Hadrian the Seventh

George Arthur Rose aspired to the priesthood, but after being much abused and taken advantage of for many years by his Catholic brothers, he finds himself disillusioned with humanity. But just as the secret conclave in Rome is deadlocked in the election of the next Pope, he finds himself rediscovered. A compromise in the election results in Rose being chosen for the office, and he styles himself as Hadrian the Seventh. With his new authority, he implements church reforms and a program to bring Christian order to the nations of the world. Frederick Rolfe was considered an eccentric, as evidenced by his often-idiosyncratic spelling ("Xystine Chapel") and made-up words like "contortuplications" and "occession." Hadrian the Seventh, written under the pen name of "Baron Corvo," is a novel of wish-fulfillment, reflecting Rolfe's vision of how he wants to order the world given unlimited power. Written before the world wars and amid the increasing secularization of twentieth century society, it was perhaps almost-plausible to think that a religious figure could get everyone on the same program merely by moral persuasion. Equal parts wicked satire and wish-fulfillment fantasy, Hadrian the Seventh imagines what might happen if the most overlooked man in the room were suddenly handed the keys to the Vatican. Frederick Rolfe's eccentric genius and singular prose style make this one of the strangest and most delightfully idiosyncratic novels of the early twentieth century. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)