Nicholas Crabbe or The one and the many : a romance

F. Rolfe

This novel is a detailed account, thinly disguised as fiction, of the four years following Rolfe's arrival in London in the 1890s, when he embarked upon his chequered literary career. The novel gives Rolfe's admiration for adolescent beauty and is structured as romances of androgynous obsession. Crabbe's beloved in this novel is based on Rolfe's sometime poetic collaborator Sholto Douglas (1873-?). The sad conclusion of the novel suggests that Rolfe believed that such relationships could not succeed, at least among Englishmen.