The Coming of the Fairies is a 1922 book by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning the veracity of the Cottingley Fairies photos. These photos depict some girls playing with the fairies. Spoilers, the photos are fake. They were paper cut outs of drawings. That they were fakes is perhaps less interesting than the kind of responses they produced. The Coming of the Fairies is attempting to present itself as an unbiased examination of the evidence and arguments for and against the authenticity of the pictures. I don't think Doyle's bias towards their probity is very well disguised but he is making a real attempt at even handedness. What that gives us is actual debates between more or less intelligent individuals about a fairly contained and comprehensible subject that was none the less insoluble to that community at the time.
What really stood out to me when reading this was how much I felt like I was reading a argument online. For instance, the supporters kept bringing up that experts agreed it wasn't a double exposure. This would be a point in favor of credibility if it looked like a double exposure. It doesn't look like a double exposure. Double exposures put transparent ghostly images in the photo. The Cottingley Fairies are very solid. In the same way, the lack of apparent shadows or shading on the fairies is attributed to their ethereal nature. Right, they look unreal because they're magic. The opposition isn't necessarily better. Take this quote from Maurice Hewlett:
One other point, which may be called a small one — but in a matter of the sort no point is a small one. I regard it as a certainty, as the other plainly is. If the dancing figures had been dancing beings, really there, the child in the photograph would have been looking at them, not at the camera. I know children.
This got the following response:
For her, cameras were much more novel than fairies, and never before had she seen one used so close to her, Strange to us as it may seem, at the moment it interested her the most. Apropos, would a faker, clever enough to produce such a photograph, commit the elementary blunder of not posing his subject?
I think the average ten year old would watch the fairies rather than the camera but it's hardly a certainty especially if she was instructed not to.
While the book begins with the photos it ends on the phantasmagoric visions of mediums and psychics, various anecdotes of sightings, and speculation on the physiology, taxonomy, and habit of the fair folk. Woo is a constant. People seeing ghosts and cryptids (or at least claiming to) is too and these things run together as often as not. If you are in the true believer camp this is an unfortunate reality and if your in the skeptic camp it's a comprehensive explanation. Hundreds of years of this stuff and physicalism is going strong with no end in sight. On the other hand we seem to have a pretty strong ghost hunter media scene. One thing that I've gotten from reading older media is that the past was a foreign country but people are basically the same across time. Doyle starts the book by reminding all readers that the existence of fairies is completely separate from the reality of the afterlife and then proceeds to use the rest to say "SPIRITS ARE REAL! SPIRITS ARE REAL! SEE! SEE! I TOLD YOU!" for about a hundred pages. The certainty that he pours into some of those pages is just sad. That said, I applaud him for it. I'd rather have somebody exhorting something they strongly believe in based on shaky evidence than stay silent when they think they see something important.
IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON