Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Often Unenviable Fairy Seat

"A Dance around the Moon" by Charles Altamont Doyle

 I knew that the creator of Sherlock Holmes had believed in fairies, and was happy to pronounce Frances and Elsie's cardboard cut-outs below evidence of psychic phenomena, despite this seeming to go against every tenet of his creation's practice of deductive reasoning.

 

  But what I didn't know – which might go some way towards explaining this discrepancy – is how large a part fairies had played in the life of Arthur Conan Doyle's own father: the illustrator Charles Altamont Doyle. According to Alistair Kneal's Transceltic blog, "his paintings were often of fantasy scenes, many featuring fairies..."

 

 "Meditation, Self Portait" by Charles Altamont Doyle  

 

 However "after growing family worries about his moods and desperate attempts to obtain alcohol, he was admitted to the nursing home of Blairerno House at Drumlithie in the Mearns... Following an aggressive attempt to leave Blairerno House he was sent to Sunnyside, Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum on 26 May 1885...

"The seat of fairies is not always enviable"

 

"It is described that he would tell staff that he was receiving messages from the unseen world and accused them of being devils... He maintained to his family that he was sane and had been wrongfully confined. In doing so he complied sketchbooks with caricatures, drawings of fairies and notes...

 

 Painting from "The Doyle Diary" 1889

 

"He inscribed the frontispiece of his sketchbook diary: ‘Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste? If in the whole book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.’"

 

 

 "The Spirits of the Prisoners" 1885

 

 There is more of his work on Monster Brains.