Adventures in the Archives: Two Literary Critics in Pursuit of a Victorian Subject

Abstract

This article describes our encounters with the archives—ephemeral, institutional, monumental, and visceral—relating to the oddly un-famous George Scharf, founding director of London’s National Portrait Gallery, professional dinner guest, and man-about-town. It explores the pressures, desires, and expectations that produce in literary critics of a historical bent a specific kind of “romance” of the archive. Our search for narrative in the dispersed traces of “the archive” reveals the theoretical and practical problems of writing an individual life. We end with an announcement of a new project: the attempt to write something other than a biography of Scharf—a (we hope) new kind of life writing we call a “vita.”

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