Summary
Summary of Hadrian the Seventh
Key ideas
Key idea 1
Rejection feeds a dream of recognition
George Arthur Rose is an English Catholic who trained for the priesthood and was turned away. Now he lives in poverty in London, writing and nursing his anger. His story begins with a question: what if the man the Church rejected were exactly the man it needed?
Frederick Rolfe had suffered a similar rejection himself. Through Rose, he explores ambition, injury and revenge, while imagining a Church willing to surrender its pomp and money. The comedy grows from a wound that remains painfully personal.
Key idea 2
A bishop opens a closed door
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Key idea 3
A divided Rome considers an outsider
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Key idea 4
Hadrian questions the display of power
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Key idea 5
Spiritual purpose comes before worldly wealth
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Key idea 6
Vindication remains entangled with wounded pride
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Key idea 7
Faith does not settle power's questions
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Key idea 8
The voice performs Rose's hungry pride
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Key idea 9
Triumph invites pleasure and doubt together
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The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
Read the rest freeWho it’s for
For readers who love eccentric, richly worded fiction, religious satire and the odd byways of English literature. Anyone curious about the Catholic Church will find a story of faith, power and wounded ambition.
What this book is
Hadrian the Seventh is a novel by Frederick Rolfe, who also wrote under the name Baron Corvo. It came out in 1904. It tells of George Arthur Rose, an English Catholic who trained for the priesthood and was turned away. He lives in poverty in London, writing and fuming, until one day his luck turns in a way no sane reader expects. The book is part comedy, part daydream, part sermon, and it is also a very thinly veiled picture of its author's own wounds.
Rolfe had himself been dismissed from a seminary and had spent years waiting for a Church that never gave him the place he felt he deserved. He wrote this book as a kind of answer. What if the man the Church rejected were exactly the man it needed? The story lets him find out. It is a book about ambition, injury and revenge, but also about what a Church might look like if it gave up its pomp and its money.
In the next fifteen minutes you will meet Rose, follow his rise, and see what he does with power once he has it. You will also learn how Rolfe tells the tale, in a voice that is proud, fussy and oddly funny. Let us begin with the man at the bottom, in his shabby room in London.
In this summary
- 1A rejected man in a shabby roomFree
- 2A bishop takes notice of Rose
- 3Rome is stuck and Rose is summoned
- 4Rose takes the name Hadrian
- 5A Pope who meets the world's rulers
- 6Wounded pride and the fantasy of vindication
- 7Faith, power and a poorer Church
- 8A voice that is proud, comic and strange
- 9The man behind the book and its afterlife
Key point 1 of 9
A rejected man in a shabby room
The novel opens with George Arthur Rose in London, living in cramped and dingy lodgings. He is a man of learning and strong convictions, and he has nothing to show for either. Years before, he went to study for the priesthood, and he was sent away before ordination. The reasons seem to him unjust, and he has never forgiven them.
Rose is poor, and the poverty is not noble. He is pressed by debts, by landlords and by people who see a man with no protector and take advantage of him. He earns scraps by writing and by odd work for others. Rolfe shows the small humiliations in close detail, the unpaid bills, the cold rooms, the callers who want money he does not have.
Yet Rose is not a meek victim. He is vain, sharp-tongued and very sure of his own gifts. He believes he has a true vocation, and that the Church has wronged him by refusing to see it. He talks and thinks like a man who has rehearsed his grievances for years, and the reader soon senses that they are rehearsed with pleasure.
This opening sets the book's strange balance. We are asked to pity Rose, and to laugh at him, and sometimes to be a little afraid of him. He is both a wronged man and a difficult one. Rolfe does not smooth that over, and it keeps the early chapters alive.
It also plants the question the whole novel will answer. If a man is both gifted and unbearable, what should a great institution do with him? For now the answer seems to be nothing at all, and Rose is left to grind his teeth in his room.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Check yourself
Why does Rose become a possible choice during the cardinals' deadlock?
Right. “He is a man with no faction behind him, which in this case is his great strength.”Not quite. “He is a man with no faction behind him, which in this case is his great strength.”
What direction does Hadrian want the Church to take?
Right. “In the novel he moves toward a Church that owns less and trusts more in its spiritual work.”Not quite. “In the novel he moves toward a Church that owns less and trusts more in its spiritual work.”
What makes Rose's vindication morally uncertain?
Right. “The reader enjoys the justice, and then wonders whether justice and revenge are as far apart as Rose thinks.”Not quite. “The reader enjoys the justice, and then wonders whether justice and revenge are as far apart as Rose thinks.”