An Archaeologist’s Approach to Baron Corvo

WHAT DO YOU DO when you have spent a considerable part of a research lifetime digging up fresh details about the life of a writer of peripheral interest to the mainstream of readers and scholars, and when what you have discovered guides you to little new understanding of your subject’s life when it is seen whole? One likelihood is that very soon the only course will be to deposit your work online in a location that offers access to the relatively few readers who will be interested, and also provides at least reasonable hope that the material will be moved from platform to platform as digital technology evolves. Robert Scoble is a scholar in such a position. He was, nevertheless, still able to find a publisher prepared to market his wares in the more securely enduring form, first as fifteen separate pamphlets, then gathered together in the present volume.

Scoble defines his approach to his subject in the introduction to Raven: The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo. He sees himself as an archaeologist in the preliminary stages of a dig—opening up trial pits in order to evaluate the site. His chosen site has already been dug over by three biographers, but, he argues, they have not dug deep enough, for there are layers still to be revealed. However, to pursue his analogy further, the problem with this approach is that such exploratory work in archaeology is intended to identify the territory for a complete excavation that would lead to a reinterpretation of the site; if the results from trial pits should not indicate a fresh examination of the whole, then the site would regretfully be abandoned. Scoble recognises that the results of his digging deeply into Rolfe’s life in likely spots has not brought up material that might drive a fresh understanding of the whole, but he has still felt the need to present to the public the nuggets of information discovered, wrapped in much tangential though sometimes interesting contextualisation.

For him nothing discovered is irrelevant. In one chapter we read of the history of piano making in general and then of the Rolfe family history in the business from its earliest involvement, which leads up to the essence of the chapter: an attempt to rescue Rolfe himself from accusations by contemporaries that he was a third-rate musician. The counterevidence Scoble presents is marginally convincing, but it has taken a long time to reach, and in the end it is not clear how much is added to our understanding of the man or the author to know that a review in a local newspaper in a very small provincial town moderately praised his playing.

The chapter “The Quest for Cockerton” takes eighteen pages to describe a search for the name and history of a previously unidentified Venetian acquaintance of Rolfe. It is pleasant to follow the footsteps of a successful explorer, to note his skill at certain moments in his adventure, the twist of fortune at another; but for complete satisfaction the goal once reached has to be worth the effort of reaching it. In this case though, with the identification once achieved, readers have to recognise that the knowledge gained has added little to their understanding of Rolfe or his writing. For the archaeologist, for Scoble, much of the value (here and elsewhere) is in the search itself; the remainder in this instance comes from the writing up of the exploration: a note on the first page of the chapter tells us (in case we should miss it) that he has written it in a style intended as a parody of A. J. A. Symons’s approach in the first biography of Rolfe: The Quest for Corvo.

In fact Scoble does not admire the three published biographies of Rolfe, and particularly dislikes The Quest for Corvo—whenever he is forced to cite Symons’s work as the authority for a statement he does so through stylistically gritted teeth. Donald Weeks’s...