His research interests are primarily in popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Merrick Burrow is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield. It was, rather, a battlefront in his war on materialism. Conan Doyle’s interest in the Cottingley fairies was, from the outset, never really a ‘case’ for investigation. He fully expected it to cause outrage among his critics, to which he had already prepared his response with a follow-up article and a second set of fairy photographs. He prepared his article for the Strand, then left to embark on a spiritualist lecture tour of Australia, likening the publication to ‘a time-delay mine’. When he encountered the Cottingley fairy photographs Conan Doyle saw an opportunity to ‘draw the fire’ of his opponents. Public discussion of the paranormal, on the other hand, he saw in purely strategic terms. He began to confine himself to debating openly only with like-minded spiritualists. Conan Doyle’s opinions hardened in response to these polemical assaults on his cherished beliefs.
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But when Conan Doyle publicly converted to spiritualism in 1916 he entered into a series of controversies with avowed materialists such as Edward Clodd and Joseph McCabe, who attacked the entirety of psychical research, spiritualism and the paranormal as the domain of frauds and dupes. He had in fact taken the supernatural seriously throughout the entire period in which he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. In this paper I will try to show that Conan Doyle’s endorsement of the Cottingley fairy photographs was not simply the intellectual slackening of his dotage. Beneath the cartoon a satirical poem speculates on what ‘that great sleuth’ must make of Conan Doyle’s ‘late defiance. It depicts Holmes chained by the ankle to his creator, whose head is lost in the clouds.
A contemporaneous cartoon in Punch magazine made the same point. Kerr’s use of the word ‘case’ suggestively hints at the stark contrast between Conan Doyle’s assessment of the photographs and the verdict one might expect from Sherlock Holmes, upon whose acumen his reputation chiefly rests. Douglas Kerr, Doyle’s biographer, remarks bluntly that ‘veryone knows Conan Doyle made a fool of himself over the case of the Cottingley fairies’ (Kerr 2013, 234). The photographs of the Cottingley fairies, as they came to be known, provoked astonishment, not to mention considerable ridicule. In the December 1920 issue of the Strand Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published an article heralding the ‘epoch-making’ revelation of photographs of fairies, which he asserted were genuine and authentic. The Cottingley Fairies: Conan Doyle’s war on materialism
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* Click on the title in blue of the talk to expand and get a full summary.ĭr Merrick Burrow (Curator of forthcoming Cottingley Fairies exhibition Head of English, University of Huddersfield)
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