Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A vita for Sir George Scharf (GS)
- Chapter 1 Introduction: adventures in the archives
- Chapter 2 Reading for romance: the marriage plot
- Chapter 3 Reading for differentiation: the family romance
- Chapter 4 Reading for success: the professional plot
- Coda: our archivist, ourselves
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A vita for Sir George Scharf (GS)
- Chapter 1 Introduction: adventures in the archives
- Chapter 2 Reading for romance: the marriage plot
- Chapter 3 Reading for differentiation: the family romance
- Chapter 4 Reading for success: the professional plot
- Coda: our archivist, ourselves
- Notes
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's ‘makdom and her fairnesse’, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of ‘makdom and fairnesse’ which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.
George Eliot, MiddlemarchThis book is a love story– no matter how embarrassing these words are to write or, perhaps, to read. In the most obvious sense, the book is a story about Sir George Scharf– Victorian antiquarian, man-about- London and founding director of the National Portrait Gallery– and his loving relationships with male friends. It is also, however, about other kinds of loves– George Scharf's and our own. In Middlemarch, another (female) George reminds her readers of the existence of an alternative love plot, another beloved that must be ‘wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires’. This is, of course, the plot of work or vocation: we see signs of this love in the playful curlicues of George Scharf's drawings; in the time he spent each day sketching, reading, making notes and recording these activities in his diaries; in the he paid to the details of the portraits he examined, copied and arranged; and in the hard-won pocket money he expended travelling to great English country houses to catalogue their collections. The self-educated son of an immigrant artist, Scharf loved his work and the surprisingly elevated social life that grew up around it with titled friends and younger fellows.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Love Among the ArchivesWriting the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015