Since he had no formal education past fourteen, it is likely that Frederick William Rolfe would have fallen into oblivion if not for the interest in his personal eccentricities that has largely precluded any convincing appraisal of his literary merits. Commentaries on his fiction are typically marginal, as in the frequently quoted remark by Stuart Gilbert in his James Joyce's Ulysses (1952) that Corvo's hero Nicholas Crabbe in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice (1934) "had a good deal in common with Stephen Dedalus." Commentaries on Rolfe's personality, which has attracted far more detailed and enthusiastic discussion, are perhaps best summed up in A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934; revised, 1955), where he characterizes encounters with Rolfe as "minor experiments in demonology."

Rolfe was born on 22 July 1860 in Cheapside, London, to Ellen Elizabeth Pilcher and James Rolfe, who was...