The other evidence is all qualified in one way or another. Whatever the exact explanation, it’s one of the few instances where there’s a suggestion that nudity might be the normal condition in Faery.Ī calendar illustration by Mabel Rollins Harris They may have objected to human things they may have thought a ‘natural’ state was healthier and preferable. Now, this girl was a human infant and there may have been several reasons why the pixies might have taken off all her clothes.
The pixies were supposed to have stolen the child, but to have cared for her and returned her. Eventually, after hope had nearly been lost, the girl was found quite near to her home, completely undressed and without her clothes, but well and happy, not at all starved, and playing contentedly with her toes. In due course, the parents realised that the older child had disappeared and several days of frantic and fruitless searching followed. A game keeper and his wife living at Chudleigh, on Dartmoor, had two children, and one morning the eldest girl went out to play while her mother dressed her baby sister. In my post on fairy abductions of children, I mentioned the story of a girl who temporarily went missing in Devon. The honest answer has to be that there’s very little sign of nudity in the older accounts of Faery. What about the folklore evidence, though? Victorian pictures- and more recently the work of Alan Lee, Brian Froud and Peter Blake– have habituated us to the idea of a Faery full of frolicking nudes, but how traditional is this? Looking at John Simmons’ painting above, you cannot help but agree with the second part of Casteras’ comment- although Simmons was a particular offender, producing a number of ‘pin-up’ canvases. Casteras, ‘Winged Fantasies: Constructions of Childhood, Adolescence and Sexuality in Victorian Fairy Painting’ in Marilyn Brown, Picturing Children, 2017, c.8, 127-8) John Simmons, A Fairy on a Leaf Many paintings of the period, she rightly observed, were all about “flaunting nudity for its own sake rather than as a supposedly accurate transcription of faery lore.” (S. She perceptively remarked how nudity, which is very far from being an inherent element in folklore, became something that the Victorians chose to exaggerate in their visions of fairyland. In a book published in 2017, American art historian Susan Casteras contributed a chapter on Victorian fairy painting.
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