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Arthur Stedman and Frederick Rolfe,
Baron Corvo

MIRIAM J. BENKOVITZ
 

T
 

|/^ If ~^HE life storv of Frederick Rolfe, the English writer who
called himself Baron Corvo among a number of other
pseudonyms, could be told in terms of unexpected en¬
counters and disrupted relationships. Two hitherto imkno\Mt let¬
ters from Rolfe in the Edmund Clarence Stedman Collection of the
Columbia University Libraries help support that statement. Rolfe
wrote these letters to Arthur Griffin Stedman, one from London
on 17 December 1899 and the other from O.xford on 4 June 1901.
Stedman and Rolfe met in London through Henry Harland,
American expatriate, novelist, associate of the publisher John
Lane, and editor of The Yellow Book. The two Americans, Har¬
land and Stedman, had a long-standing connection. Their fathers,
Thomas Harland, lawyer and one-time Commis.sioner of Internal
Revenue, and Edmund C. Stedman, a prominent man of letters in
his own day—the "banker-poet"—had been boyhood friends and
Yale classmates. As young men, they had been together at Unitary
Home, a New York City commune on East Fourteenth Street and
the last remnant of Fourierism in America. There Edmund's sec¬
ond son Arthur Griffin Stedman was born in 1859, and there
Thomas Harland found his «ife. To the Harlands' second son

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