The Cottingley Fairies are the most famous fairy story of the modern age, born not from old tradition but from a camera. In 1917, in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley, two cousins — sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and nine-year-old Frances Griffiths — took photographs of themselves beside the beck at the bottom of the garden, apparently in the company of dancing winged fairies and a gnome.
The story
The pictures came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a fervent spiritualist, who published them in 1920 as possible proof of the existence of fairies, igniting a sensation that ran for decades. The fairies were in fact cut-out drawings, copied from a popular illustrated book and fixed in place with hatpins — but the girls, embarrassed at having fooled so eminent a man, did not fully confess until the early 1980s, more than sixty years later, though Frances always maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine. The Cottingley affair endures as a fable about belief and the longing to find magic at the bottom of an ordinary garden.