himself as “a shabby, badly dressed person with a wan face haggard with the worry of 7 years torment and insufficient food.” During the winter of 1894-5, he wore unchanged light summer clothes, he often had no place to sleep, and he was forced to eat food from the gutter. Ella D’Arcy, who encountered Corvo at receptions for the Yellow Book set at Henry Harland’s home, insisted that he must have slept in doss houses or on the embankment and stated that he left “singularly lively traces of his presence in Harland’s armchairs.” After leaving London, he lived in “humble poverty” in Holywell, writing to John Lane that all he desired was “to be picked out of this hole where I am buried, and to be given a chance to use myself.” In 1898, he was forced to stay in the workhouse in Holywell, Wales Corvo’s poverty is central to the mythology that has surrounded the author and his work since his deathEarly biographical treatments of Corvo by Shane Leslie and A.J.A. Symons emphasize that he frequently starved, that he was often miserable and always frustratedIn his Quest for Corvo, the first major biography of the author, Symons cites an 1898 article from the Aberdeen Free Press that describes Corvo’s humiliating eviction from his lodgings in his pyjamasHe stresses how frequently Corvo was forced to draw on the charity of others, how often he was “penniless” and “friendless.” However, these early biographical treatments rarely note the dissonance between Corvo’s avowed elitism and his actual circumstancesIn a review of The Quest for Corvo, Shane Leslie refers to Corvo as “the most aristocratic of English writers,” reproducing Corvo’s cantankerous claims about his own exceptional status. Again and again, early “Corvines” highlight Corvo’s avowals of nobility without investigating the incongruity between his harsh and reactionary ideas about inequality and the direness of his financial situation. Regenia Gagnier’s treatment of Corvo this critical traditionShe notes that Corvo was “for long periods homeless” and wrote the suffering of those who sleep on the streets; who watch
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