Truth Claims in Two Cases of Nineteenth-Century Fairy Representations

This chapter introduces the concept of truth claims, drawing from Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), which investigated the world of seventeenth-century English gentlemen and their complex negotiations with truth and falsehood as modes of sociability as well as of science. We can see the contours of such genteel settlements between truth and falsity in Victorian culture through two of the period’s most abundant and popular genres concerned with explaining “nature,” fairy painting and natural history writing. Fairy painting co-opted the conventions of Victorian natural history, attending to the details of habitat, behavior, and diet of the fairy in parallel to details available about real creatures, be they mollusks, bees, or pigeons. The provoking and ironic pleasures caused by these realist gestures nonetheless give no assurance that fairies are real; in fact, the detailed realism of many such paintings serves as ironic provocation for the viewer’s natural desire to make sense of what he or she sees. In parallel, early fairy natural histories, written by those early and mid-nineteenth-century antiquarians who strove to account for fairies as anthropological subjects, often fall into a variety of incompatible rhetorical modes and even tentative affirmations of fairy existence. The chapter sets Lewis Carroll’s juvenile mockery of pixies in 1849 alongside the fairy anthropologies of T. Crofton Croker’s Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825); Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828); Anna Eliza Bray’s Traditions, Legends and Sketches of Devonshire on the Borders of the Tamar and Tavy (1838), and Archibald Maclaren’s The Fairy Family (1857).