How the Industrial Revolution convinced people that fairies really did exist

Writers of the Victorian period drew on older rural legends and they presented fairies to a growing middle-class audience in new poetic and artistic forms.

For example, William Allingham’s 1850 poem The Fairies described strange nighttime beings that moved through meadows and woodlands, which encouraged readers to believe that such creatures might actually still inhabit the British countryside.

A few years later, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, published in 1862, used fairy-like figures to deliver moral warnings in a spiritual and emotional narrative.

Also, visual artists, such as Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald, created detailed paintings that imagined fairies in dreamlike scenes, which often showed their subjects surrounded by glowing natural elements and unusual colours.

Meanwhile, Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which was completed between 1855 and 1864, and Fitzgerald’s The Captive Robin were striking examples of this imaginative trend.

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was first staged in 1904 and published as a novel in 1911, which which was responsible for embedding fairy imagery into popular culture, especially for children. 

Printed material also circulated widely during this period, and as cheap illustrated books and penny magazines entered homes across Britain, tales of fairy sightings became more available.

Publications included both fiction and supposed firsthand accounts, collected from rural communities that still preserved oral stories.

In these reports, fairies lived near stone circles, appeared in the misty light of early morning, or lured travellers off their paths into wooded glades.

Belief in their reality grew stronger through repeated publication of these stories, and as literacy rates increased, more people came into contact with these ideas. 

Publications alone did not keep the interest going. Academic interest also helped convince people that fairies deserved serious study.

The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 and had the stated goal of using scientific methods to study unexplained events.

While best known for its work on ghost sightings and telepathy, the society occasionally included references to fairies in its wider investigations into spiritual phenomena.

Its members believed that science should not reject claims simply because they challenged usual thinking.

Some figures, such as the physicist Sir William Crookes, had already supported the investigation of spiritual mediums and considered fairies a related subject. 

Around the turn of the century, the Oxford-trained folklore scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz had begun several years of fieldwork to document fairy beliefs across the Celtic-speaking world.

He had interviewed elderly farmers, rural priests, and local historians in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany, compiling their accounts in a book titled The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, published in 1911.

Evans-Wentz treated the stories as historical evidence rather than fiction, arguing that they recorded genuine cultural experiences that modern industrial life had failed to explain.

His fieldwork drew from oral traditions that involved changelings, fairy abductions and sacred natural sites, and he applied field methods to gather testimony.

Evans-Wentz later became involved in Theosophical and Tibetan Buddhist studies.

Regardless, his research gave an academic basis to a belief that many people had already begun to take seriously. 

In the summer of 1917, Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, who lived in the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire, had borrowed a camera and had produced the first of several photographs, which appeared to show Frances surrounded by four small, winged creatures.

Elsie, who had experience with drawing and photography, had created cardboard cut-outs based on fairy illustrations and used hat pins to position them, but she and Frances insisted the photo was genuine.

Encouraged by the positive reaction from family and friends, they had produced a second photograph, and this photograph had shown Elsie with a fairy companion that seemed to float beside her in the garden. 

Interest in the photographs remained local until 1919, when Elsie’s mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford and showed the images to a speaker.

From there, the photographs reached Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist who believed in invisible realms and spiritual energies.

Gardner passed the photos to experts, including Harold Snelling, who concluded that the photographic plates had not been altered, though he made no judgment about the genuineness of the fairies themselves.

Kodak technicians also found no physical manipulation on the negatives, but they refused to confirm the images, and they stated that the photographs appeared genuine, but they could not confirm the reality of the fairies, citing their suspicions about how the fairies had been introduced into the scene.

As a result, the images entered the wider public sphere with a reputation for genuineness. 

It was at this point that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was already a passionate believer in spiritualism, saw the photographs in 1920 and accepted them as clear support for his belief in spiritual things that could not be seen.

In his view, the existence of fairies supported the idea of a spiritual world that lay outside the scope of traditional science.

He published a detailed article in The Strand Magazine in December 1920 and followed it with his book The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, which combined the Cottingley photographs with reports of other sightings and personal reflections.

Conan Doyle had previously written The New Revelation in 1918, which defended spiritualist belief, and he viewed the Cottingley images as clear confirmation.

For Conan Doyle, fairies spiritual beings who offered reassurance in the aftermath of the First World War, when usual explanations had failed to answer the grief and confusion left by mass death. 

Public fascination with the photographs grew quickly after Conan Doyle’s support, as newspapers reproduced the images, magazines ran features, and thousands of readers wrote in to describe their own experiences or voice their support for the girls.

Some publications, such as The Sphere, featured the images clearly, and they were even displayed in department stores like Harrods.

Children across Britain claimed to have seen fairies in gardens, woods, or even city parks.

The photos appeared in publications and were reportedly shown in some public settings, as what many interpreted as proof that the magical had returned to a world made grey by war and industry rather than as jokes or artwork. 

By the 1930s, photographic techniques had improved enough for experts to find faults in the Cottingley images.

Analysts pointed out problems in lighting, shadows, and focus, while others noticed that the fairies closely resembled drawings published in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a popular illustrated collection released in 1914.

These observations prompted some critics to call for a rethink of the evidence, although the girls themselves continued to insist that the photographs were authentic. 

As the scientific community began to dismiss the fairy photographs, public belief started to shift.

Fewer mainstream newspapers featured fairy-related content, and articles that did appear often carried a sceptical tone.

New publications focused on technological advances and urban expansion, replacing earlier interests in folklore and mysticism.

Yet, as doubt grew, belief in fairies did not vanish. Instead, it moved to smaller spiritualist and theosophical circles, where the idea remained popular among those who still rejected the materialism of modern science. 

In the early 1980s, with both women in their seventies, Frances and Elsie gave interviews in which they explained how they had created the first four photographs by attaching drawings to cardboard and fixing them with pins.

They laughed at their childhood mischief, yet Frances continued to maintain that the fifth photo, which showed a strange, translucent figure near the trees, had been genuine.

Their confession, made during a 1983 interview on the BBC programme Nationwide, confirmed what many already suspected, but it did not end the fascination.

For some, the story remained compelling because it had captured the spirit of a generation that longed for a sense of wonder rather than because it had been true. 

Scholars have since examined the Cottingley photographs through the lens of postwar grief and childhood psychology, with attention to contemporary media influence.

The trauma of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic had left millions who searched for hope in a shattered world, and the idea that an invisible presence, experienced as beautiful and connected to nature, could still exist gave emotional comfort.

In that climate, fairy belief thrived because it promised a world that felt more meaningful rather than because it offered truth. 

Belief in fairies during the Industrial Revolution showed a tension between progress and meaning, as factories multiplied and railways carved through forests and farmland, many people began to question whether mechanical advancement had come at too high a cost.

Fairies symbolised the world that industrial life had left behind, one filled with woods, rivers, mystery, and stories passed down by firelight.

They stood for the spiritual and emotional aspects of life that could not be measured by machines or explained by laboratories. 

For many thinkers, fairies offered a way to reintroduce wonder into daily experience.

Some argued that fairies could exist as beings described as vibrations whose presence became visible only under specific mental or environmental conditions.

In this way, belief in fairies became part of an argument against materialist science, which believers claimed had rejected too much in its search for knowledge that could be measured. 

People used stories of fairies as a form of cultural protest. As cities grew larger and daily life became more structured and impersonal, people used stories of fairies to reclaim emotional life.

The fairy craze, therefore, cannot be dismissed as naive or childish. It showed a long-lasting need to believe in the extraordinary at a time when the ordinary world had become mechanical and grey.

For a brief period, belief in fairies allowed people to imagine that a sense of wonder had stepped out of sight rather than disappeared.