Ellen Steiber

They are often portrayed as amoral beings, rather than as immoral ones, who simply have little comprehension of human notions of right and wrong.
The great English folklorist Katharine Briggs tended to avoid the “good” and “bad” division, preferring the categorizations of Solitary and Trooping Faeries instead.

Bishop Thomas Percy began to collect old English folk ballads, which he published in an influential volume called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Without Percy’s labors, many old poems and ballads might have been lost forever—he rescued one important manuscript from a cottager who was using it to light the fire

Opium derivatives like laudanum, called “the aspirin of the 19th century,” were available without prescription in Victorian England, and were commonly used for insomnia, headaches and “women’s troubles”. It may be no accident that the Victorian’s obsessions with fairies and Spiritualism occurred during the same span of years when casual opium use was widespread.