Gardner that she was sorry and disappointed to have so few pictures to show for all the plates he’d sent. She just wrote, at the end of her letter, “She didn’t take one flying after all.”
F rances went home to Scarborough. Summer ended and school began.
Elsie had another job now, in a Christmas-card factory in the hills above Bradford. All day long, she sprayed brown paint on reindeer, red paint on Father Christmas, and so on, for card after card after card.
The days grew shorter and colder. Dark fell early. Outside the factory, the real world began to look more like Christmas.
Then one day, in late November, Elsie received a hastily written letter from Mr. Gardner. “I send just this line at once as the
Strand
is out today and I am already getting numerous inquiries about the fairies,” Mr. Gardner wrote.
Elsie couldn’t just run out and buy one in the village, since there weren’t any shops that sold magazines in Cottingley. But when she did find a copy of the
Strand,
there was the headline, right on the front cover.
FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED
AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
Inside were the photos of Elsie and the gnome and Frances and the dancing fairies. They were “the two most astounding photographs ever published,” the article said.
Cover of
The Strand Magazine,
December 1920
“Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought,” Sir Arthur wrote. “I put them and all the evidence before the public for examination and judgment.” Sir Arthur added that there was no “final and absolute proof” that the photographs were genuine. But he himself considered the case to be very strong.
Sir Arthur admitted that at one point, he and Mr. Gardner had suspected that Elsie might have painted the fairies. “Mr. Gardner, however, tested her powers of drawing, and found that, while she could do landscapes cleverly, the fairy figures which she had attempted in imitation of those she had seen were entirely uninspired, and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph.”
Entirely uninspired.
Elsie remembered those words for the rest of her life.
“They threw cold water over the one thing I thought I was good at,” she wrote many years later, “my drawing and paintings that hung in our house.”
Elsie couldn’t say
she
drew the fairies in the photographs, for that would have given everything away. She could only keep reading as Sir Arthur raved about the beauty of the little dancing figures. “There is an ornamental rim to the pipe of the elves which shows that the graces of art are not unknown among them. And what joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance!” he wrote.
But
Elsie,
of course, could not have drawn them. Oh, indeed not.
For Elsie was a country girl. Elsie was an artisan’s child.
And Elsie was not a good enough artist.
Sir Arthur hadn’t wanted tour buses packed with people coming to Cottingley to see the fairies, so he had made up a false name for the village. He gave Frances and Elsie fake names, too: Alice and Iris Carpenter.
Alice and Iris Carpenter, the mysterious fairy girls . . .
In a portrait taken that summer in Cottingley, Frances/Alice is standing in the back garden of 31 Main Street in front of a big clump of daisies. She’s smiling shyly, wearing her white lace dress and big hair ribbon. She does not look at all mysterious.
But, in her portrait, also taken that summer, Elsie/Iris leans against a tree in the woods, near the spot where the gnome picture was taken. She’s dressed in something an artist or a person in a play might wear: a peaked fur cap and a dark, folktale kind of dress. She stands at a distance from the camera, so it’s hard to see her expression. Her long hands are hidden in her pockets.
Reporters soon
F rances went home to Scarborough. Summer ended and school began.
Elsie had another job now, in a Christmas-card factory in the hills above Bradford. All day long, she sprayed brown paint on reindeer, red paint on Father Christmas, and so on, for card after card after card.
The days grew shorter and colder. Dark fell early. Outside the factory, the real world began to look more like Christmas.
Then one day, in late November, Elsie received a hastily written letter from Mr. Gardner. “I send just this line at once as the
Strand
is out today and I am already getting numerous inquiries about the fairies,” Mr. Gardner wrote.
Elsie couldn’t just run out and buy one in the village, since there weren’t any shops that sold magazines in Cottingley. But when she did find a copy of the
Strand,
there was the headline, right on the front cover.
FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED
AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
Inside were the photos of Elsie and the gnome and Frances and the dancing fairies. They were “the two most astounding photographs ever published,” the article said.
Cover of
The Strand Magazine,
December 1920
“Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought,” Sir Arthur wrote. “I put them and all the evidence before the public for examination and judgment.” Sir Arthur added that there was no “final and absolute proof” that the photographs were genuine. But he himself considered the case to be very strong.
Sir Arthur admitted that at one point, he and Mr. Gardner had suspected that Elsie might have painted the fairies. “Mr. Gardner, however, tested her powers of drawing, and found that, while she could do landscapes cleverly, the fairy figures which she had attempted in imitation of those she had seen were entirely uninspired, and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph.”
Entirely uninspired.
Elsie remembered those words for the rest of her life.
“They threw cold water over the one thing I thought I was good at,” she wrote many years later, “my drawing and paintings that hung in our house.”
Elsie couldn’t say
she
drew the fairies in the photographs, for that would have given everything away. She could only keep reading as Sir Arthur raved about the beauty of the little dancing figures. “There is an ornamental rim to the pipe of the elves which shows that the graces of art are not unknown among them. And what joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures as they let themselves go in the dance!” he wrote.
But
Elsie,
of course, could not have drawn them. Oh, indeed not.
For Elsie was a country girl. Elsie was an artisan’s child.
And Elsie was not a good enough artist.
Sir Arthur hadn’t wanted tour buses packed with people coming to Cottingley to see the fairies, so he had made up a false name for the village. He gave Frances and Elsie fake names, too: Alice and Iris Carpenter.
Alice and Iris Carpenter, the mysterious fairy girls . . .
In a portrait taken that summer in Cottingley, Frances/Alice is standing in the back garden of 31 Main Street in front of a big clump of daisies. She’s smiling shyly, wearing her white lace dress and big hair ribbon. She does not look at all mysterious.
But, in her portrait, also taken that summer, Elsie/Iris leans against a tree in the woods, near the spot where the gnome picture was taken. She’s dressed in something an artist or a person in a play might wear: a peaked fur cap and a dark, folktale kind of dress. She stands at a distance from the camera, so it’s hard to see her expression. Her long hands are hidden in her pockets.
Reporters soon
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