Abstract
T he year is 1920. C ottingley D ell, just outside of Bradford. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opens a letter from Edward Gardner, a well-known lecturer on occult subjects and president of the Blavatsky Lodge of Theosophy in London. Gardner reports an amazing discovery: fairies have been photographed in the north of England. The same letter informed Doyle that the images capture an angelic ten-year-old girl, Frances Griffiths, playing with hand-sized and togaed pixies. The photographs were taken about three years earlier by Frances’s sister Elsie: Elsie said she wanted to photograph them, and begged her father to lend his camera. For long he refused, but at last she managed to get the loan of it and one plate. Off she and Frances went into the woods near a water-fall. Frances ‘ticed’ them, as they call it, and Elsie stood ready with the camera. Soon the three fairies appeared, and one pixie dancing in Frances’ aura. Elsie snapped and hoped for the best. It was a long time before the father would develop the photo, but at last he did, and to his utter amazement the four sweet little figures came out beautifully!1 Gardner wrote excitedly to the girls’ mother, Polly, asking for permission to see more photos and to interview the children. The mother, a fellow Theosophist, was honored and agreed.2 After just a single meeting with the girls, Gardner speculated that the fairies had appeared to the children because they were both natural mediums, especially Frances, whom Gardner describes as having “a beautifully clear, yet loosely knit, etheric aura, yielding easily accessible ectoplasmic material.”3
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Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (New York: George H. Doran, 1922), 16–17.
Ibid., 37; Paul Smith, “The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend,” in The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, ed. Peter Narváez (New York: Garland, 1991), 371–405; 379. Mr. Wright, while not a Spiritualist, seems to have been an honest, straightforward, and fairly indulgent man (Edward L. Gardner, Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel, rev. ed. [1966; repr., London: Theosophical Publishing, 1974], 21).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Do We Live after Death? The New Revelation (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 17. So far as I have ascertained, the new Lady Doyle never bothered to reach out to Doyle’s first wife.
See also Christopher Redmond, A Sherlock Holmes Handbook (Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1993), 130.
Bernard M. L. Ernst and Hereward Carrington, Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship (London: Hutchinson, [1933]), 165.
The former ophthalmologist was also fooled by “Spirit Photography” photographs which seemed to reveal the evidence of a spirit’s face floating near that of the medium; these floating heads have contemporary hairstyles or, in the case of men, Victorian beards (Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism [1926; repr., NewYork: Arno Press, 1975], 2:128–51). For more on Doyle and the fairies, including his belief that these spiritual manifestations signaled a coming apocalypse, see
Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 224–27.
C. W. Leadbeater, The Astral Plane (Adyar, India: Theosophical Society, 1973), 154–55; emphasis my own.
C. W. Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things (1913 repr., Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing, 1954), 99.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edge of the Unknown (1930; repr., Guildford, England: White Crow Books, 2010), 126–27.
Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: J. B. Ford, 1868), 241;
Luther Calvin Tibbets, Spirit of the South (Washington, DC: rip., 1869), 41;
Eugene Crowell, The Identity of Primitive Christianity and Modern Spiritualism (New York: Two Worlds, 1881), 2:73;
J. M. Peebles, Seers of the Ages: Embracing Spiritualism Past and Present (Chicago: Progressive Thinker, 1903), 235;
Moses Hull and William F. Jamieson, The Greatest Debate within a Half Century upon Modern Spiritualism (Chicago: Progressive Thinker, 1902), 267; The Medium and Daybreak 25 (1884): 220; and Theosophy 7 (1919): 163.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.1.166–67.
Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924; repr., Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), 161–62; see also 141.
Sir Oliver Lodge, Science and Immortality (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908), 72.
Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man: A Study in Unrecognized Human Faculty (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909), 3.
Sir Oliver Lodge, Past Years: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 349.
Sir Oliver Lodge, Phantom Walls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 77.
For examples, see Barrett Harper Clark, European Theories of the Drama: An Anthology of Dramatic Theory and Criticism from Aristotle to the Present Day (Cincinnati, OH: Stewart, 1918), 3, 10, 14, 20.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Philip Pullman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1, no. 26.
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 162.
Nicola S. Schutte and John M. Malouff, Why We Read and How Reading Transforms Us: The Psychology of Engagement With Text (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), passim.
Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction, ed. Walter Raleigh (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), 20–21.
On this point, we might remind ourselves that as far back as 1961, Lionel Trilling cautioned against reading literature for “presumably practical relevance to modernity” (Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature” [1961], in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000], 381–401; 382).
Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, introduction to Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 1–12; 1.
Ibid., 3; see also Brian Vickers, “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 95–164; 95. On this point, E. M. W. Tillyard notes Irving Babbitt and other early twentieth-century literary critics adopted a rigorously scientific, hierarchical approach
(E. M. W. Tillyard, Essays Literary and Educational [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962], esp.138–39).
James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays and Literature and Belief (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 2000), xii, xi.
Gerald L. Bruns, Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 53–54.
Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 140.
A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (New York: Methuen, 1983), 170.
On the crisis of spirituality, the transcendent is now so proscribed that even theological scholars often avoid using the word “God,” replacing it with euphemisms that perform the same basic function: “first cause,” “fine structure,” “cosmic envelope,” “ultimate,” and so forth. See Sean Creaven, Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge/Francis and Taylor, 2010), 1, 3. On the critics cited, see
Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (New York: Free Press, 1997);
John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997);
R. V. Young, At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999);
Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare Minus “Theory” (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); and
Edward Pechter, Shakespeare Studies Today: Romanticism Lost (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), esp. 73. On the supposedly amateurish quality of his criticism, see
Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 17; on the charge of being old-fashioned, see James Wood, who writes that Bloom’s argument “is about as antique as a wing collar” (The Broken Estate, 20).
Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1996), 117, 123.
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.
For an overview, see E. K. Chambers, The Disintegration of Shakespeare: Annual Shakespeare Lecture, 1924 (London: British Academy, [1925]), 5–14.
Benjamin De Casseres, Forty Immortals (New York: Seven Arts, 1926), 364.
Ibid. See also Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3; and
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), passim.
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 3. In his scholarly Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), Greenblatt yearns to “speak with the dead.” See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1; and
Stanley Wells, Coffee with Shakespeare (London: Duncan Baird, 2008), passim.
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© 2013 Jeffrey Kahan
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Kahan, J. (2013). Beyond the Academic Fields We Know …. In: Shakespiritualism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313553_7
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