‘Sir George Scharf’ by Walter William Ouless. This painting was bestowed on the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1886. Walter William Ouless / Wikimedia Commons

In May 2009, Professor Robyn Warhol traveled from her home in Vermont to Houston, Texas, where she joined her friend and colleague Helena Michie for a dinner party. With thirteen other diners, the two professors of English first prepared and then made their way through eight courses, including beef broth, haddock, steak, mutton, chicken, and chocolate profiteroles. Strictly speaking, they should have topped the chicken with crawfish as well as poached eggs; crawfish not being in season in Texas in May, they used crab claws. The dinner was a recreation of one eaten 132 years earlier, in one of England’s grandest country houses. Among the guests at this first dinner was George Scharf, founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a man not especially famous in his own day and virtually unknown in ours.

Michie and Warhol intended their dinner to be a culmination of the ten years they had spent studying Scharf. They had first encountered him in the course of their research into Victorian food, when they had found an album of his, filled with invitation cards, menus and seating plans for meals he had attended. A ceremonial dinner seemed an appropriate way for the academics to honor him, and their relationship to him. But once the dishes were cleared away, and the blog of the dining experience was complete, Michie and Warhol realized they were not yet done with the person they sometimes referred to, affectionately, as “The Most Boring Man in the World.” The result of their continuing investigations is Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, a not-quite-biography about a not-quite-interesting Victorian.

Scharf was born in 1820 to a German artist father, who had arrived in London four years earlier, and a mother who owned a grocery store. Aged nineteen, he traveled to Turkey with Sir Charles Fellows, the archaeologist who excavated more than a dozen ancient cities and brought back some of their finest monuments to the British Museum. Over the next fifteen years, Scharf became a respected authority on art, although for a long time professional success did not bring him financial stability. In 1857, he was appointed secretary and director of the new National Portrait Gallery, a position he held almost until his death, overseeing the Gallery’s development into one of England’s most important collections of art. He also gave advice to royalty and nobility, including Prince Albert, on how to curate and display their art collections. He loved the wealthy and titled, perhaps all the more intensely because of his lower-middle-class upbringing. He loved rich meals, and suffered from the effects of too much eating and drinking. He died in 1895, three months after receiving a knighthood from the Queen.

Before the dinner, Michie and Warhol had been determined not to write a life of George Scharf. The replica dinner party worked so well not just because of Scharf’s love of food but also because of the nature of the plentiful records he left behind. These records, which include diaries, account books and letters, are rich in everyday detail (food consumed, money spent, weather observed) but strikingly poor in those details that combine to produce a compelling biographical narrative: interiority, the subject’s participation in or reflections on historical events, the texture of the subject’s relationships with those around him. In a representative diary entry, describing a dinner party that Scharf himself gave, he lists the names of his guests, draws a seating plan, and then has nothing more to say than “Very lively talk, Extra waiter (Midland). All carving done off the table. The hired flowers & new table linen looked very nice. To bed after 1 o’clock.”

Writing the kind of biography that moves from its subject’s birth to his death, creating him as a psychologically rounded character, wasn’t really a possibility for Michie and Warhol, then. But, as they point out, this approach has seemed old-fashioned for a while, in comparison to more inventive works of recent years, such as the biography of a group of friends (The Fellowship by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski), a life or lives told through a series of objects (Deborah Lutz’s The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects) or a single event (The Immortal Dinner by Penelope Hughes-Hallet). But although the approach of these works is experimental, their content often relies as much as birth-to-death biographies on those things conspicuously absent from Scharf’s documents.