Elias Ashmole and the Cottingley Fairies: from ‘An Excellent Way To Gett A Fayrie’ to Princess Mary’s Gift Book
- 18/03/2025
- 19:00-20:30
- online talk
Fairies from Princess Mary's Gift Book
Elias Ashmole and the Cottingley Fairies: from ‘An Excellent Way To Gett A Fayrie’ to Princess Mary’s Gift Book
A Folklore Society online talk by
John Clark (Curator Emeritus, Museum of London)
Tuesday 18 March 2025, 19:00
The three butterfly-winged ‘dancing fairies’ in the first photograph taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths at Cottingley Beck in July 1917 were cut-outs based upon a drawing of fairies that had appeared in a book called Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915). The drawing, by Claude Shepperson, was an illustration for a poem by distinguished poet Alfred Noyes ‘A spell for a fairy’.
Surprisingly, a mishmash of magic rituals Noyes describes, to summon fairies and make them visible, can be traced back to original spells in one of the ‘magical’ manuscripts of Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) in the Bodleian Library. Yet central to Noyes’s poem are concerns that are very much of his own time.
The immediate inspiration of Shepperson’s image of dancing fairies is also unexpected, lying not in contemporary ‘fairy’ depictions like those by Arthur Rackham, but apparently in another art form entirely.
And we also look at the career of the art-historian/occultist Fred Gettings who in the 1970s was the first to recognise the source of the Cottingley Fairies in Shepperson’s drawing.
John Clark was for many years curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London. Since retiring in 2009, he has continued research, lecturing and writing on topics including the history and archaeology of medieval London, medieval folklore and legends, and also on medieval horses and horse equipment.
Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 Folklore Society members with the Promo Code)
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Image: Fairies from Princess Mary’s Gift Book