Power at Play in Paranormal History: The Contested Object Biography of the Cottingley Fairy Artefacts.

Abstract

This article presents a collective object biography and discussion of the Cottingley fairy artefacts—cameras, photographs, watercolours sketches, and print materials—held at the National Science and Media Museum. I demonstrate how the controversial paranormal claims made about the Cottingley cameras by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner relied on the manipulation and obfuscation of key episodes in their history of use, a strategy that worked to distance the objects from each other and from their young female working-class operators Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright. My article seeks to both interlink and restore the lost episodes in the histories of these objects as a way of redressing the power imbalance between the plebeian producers and elite cosmopolitan popularisers of the world-famous fairy photographs. I suggest how a new curatorial approach to the materials might reject the familiar—and largely inaccurate—narrative of deliberate hoax and deception still widely attached to the case, and instead use them to tell a new story about the technological experimentation, artistic aspirations, and social restrictions experienced by working-class girls in early twentieth-century Britain.