Arthur Conan Doyle

The Case for Spirit Photography Arthur Conan Doyle

The issue of Punch for 12 May 1926 featured a cartoon which depicted an elderly and oversized Arthur Conan Doyle sitting on a stool (see figure 1). Clouds are gathered around his uplifted, preoccupied head. Holding a chain which shackles Doyle's legs is a miniature Sherlock Holmes, brooding and thoughtful. The cartoon's immediate context is satirical: Doyle's warm reception of the Cottingley Fairy photographs, then a matter of ongoing notoriety due to the publication of his The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, had prompted a degree of ridicule. In 1920 he had become involved in an investigation of what purported to be photographs of actual fairies taken by two teenage girls. The matter which commenced as an investigation had, by 1928, with the publication of the study's second edition, developed into a whole-hearted endorsement of the photographs. For Doyle and his colleague, the theosophist Edward Gardner, this event was the ultimate proof that fairies actually existed. Nor was the intervention Doyle's only encounter with paranormal photography. A committed spiritualist by the 1920s, Doyle had previously championed the cause of spirit photography, a process where supposed materializations of the dead appeared in photographs. For the spiritualists, this possibility was an important concept, as it endorsed their central tenet: that the living could communicate with the dead. Relatedly, Doyle's The Case for Spirit Photography (1923) defended William Hope, who had been accused of using fraudulent methods to attain his materializations.