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Frederick Rolfe

London, 1860 - 1913, Venice

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n80044733
Rolfe, Frederick William, styled Baron Corvo (1860–1913), writer, was born at 61 Cheapside, London, on 22 July 1860, the eldest of the four sons and three daughters of James Rolfe (c.1827–1902), piano maker and tuner, and his wife, Ellen Elizabeth Pilcher (c.1837–1928/9). He was educated at the North London Collegiate School until, aged fourteen, he had a cross tattooed on his breast in token of a momentous religious experience, and became a teacher. He started work at the Stationers' Company School, London, in 1874, and by the time he took up a post at Grantham grammar school in 1884 he had already taught in Saffron Walden, Winchester, Newbury, and Cambridge. During this time, Rolfe had discovered his passion for writing, painting, and photography. His first work, Tarcissus: the Boy Martyr of Rome, was published in 1880.

Rolfe was received into the Roman Catholic church in 1886. Later that year he accepted the invitation of the third marquess of Bute to become headmaster of his cathedral choir school in Oban. To coincide with this, he relaunched himself as the Revd Father Rolfe, a nominal mutation which coupled the enigma and scoundrel in Rolfe and was the first of many pseudonyms he would assume. He left Oban after a couple of acrimonious months and, following a spell as a private tutor, enrolled at St Mary's College at Oscott, Aston, near Birmingham, in October 1887. Here Rolfe neglected his religious studies and was dismissed in 1888 for developing his aesthetic interests. Just over a year later, in December 1889, Rolfe entered the Scots College, Rome. Once again it was his self that he cultivated, rather than the seminarist's vocation, and he was expelled in May 1890. Adrift and in debt, Rolfe was taken in by the duchess of Sforza-Cesarini, who conferred on him the title Baron Corvo before he returned to England later in the year. Rolfe took up residence in Christchurch, before the fraudulent offer he made for his hosts' house marked the end of his credit and credibility in Hampshire. A cantankerous sojourn in Aberdeen ended when he was forcibly evicted from his lodgings.

Rolfe next moved to Holywell, near Chester, in 1895, where he began to paint and write more steadily. He painted a series of sacred banners for the local church, which were paraded throughout the town on St Winifred's day, 1896. Stories Toto Told me was published in 1898 and Rolfe also contributed six tales to the Yellow Book and one to The Butterfly. Yet Rolfe's fortunes worsened when, in November of that year, three anonymous articles appeared in the Aberdeen Evening Gazette, vilifying Rolfe and his murky past. They were reprinted in the Catholic Times, and distributed throughout Britain. In January 1899, shattered in mind and body, he entered the Holywell workhouse. A month later he discharged himself and trudged south to London, where he published Chronicles of the House of Borgia in 1901.

The same tenacious vanity which enabled Rolfe to survive the next nine years of penury wrecked his chances of succeeding as a writer. Rolfe's most successful work, Hadrian the Seventh, was published in 1904. A combination of thinly veiled autobiography and wish-fulfilment fantasy, it charts the rise to pope of a forlorn seminary drop-out. It is a bizarre if masterful document of exotic descriptions, erudite vocabulary, and obscure scholarship, which situates Rolfe firmly in traditions of fin de siècle decadence. Translated into French and Italian, and ultimately adapted for the stage, it earned Rolfe the posthumous praise of D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, and Graham Greene. A similar, although less successful novel, Don Tarquinio: a Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance, followed in 1905.

In August 1908 Rolfe left for Venice and never returned, living out a kind of degenerate and vituperative envoi to his earlier years. His squabbles with publishers and his vicious exploitation of those who befriended him continued as before. He began to compose detailed fantasies about mystic cults signed ‘Frederick of Venice’, and embarked upon a series of sexual relationships with adolescent boys. Don Renato appeared in 1909, but was immediately suppressed. The Weird of the Wanderer, the last novel published in his lifetime, was brought out in 1912 in collaboration with Harry Pirie-Gordon. Rolfe then established residence at the Albergo Cavalletto, where he died of heart failure on 25 October 1913. He was unmarried, and his Venetian will left his estate to his brother, Alfred, a schoolteacher in Australia, who was unable to claim it for fear of creditors. The estate, consisting mostly of ‘incriminating’ letters, photos, and manuscripts, was confiscated by the British consul, and most of it was destroyed. Rolfe was buried on 30 October 1913 in a pauper's grave in San Michele cemetery, Venice, where he was reinterred in 1924. His last novel, a homoerotic fantasy, The Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole, was published in 1934 to critical acclaim.

David Bradshaw, rev.
Sources

M. J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (1977) · A. J. A. Symons, The quest for Corvo: an experiment in biography (1934) · C. Woolf, A bibliography of Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, rev. edn (1972) · F. Rolfe, Venice letters, ed. C. Woolf (1974) · The centenary edition of the letters of F. W. Rolfe, ed. C. Woolf, 4 vols. (1959–62) · F. W. Rolfe, The desire and the pursuit of the whole: the first complete edition, ed. A. Eburne (1996) · D. Weeks, Corvo (1971) · A. Eburne, ‘Frederick Rolfe: the desire and the pursuit of the whole, 1908–1912’, DPhil diss., U. Oxf., 1994 · R. Strauss, ‘Quarrels and curiosities: the “unpublishable” Corvo’, Sunday Times (9 Dec 1934), 9
Archives

Bodl. Oxf., literary and personal papers :: Bodl. Oxf., letters to C. M. Fox · NYPL, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg collection of English and American Literature · Ransom HRC, letters mainly to John Lane · Royal Literary Fund, London, letters to Royal Literary Fund

Likenesses

photograph, 1883, repro. in Weeks, Corvo · two photographs, 1888–1908, repro. in Symons, Quest for Corvo · photograph, 1898, repro. in Wide World Magazine (Nov 1898) · F. Rolfe, self-portrait, 1903, repro. in F. Rolfe, A letter to Claude (1964)
Wealth at death

insolvent: Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe; Eburne, ed., The desire and the pursuit
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

David Bradshaw, ‘Rolfe, Frederick William, styled Baron Corvo (1860–1913)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2014 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/37910, accessed 11 Oct 2017]

Frederick William Rolfe (1860–1913): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37910

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Last Updated8/7/24

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