The Attack on St Winefride's Well
In 1895 there arrived in the small Welsh town of Holywell in Flintshire, a former school-teacher, sometime artist, photographer and writer, called Frederick Rolfe. Rolfe would later become known as Baron Corvo and gain lasting fame as a writer of fantasy and the fantastic. His time in Holywell was marked by his attatchment to the Shrine of St Winefride in the town, which is built over an ancient spring. Rolfe painted banners, edited a Catholic magazine, fought with Protestants and with the Catholic clergy and ended his time in the town in the workhouse. All this in only four years residence. Right at the very end of this period a proposal was made to use St Winefride's Well as a source for bottled table water and, understandably, the Catholics of the town were upset by this. Rolfe wrote a pamphlet in typically ebulliant style, railing against the scheme and creating a scathing satire against the local town authorities. He published it out of the same office as the Catholic magazine for which he worked.
Only two copies have ever been discovered of this rarest of all Corvine pieces. It is our hope that, with a long introduction by Callum James representing over a year's research into Rolfe's time in Holywell, that this publication will fill a gap, long left empty on the shelves of every Rolfe collector and will also add to the local history of the area. This edition also includes the first publication since their original appearance of two long letters Rolfe wrote to newspapers at the time as well as having, for a frontispiece a previously unpublished photograph attributed to Rolfe.
Of a limited and numbered edition of 60 copies, the first 20 are printed on Zerkall paper and bound in hard covers between hand-printed patterned paper boards and with a buckram spine. Copies numbers 21-60 are sewn into blue card covers with an acetate wrap.
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by Frederick Rolfe,
edited and introduced by Callum James
