Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor

ISBN-13: 9781474406642 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 256 str.

Helena Michie;Robyn Warhol

Opis

WINNER of the 2016 NAVSA Book of the Year
Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After discovering Scharf's scrapbook of menus and invitations from England's most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in the archives of London, searching Scharf's diaries, sketchbooks, and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but found Scharf's passionate attachment to a younger man who had hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother. Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible, gregarious, prolific, and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called "my best friend." The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts, and dinner parties comes together to produce a rich Victorian character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we think we know about sex, class, and profession in his time.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations; Preface and Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; A Vita for Sir George Scharf (Timeline); Part I. Introduction: Adventures in the Archives; 1. Identifying George Scharf; 2. Expanding Middles; 3. So Many Archives; 4. The Ephemeral Archive: The Lives of Objects; 5. The Institutional Archive: The NPG on Paper and Screen; 6. The Monumental Archive: A Trip to Xanthus; 7. The Visceral Archive: A Victorian Dinner Party; 8. Writing George Scharf’s ‘Life’; II. Reading for Romance: The Marriage Plot; 9. Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places; 10. A World of Men; 11. We Don’t Know Jack about George; 12. ‘Don’t Be Shocked!’; 13. ‘Jackiana’, or, Giving Jack Away; 14. Getting Used To It; 15. Piano Wars; 16. Romance Plot Redux; 17. After Plot: Illegible Romance; III. Reading for Differentiation: The Family Romance; 18. Left Behind: George Senior; 19. Incorporating the Elderlies: Mother and Aunt; 20. Horizontal Narratives (1): Family (Accounting) Systems; 21. Horizontal Narratives (2): Brother Henry Disappears; IV. Reading for Success: The Professional Plot; 22. Desiring Knole; 23. Knole in the National Imaginary; 24. In Which We (Maybe) Uncover a Dark-Hearted Villain; 25. Days and Nights at Knole; 26. Back to the Table; 27. In Which We Become Guests of the Sackvilles (Sort of); 28. Friends at Chevening; 29. Reading for Death; Coda: Our Archivist, Ourselves; List of Works Cited; Index