Fairy. A tiny, pretty, magical figure with a childish wisp with insect-like wings wearing a dress made of petals. Isn’t this how we have always imagined a fairy? Well, our perception of fairy has been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, a British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies.
The year 2024 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring. Its anniversary is currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, U.K.
The influence of Flower Fairies has been everlasting, they have never been out of print and to date continue to be popular around the world. In the year 2022, Gucci released a children’s range featuring Barker’s prints in Italy and Japan. Recently, Billie Eilish had flower fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok “fairycore” trend.
The making of the Flower Fairies:
Barker’s delicate watercolors played a significant role in creating the traits associated with fairies that we now consider classic. These traits include the fairy’s small size, youthful demeanor, connection to nature, and unique charm.
Fiona Slattery Clark, the organizer of the exhibition, points out that Barker’s drawings were firmly based on reality. Her drawings of plants and flowers are as realistic as possible, and the children in her paintings were all painted from real life. The children who appeared in her paintings were from the nursery school run by Barker’s sister in Croydon, a London suburb. Each child was given a flower or tree, and Slattery Clark claims that Barker’s botanically correct pictures were based on samples from Kew Gardens. Even the fairy attire and petal-like wings were inspired by natural forms: a harebell became the skirt’s lovely scallops, and an acorn cup served as the hat.
Fairies; a symbol of demonic possession
Fairies have been with us for a long time, at least in our imaginations. But for many hundred years, they weren’t tiny and fey creatures rather were grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. Alice Sage, a curator and historian pointed out to BBC that in 1800, if a child was thought of as a fairy, it was considered as a demonic possession. To oust the fairy, you would have burned that youngster alive.
This entire perception changed, however, in 100 years. Sage says, “Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturized, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery,” As their popularity grew in the Victorian era, they shrank.
Fairies: The Subject of Fashion:
Shakespeare’s plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest served as frequent sources of inspiration for Victorian artists as they adopted fairies as a popular theme. From the 1840s onward, a large number of artists, including John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham, and even JMW Turner, portrayed supernatural beings. But many of their images retained an aura of otherworldly weirdness, as evidenced by the work of Richard Dadd, who created his incredibly elaborate fairy paintings while residing in a Victorian asylum after murdering his father.
Then, two more significant cultural changes transpired, altering the reputation of fairies for all time. According to Sage, one was that “children’s literature happened.” The Victorians emphasized that childhood was an innocent period that called for its own enjoyment. From the 1870s onward, illustrated children’s books truly took off, with fairies being a common and increasingly adorable theme.
Another was pantomime. “At the conclusion of every Victorian pantomime, a large transformational show with youngsters dressed as fairies would take place on stage,” explains Sage. Think tinsel, dazzling sequins, and transparent, gauzy wings when imagining the typical fairy fancy dress attire of today; it is essentially the same as what these Victorian kids would have worn.
Huge popularity:
The 20th century was the era when fairies cemented their place. Slattery Clark points out to BBC that in the Edwardian era, Peter Pan started to be performed in 1904 and that carried on for the next 25 years. It was enough time for several generations of children to learn to clap their hands to show they believe in fairies.
The fairy mania only widened and deepened as the new century lurched through global upheaval in the form of World war. Sage notes that the “golden age of children’s literature” was essentially an upper-middle-class phenomenon. “What happened from World War One onwards is that it explodes beyond that, and becomes an adult concern.”
Fairies were snatched from the woods into the nursery and made their way to disturbed adults waiting at home or on the battlefield. Consider the print Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, which was extremely popular during World War One. It features a wispy image of a man playing a pipe and is surrounded by tiny fairies. In 1916, it sold a startling quarter of a million copies.
Sage explains that fairies during that time were symbolic of belief and hope. “When people lack control over their lives, futures, or families, turning to the paranormal becomes a way of finding some luck and brightness.”
Though in recent times, fairies have been associated with little girls, however, in that era fairy art was popular with grown men, too. Technology only helped in spreading it further with the explosion in spending postcards around that time. They were inexpensive to purchase and free to send to a deployed soldier. Fairies are suddenly soaring through the air and over the ocean, and anyone can send them. The practical side of it is something you can’t undervalue, Sage explains.
In the foreword of Flower Fairies of the Wayside, Barker confessed that “I have never seen a fairy” and that she had never claimed that fairies were genuine. But it’s important to remember that when she initially released The Flower Fairies, the urge to believe in magical beings was at an all-time high.
