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2 - The Key to All Mythologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2016

Colin Kidd
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

[H]e had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.

(Middlemarch, ch. 3)

The ‘Key to All Mythologies’ has become a byword for the mind-numbingly recondite and is typically thought of as a scene of arid and misguided pedantry. Readers of Middlemarch also gain a sense of the windy and unfocused emptiness of Casaubon's project, its seemingly unrealisable immensity bringing into relief the mythographer's pettiness. Casaubon did, of course, pay attention to detail – an excessive antiquarian attention to trifles indeed; but the logic of his bloated project led him to superimpose a universal pattern on immensely varied elements, regardless of their context or provenance. Mr Casaubon, readers soon divine, had bitten off more than he could chew.

Casaubon seems in that respect like one of the other central characters in Middlemarch, Dr Tertius Lydgate, who is engaged on a medical quest to unravel the scientific secrets of the most basic building block of life, what he calls ‘primitive tissue’. The supposed parallel here is obvious, for Lydgate, whose vainglorious dreams and ambitions exceed his grasp, is, under the influence of the French anatomist Marie-François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), attempting to discover what might be called a key to all biology. Indeed, Lydgate, like Casaubon who desperately tries to reduce all myths to a common cipher, has a totalising and reductive approach to knowledge and is keen to unravel ‘the homogeneous origin of all the tissues’. Yet in both cases there are more generous ways of assessing each man's pretensions to learning, though Eliot, it seems, only grants such indulgence to Lydgate (who, to be fair, was also inspired – unlike the quietly misanthropic Casaubon – by philanthropic intentions to improve the lot of his fellow humans). As Eliot and her readers knew, Lydgate was onto something, and the knowing reader appreciates that despite being a young man in a hurry Lydgate was an unsung pioneer in the development of cell theory by Matthias Schleiden (1804–81) and Theodor Schwann (1810–82). The road, which for Lydgate proved to be a cul-de-sac, turned out to be a throughway. Sympathetic understanding of this sort is not extended to Casaubon or to his enterprise.

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The World of Mr Casaubon
Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870
, pp. 29 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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  • The Key to All Mythologies
  • Colin Kidd, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: The World of Mr Casaubon
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226646.002
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  • The Key to All Mythologies
  • Colin Kidd, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: The World of Mr Casaubon
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226646.002
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Key to All Mythologies
  • Colin Kidd, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: The World of Mr Casaubon
  • Online publication: 24 November 2016
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139226646.002
Available formats
×