Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  The reporters looked somewhat doubtfully at each other.

  Sir Arthur reassured them. “You don’t have to be so very good to get to heaven,” he said.

  No, a roomful of American reporters—then or now—would not be the most obvious candidates for halos. What he didn’t tell them at the time was that in his view souls may spend a long time giving up their bigotry and selfishness before moving beyond the lower heavens. But he was purposely optimistic; he’d seen too many good people terrorized by the fire-and-brimstone theology of Christian preachers. On any given nineteenth-century Sunday, in both England and America, the message from most pulpits was this: Yes there is life after death—and most people are going to spend it rotting in hell. Unless you clean up your act big-time, that includes you. Spiritualists had been hearing a very different message from the next world: God embraced everyone, and not just Catholics or Calvinists or Buddhists. This was a key theme that Doyle proclaimed onstage. “When I said that the average human being, hard-worked and ill cared for, deserved compensation rather than punishment, there were hearty cheers of assent,” he wrote. “It was our own man-made theology which draped our future with terrors.”

  Yet he wondered why so many Christians despised him and wanted him dead.

  During his dozen years of missionary work, Conan Doyle said and wrote things about Christianity and the Bible that would have gotten him tarred and feathered in places like Tennessee. (Even today.) Particularly in The Vital Message, he tore into modern Christianity. He called it stupid and decadent; he said the churches were “empty husks”; he said that Jesus fought the theologians of his day, “who then, as now, have been a curse to the world.” He said most of the Bible was worse than worthless; “every hard-hearted brute in history … has found his inspiration in the Old Testament.” It’s an old book but not a good book; it “advocates massacre, condones polygamy, accepts slavery, and orders the burning of so-called witches.”

  The New Testament is inspirational if you focus upon the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus, who was “the sweetest soul that ever trod this planet.” The same cannot be said of Saint Paul. “One thing that can safely be said of Paul is that he was either a bachelor or else was a domestic bully with a very submissive wife, or he would never have dared to express his well-known views about women,” Doyle wrote. Paul’s letters to the early churches could be confusing, Doyle wrote, but they make a little more sense when you realize that the early Christian church was a psychic movement. “When we translate Bible language into the terms of modern psychic religion the correspondence becomes evident,” he explained. “It does not take much alteration. Thus for ‘Lo, a miracle!’ we say ‘This is a manifestation.’ ‘The angel of the Lord’ becomes ‘a high spirit.’ Where we talked of ‘a voice from heaven,’ we say ‘the direct voice.’ ‘His eyes were opened and he saw a vision’ means ‘he became clairvoyant.’”

  Despite all this, he couldn’t understand why the churches didn’t greet him with open arms and embrace spiritualism as a powerful ally. (Some ministers did. They were the Christian spiritualists, a subset of the movement. Doyle’s friend and first biographer, the Reverend John Lamond, was one of them.) Their common enemy was the worldview of Joseph McCabe—there is no God, the universe doesn’t care about us, and death really does end all. This was the philosophy known as materialism. Here it is in a nutshell: In Doyle’s one work of psychic fiction, the 1926 novel The Land of Mist, Professor Challenger’s daughter, Enid, says to him before his conversion, “Don’t tell me, Daddy, that you with all your complex brain and wonderful self are a thing with no more life hereafter than a broken clock!” Challenger’s reply: “Four buckets of water and a bagful of salts.”

  Doyle’s steadfast vision was the unity of all religions of the world, refreshed and revivified by psychic knowledge. “The differences between various sects are a very small thing as compared to the great eternal duel between materialism and the spiritual view of the universe,” he wrote. “That is the real fight.” In his last years, he refined his thinking: He wanted to see spiritualism merged into Christianity as a practical first step, before Christianity was eventually merged with the world’s other religions. He proposed to the Spiritualists’ National Union an eighth principle, recognizing Jesus as their leader in the realm of ethics. It was promptly turned down.

  * * *

  IF SPIRITUALISM was its own distinct religion, it wasn’t much of one—at least in the sense of being an organized institution. Spiritualists the world over were a disorganized bunch. After touring Australia, Doyle would write, “It would be far better to have no Spiritual churches than some I have seen.” As for England, he complained to Lamond after the rejection of the eighth principle, “What is the use of calling me their leader, when they refuse to follow?” In the last days of his life, infighting between the Spiritualists’ National Union and the London Spiritualist Alliance scuttled his attempt to stop the police from arresting honest mediums under the old witchcraft and vagrancy laws.

  Nor could spiritualists be relied on for earthly funds. In early 1923, Doyle wrote a letter to the publication Light, asking readers to contribute to an international memorial for the “piercing of the barrier” that occurred in Hydesville on March 31, 1848, “the greatest date in human history since the great revelation of two thousand years ago.” He would take the donations with him on his upcoming second American tour. A month later, he wrote back to say forget it. The response was “so scanty that I cannot bring myself to present it.”

  American spiritualists were no better, and it was ever thus. The birthplace of the movement had produced a few congregations by the end of the 1850s, but they were meeting in auditoriums, not churches per se. A typical weekday or Sunday service would include music, a prayer, and a lecture. Then they got to the most important part: the receipt of spirit messages. When it was over, they would disband without a blessing. There was no reading of Scripture, no recital of a creed, no ordained minister, and no worship of God in the old God-fearing ways.

  And even that was too formal for most believers. No more than one in ten spiritualists became regular members of a congregation, and a permanent umbrella organization, the National Spiritualist Association, wasn’t formed until 1893. Spiritualism was a do-it-yourself religion whose adherents were happiest when holding séances at home; most would go anywhere to see a table turned for the fortieth time, complained the editor of The Spiritual Telegraph, but they weren’t keen on spending time and money to start a church. In 1869, one frustrated organizer summed up the limits of their faith: “So soon as they become satisfied that there is no death, no eternal hell, no angry God to appease, or vindictive or seductive devil to escape from;… and they are required to make effort and use time and means to bring these facts before the world, their zeal falls below zero.”

  This was the cause to which Conan Doyle gave the last years of his life. In 1930, he would publish his final book, The Edge of the Unknown. It had a print run of fewer than a thousand copies. By the end of the Roaring Twenties, Arthur Conan Doyle’s religious writings had reached the edge of the obscure.

  When two young girls claimed to have actually photographed fairies in 1917, Conan Doyle believed their story and even wrote a book about it.

  GLENN HILL/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An Embarrassment of Fairies

  They would later become some of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century, the subject of furious debate, derisive laughter, and, in the end, scalding ridicule aimed squarely at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  The five pictures showed two adolescent girls cavorting with what appeared to be a clutch of semitranslucent, fluttering fairies and a cute little gnome with panpipes. The photographs, Sir Arthur would later write, represented “either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else … an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character.”

  So w
hich was it? Were the pictures evidence of epoch-making genuineness, or were they ordinary, quite embarrassing fakes and a permanent stain on Doyle’s reputation?

  In long accounts published in The Strand Magazine in 1920 and 1921, and later in a short 1922 book called The Coming of the Fairies, Conan Doyle came down foursquare on the side of the fairies. Even though he hedged his bets somewhat by writing things such as “If I myself am asked whether I consider the case to be absolutely and finally proved, I should answer that in order to remove the last faint shadow of doubt I should wish to see the result repeated before a disinterested witness,” elsewhere he simply came out and said it: He believed that “a strong prima-facie case has been built up” that the photographs were for real.

  And so, by extension, were the fairies.

  How did all this happen? How did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s most rigorously rational detective, get so roundly snookered by a couple of adolescent girls in ringlets, one of whom was nine? Or was the story considerably more nuanced than the one that has been handed down through history?

  It takes a bit of telling.

  * * *

  THE STORY begins in the summer of 1917, in the bucolic English countryside of western Yorkshire, near the tiny village of Cottingley. Threading through the town was a sylvan stream (known to the locals as a beck), sometimes called Cottingley Beck.

  Two cousins, nine-year-old Frances Griffiths (who had grown up in South Africa) and sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright, loved to play in and around the woods and streams behind their family’s home in the village. For several years, the girls had been telling Elsie’s parents that they sometimes saw and played with fairies in the woods. Though the parents scoffed at this girlish moonshine, the children stuck with their story.

  Many years later, when she was in her seventies, Frances wrote of those innocent days, “I was up the beck alone quite a lot after school. It was good to sit quietly on the willow branch and listen to the sound of the water, the odd bee buzzing and an occasional splash as a frog plunged into a deep pool. I suppose I must have been day dreaming one day when I looked across the beck and saw a willow leaf twirling around rapidly, moving as it were, on its own. I did think it odd, as there was no breeze. I had never seen a leaf do that before.…

  “That was the beginning, although at the time I didn’t realise it. The leaf was being held by a little man. The first time I saw the little man—he was about eighteen inches high—he was walking purposefully down the bank on the willow side of the beck, holding a willow leaf in his hand, twiddling it very fast as he crossed the water to the other side. I wasn’t unduly surprised—the beck was a wonderful place and I wouldn’t have been surprised at anything that happened there.”

  One day that summer of 1917, Elsie begged to borrow her father’s camera. Arthur Wright, who worked as an electrician at a nearby estate, was a bit of an amateur photographer who owned an inexpensive “Midg” quarter-plate box camera and had set up a small darkroom in the house. He lent the girls the camera, and they danced off into the woods. They returned less than an hour later with an exposed photographic plate they asked their father to develop. Elsie, excited, pushed her way into the tiny darkroom, and when images began to appear on the developing plate, she cried, “Francis! The fairies are on the plate! The fairies are on the plate!”

  The image showed Elsie staring directly at the camera and around her a dancing chorus line of five cavorting “fairies.” Later, the girls returned to the woods with the camera and came back with another exposed plate, which showed “the quaintest goblin imaginable,” according to someone who saw it.

  It must be said that to the modern eye, jaded by Photoshop and every other kind of digital manipulation, the “fairies” in these century-old photographs look transparently fake. But it’s important to remember that in that more innocent age the original images were quite indistinct and sepia toned; only later were they cleaned up and clarified.

  Arthur Wright, convinced that the girls had faked the pictures somehow, searched the wastebaskets in Elsie’s room and the tall grass down by the beck, to find evidence that the “fairies” had been pictures cut out of magazines. But he found nothing. Frances sent one of the pictures to a friend in South Africa and jotted casually on the back, “Elsie and I are friendly with the beck fairies. Funny, I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there.”

  The girls sent the pictures to a few other friends and family members, without fanfare. In a bright, newsy letter dated November 9, 1918, Frances wrote to another friend in South Africa, mentioning that her dad had just come back from France, that everyone thought the war would be over in a few days, and—oh, yeah—that “I am sending two photos, one of me in a bathing costume in our back yard, Uncle Arthur took that, while the other is me with some fairies up the beck, Elsie took that one.… How are Teddy and Dolly?”

  It was as if seeing fairies were as ordinary as seeing the sun come up.

  Then, in 1919, Elsie’s mother attended a lecture on “fairy life,” sponsored by the Theosophical Society, in the nearby town of Bradford. (The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by the flamboyant Madame Blavatsky, was a quasi-religion that incorporated Buddhist ideas about reincarnation and mystical insight and believed in the existence of diminutive “elementals,” or nature spirits, inhabiting the natural world.) Polly Wright had become interested in occult subjects and took along her daughter’s curious fairy pictures, which she showed to the lecturer. A few months later, the pictures were displayed at another Theosophical Society meeting, where they came to the attention of a prominent Theosophist and lecturer named Edward Gardner.

  Gardner was transfixed by the pictures, partly because they seemed to support the Theosophists’ notion that humanity was undergoing a cycle of evolution toward increasingly greater “perfection.” Gardner later wrote, “The fact that two young girls had not only been able to see fairies, which others had done, but had actually for the first time ever been able to materialize them at a density sufficient for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, meant that it was possible that the next cycle of evolution was underway.”

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, ABOUT that same time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been asked by The Strand Magazine to write a story about fairies for its Christmas 1920 issue. In the course of sleuthing the story, he learned of the existence of the fairy photographs and eventually made contact with Edward Gardner. The two men arranged to meet at a gentlemen’s club in London.

  Doyle found Gardner to be “quiet, well-balanced and reserved—not in the least of a wild or visionary type.” He became convinced that Gardner was “a solid person with a reputation for sanity and character.” (As a gentleman of breeding and culture, Conan Doyle often put great store in the personal character and credentials of those who professed to have seen or demonstrated psychic phenomena—an important consideration, certainly, but no substitute for rigorous scientific proof, of which there was often none.)

  When Gardner showed Doyle “beautiful enlargements of these two wonderful pictures,” they took his breath away. Could these photographs help provide the long-sought proof of the realities of spiritualist belief? Doyle and Gardner agreed that they would do everything possible to test the veracity of the pictures and seek out and interview the girls and their family and that—if the whole thing passed muster—Doyle would “throw [this news] into literary shape.”

  After his meeting with Gardner, Doyle showed the pictures to a few colleagues whose opinions he valued. Chief among them was the fiercely rational Sir Oliver Lodge. “I can still see his astonished and interested face as he gazed at the pictures which I placed before him in the hall of the Athenaeum Club,” Doyle later recalled. But Lodge wasn’t buying it. He suggested that photographs of classical dancers had been taken and cutouts of the prints superimposed on a rural British background. Doyle argued that such photographic tricks would be beyond the skills of a couple of country girls. But Lodge rema
ined unmoved. And for good reason. As other critics later pointed out, the fairy dancers were actually less neoclassical than oddly up to date: Some of them had bobbed hair and wore beaded Charleston dresses, like flappers.

  As news of the fairy photographs got around, Doyle was surprised to notice that some of the noisiest critics were fellow spiritualists, who argued that the whole debate over the existence or nonexistence of some diminutive, separate race was a distraction from the core beliefs of spiritualism—the existence of the human personality after death. If the fairy pictures were shown to be fake, they worried, it might have a negative impact on other, more important concerns of the movement.

  It is clear from the written record Doyle left behind that while he went about dispassionately investigating the pictures, he desperately wanted to believe that they were genuine. It turns out that he had some deeply personal reasons to hope that the little people—what he called “dwellers at the border”—were real.

  In his celebrated public life, Conan Doyle seldom spoke of his father. But the ghost of the dreamy, depressed, alcoholic Charles Doyle, with his fanciful drawings of fairies, elves, and brownies, scribbled in the dayrooms of a series of lunatic asylums, never hovered too far away. One sketch, so realistic it almost appears to have been drawn from life, depicted a female cupid dangling a string out of a potted plant, with a tiny elf hanging on to it down below. The caption read, “This bracket and plant are opposite my daily seat.” One could imagine Conan Doyle’s father, disheveled and with a long black beard, fixedly staring into thin air, into his own fevered imagination, or perhaps even into another world. Though this world had chosen to consider Charles Doyle crazy, dangerous, or simply useless, if his celebrated son could prove, for the first time, that there really was a diminutive race of beings that existed on the borderlands, Conan Doyle’s investigation would turn into a chivalric quest: to redeem his father’s honor.