The World of Mr Casaubon by Colin Kidd review – in defence of George Eliot’s pedant

Casaubon’s unfinished Key to All Mythologies was not, by the lights of his time, out of touch or deluded

When the 18th‑century antiquary William Stukeley was vicar of Stamford in Lincolnshire he put up a statue of Phut in the vicarage garden. Phut, son of Ham, grandson of Noah, was a figure whose importance in the development of Christianity Stukeley felt had been overlooked. While many of his contemporaries disagreed with him on this point, they didn’t disagree that it was a point. Stukeley’s friend Isaac Newton was similarly interested in the progeny of Noah. Ever since their discovery of the Americas, Europeans had readjusted their ideas about history and the nature of creation. In an age in which religion and politics were synonymous, all social order depended on the Christian system of belief – so each new discovery had to be accommodated to fit the evidence of different peoples’ faiths into a single absolute truth. The Flood, widely believed to have been a real historical event, had left unharmed only Noah’s family, who had gone out and populated the Earth. Perhaps, in the process, the truths of the Old Testament, which prefigured the birth of Christ, had taken on different local forms, though proceeding from one source.

This quest for a spiritual equivalent of the Unified Field Theory lasted for centuries and took many forms. Indeed, as Colin Kidd implies in his deft guided tour of some of the more labyrinthine byways of intellectual history, it is with us still. Kidd uses Mr Casaubon, the pedant of Middlemarch, whose purblind quest for the key to all mythologies sucks the life out of his young wife, Dorothea, as a pivotal figure. From different moments in the novel, Kidd shows that Casaubon was less out of touch or, by the lights of his time, deluded than George Eliot makes him appear. As a novelist and apologist for her own free-thinking views, she necessarily played down the size and complexity of the field in which he laboured. Kidd, however, comes neither to bury nor to praise a fictional character but aims to understand mythography. By an exercise of historical imagination he rescues this tale of red herrings and blind alleys from the condescension of posterity.

It’s not an easy task and the book is no light read, but it is immensely rewarding. Kidd’s sprightly style can breathe life into apparently dead disputes. He makes a particularly touching case for Jacob Bryant, whose hefty A New System of Ancient Mythology (1774-76) was the closest thing to a prototype of Casaubon’s project. An affable man on friendly terms with George III, Bryant was remembered by Fanny Burney in her journals as an anecdotalist, willing “entirely to cast aside his learning” on social occasions. This was just as well. Over the course of a long working life, he was wrong about every subject on which he formed a judgment. His great mythographic system was full of gaps filled in with what Kidd describes as “a kind of pseudo-scholarly grouting”. Yet though Bryant’s answers were wrong, his questions were valid, and they were recast in different terms by succeeding generations. The evidence of paganism could be used to bolster Christianity. After all, it was argued, why should non-Christian societies share so much, such as the memory of floods, the belief in a dead god resurrected? Paganism could be an allegory, or again, from another point of view, it could be asserted that the primitive nature of myths showed by contrast the moral and intellectual superiority of Christianity.

Only so much new information, however, could be fitted into the existing worldview before it began to come apart at the seams. All sides could play the mythography game and from the age of Voltaire onwards it became as often as not, an instrument of scepticism. Mythographers of the Enlightenment suggested the unifying source was simply nature worship, not the unfolding of any divine plan, or that myths were only stories. By the point at which Middlemarch is set, in the early 1830s, the forces of scepticism, atheism and political reform were being urgently fought off by clergyman-scholars like Casaubon in a debate that raged across Britain, France and Germany. Casaubon’s cousin, Will Ladislaw, suggests that if only Casaubon could read German he would not have wasted his life on a wild goose chase. The German “higher criticism”, as it became known, treated the Bible as a text rather than divine revelation, using the historical records of the Middle East for independent confirmation (or not) of its literal truth. Casaubon’s death, halfway through the novel, stands, Kidd suggests, for what Eliot believed, or hoped, to be “the extinction of Christian mythography as a viable form of intellectual life”.

Yet as he points out Casaubon, in the early 1830s, could not have known much about authors whose major works appeared in the 1840s, and he had another chronological disadvantage as he toiled away in his Midlands vicarage. While Newton had expanded the understanding of space, the concept of time was still limited. The Bible remained the earliest authority and that, according to the calculations of Archbishop Ussher, meant creation had taken place on 22 October 4004BC, which was a Saturday. By Casaubon’s day this had come to seem increasingly unlikely, but there was no other evidence until Charles Lyell published his three-volume Principles of Geology between 1830 and 1833. The birth of “deep time”, stretching back far before Genesis, coincides tellingly with Casaubon’s death. Darwin read Lyell’s book and found that it “altered the whole tone of one’s mind”. His On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

The first readers of Middlemarch in 1872 therefore looked back at Casaubon across a vast intellectual gulf. Understanding of humankind and its place in time had been transformed in a generation. It is perhaps surprising that Kidd makes no direct reference to Lyell or Darwin, but in fairness they made at first no fundamental difference. The mythography of the mid-Victorians continued to absorb the discoveries of archaeologists in Nineveh and Egypt, of explorers and scientists within an overarching theory of “development”. In theology, in the architecture of the gothic revival, as well as mythography and geology, creation could be presented as the immensely slow unfolding of what was, nevertheless, a divine plan. It allowed for cultural evolution, of primitive societies evolving towards Christianity. “Development” defended the breach until the year before Middlemarch. In 1871 Darwin’s The Descent of Man overturned the concept of humanity as a unique creation, distinct from the animals. After that, development was doomed.

So mythography as a subject finally died at the end of the 19th century, or rather it dissolved into the ectoplasmic haze of theosophy, and echoed faintly in the new, secular anthropology. James Frazer’s popular The Golden Bough (1890) explained myth as a primitive stage from which society progressed, passing through religion and arriving at last at science. It was the ironic fulfilment of Casaubon’s quest, a total explanation of mythology that relegated it to an ignorant past. Yet Frazer himself, with his grand insensitivity to context and provenance, was to be overtaken. Kidd’s implicit conclusion is that we should not cast stones at Mr Casaubon. We do not know which of our own intellectual inquiries it will be, but we can be sure that some of the most urgent questions of today will be to later generations as redundant as Phut.

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