Farewell To The Fairies

Abstract The Fairies Have Been Leaving England since the fourteenth century—at least according to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—but despite their perpetual farewells they had not completely vanished from Great Britain by the 1920s, and, some argue, they have not yet left. The spreading of the towns and the growing urbanization of former country people, the growth of standardized education and the elevation of science, the widespread materialism, the power of official religion, whether Roman Catholicism in Ireland, Presbyterianism in Scotland or Methodism in Wales, were all among the factors blamed for their demise. Paradoxically, however, it was their very prominence-their popularity especially after the turn of the century-that seems to have hastened their ostensible departure.