The brilliance of Cicely Mary Barker

When Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923, a post-first world war mass wishful belief in fairies was at its height in Britain. Just over two years previously, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in the 1920 Christmas issue of the Strand Magazine, had stated that the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ (tiny winged figures visible in photographs taken near Bradford by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths) were almost certainly genuine and were clear evidence of the existence of psychic phenomena.

The public – 21 years on from the birth of Peter Pan – were hungrier than ever for fairies: their innocence, their delicate beauty, and their hint of benign mischief. Barker, a young, unmarried illustrator living with her mother, and sister Dorothy, in Croydon, didn’t believe in fairies herself. She was an ardent Christian, and said that ‘fairies, and all about them, are “pretend”’. But she came up with the idea of tapping into the zeitgeist by creating books about fairies living at close quarters with the British flora of all four seasons.

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She and Dorothy were galvanised by the urgent need to earn their living. Their father had died when Cicely was 17. Dorothy ran a kindergarten in the back room of their house, and Cicely used the pupils as models. The Flower Fairy books were an instant success, adored by everyone from Queen Mary downwards. They became part of the inner landscape of generations of 20th-century children (perhaps mainly girls), who found solace in the rosy-cheeked sweetness of the fairies, and usually avoided reading the sickly poems (also by Barker) that went with each one.