"In 1846, William John Thomas, who contributed the term folklore to the English language, commented in The Athenaeum that "belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England" (Merton, p. 1846, 55). Thorns was not alone in his opinion; he was merely echoing and endorsing the words of others such as Thomas Keightley, the author of The Fairy Mythology. For believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers, country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria's reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, social scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers. By the 1880s such leading folklorists as Sabine Baring-Gould, Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and Sir John Rhys were examining oral testimony on the nature and the customs of the "little folk" and the historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the beginning of the twentieth century, eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. In a remarkable "trickle up" of folk belief, a surprisingly large number of educated Victorians and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.

For the Irish, especially those involved in the Celtic revival, belief in fairies was almost a political and cultural necessity. Thus, William Butler Yeats reported endlessly on his interactions with the sidhe (Irish fairies) and wrote repeatedly of their nature and behavior. His colleagues AE (George Russell) and William Sharp/Fiona Macleod proudly enumerated their fairy hunts and sightings, and the great Irish Victorian folklorists--Patrick Kennedy, Lady Wilde, and Lady Gregory--overtly or covertly acknowledged their beliefs. Even those not totally or personally convinced, like Douglas Hyde, remarked that the fairy faith was alive and well in Ireland."

Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples Fairies and Victorian Consciousness