Reading for differentiation: the family romance plot

Despite George Scharf’s professional success and eventual social status, most people who have heard the name are thinking of his father. It is George Scharf Sr’s urban sketches– tracking street by street and demolished house by demolished house the emergence of Regency London and of the city we know today–that were brought together in the 1980s as an exhibition and a book, both entitled George Scharf’s London. If George Jr does not get to possess, in the contemporary imagination, the city in which he, too, lived and worked, he did in his own time manage to surpass his father in reputation and class, to leave behind the slightly pathetic figure, the chronically underemployed immigrant debtor who shared– that is to say, anticipated– his name. The remarkable story of George Jr’s class and professional ascendancy, marked by increasing signs of public respect, achieved its apotheosis in the nominal change that shortly preceded his death: the not-quite- posthumous creation of ‘Sir George Scharf’, the addition of ‘Sir’ to the name of the son, marked the distance between the two men for posterity.

Reading for romance: the marriage plot

So far we have structured the story of this project around an originary narrative and, indeed, a moment of origin– our encounter with George Scharf’s album of menus and invitations that served as our introduction to him (see Fig. 1.1). Certainly that origin shaped our initial sense of George as a guest, a diner out. If we had not always had before us the glowing after-image of the menus, the gilded names of country houses and the calling cards of the rich and famous, we would perhaps have read the diaries differently: we might have read George not only or primarily as a guest but also as a host. Although, as we describe in the introduction, we found traces of Scharf as a host in the album and in the nightmare of hospitality we construed from those traces, the album resolutely and snobbishly tied him to country estates and their social rituals. The diaries, however, show Scharf as an almost obsessive giver of dinners, small and large, and as the centre of what one guest called ‘The Ashley Place Circle’, a group of male friends defined by the address of the lodgings Scharf rented for the last two and a half decades of his life.

Reading for success: the professional plot

In the last two chapters we have read some key moments in Scharf’s life with and against two dominant cultural narratives: the romance plot and the differentiation plot. These plots are intimately but complexly related to literary genres– the marriage-plot novel and the Bildungsroman. This chapter focuses not so much on a single plot as on a culturally privileged place that has generated a variety of literary plots. By telling the story of Scharf’s relationship with two great country houses only seven miles apart, we cannot help invoking the frisson-inducing spectre of the Gothic and sensation novel and the linked cultural and literary plot of inheritance. Scharf’s relationships with Knole, the home of the Sackville family, and Chevening, the seat of the earls of Stanhope (both located in Sevenoaks, Kent), brought up for us some of the central questions of Gothic and sensation novels: who belongs to the house, and who does not? Who is absorbable into the household, and who, finally, is foreign to it and must be thrust out into a different space, whether that be a prison, an asylum or another country?1

Introduction: adventures in the archives

The album is huge. Depending on which librarian brings it to the circulation desk, you might be offered a cart to carry it to your seat in the British Library Reading Room or you might have to tote it yourself. Its vertical length is at least two feet; its width nearly as great. The covers are a dusty red-brown, faded and scratched, and the binding is broken so that the album must be tied with a flat cord to keep it from falling open when lifted. Inside, musty pages of heavy paper require you to stretch out your whole arm to turn them. Neatly affixed to the pages in rough chronological order are a variety of items in card stock: calling cards with the names of English dukes and duchesses in elaborate scripted fonts; handwritten menus for French meals served in grand country houses; seating charts for dinners large and small; printed bills of fare for restaurant banquets. The pages, despite their slight yellowing and a faint but perceptible yellowish smell, have an aura of faded opulence.

Coda: our archivist, ourselves

But perhaps George Scharf would not have wanted us to end with him at rest. He was, after all– and this is a modern term for an old-fashioned value– a hard worker. This was, for both of us, another point of identification with Scharf, although we suspect he would be as puzzled by the kind of work we do as we sometimes were by his professional activities. By the end of our work on and with him, however, we realised that our jobs–Scharf’s job and our own– had something in common and that this commonality might produce a final attempt at an identity term to add to bachelor, diner, sketcher, fat man, extra man and the other categories we tried out for Scharf. It took us arguably too long to realise that Scharf, too, was an archival researcher subject to the exigencies and fantasies of the archive. That realisation came to us after Helena’s trip to the Laing archive at the University of Edinburgh, whose holdings include letters from Scharf to David Laing, librarian of the Signet Library in Edinburgh and member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.