Content area
Full Text
The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870, by Colin Kidd; pp. vi + 232. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016, ?34.99, ?19.99 paper, $49.99, $29.99 paper.
In Middlemarch (1871-72), George Eliot so successfully portrayed Edward Casaubon as an odious creature that his entire field of study has come to be viewed as risible and absurd. It is "the higher stamp-collecting" (5). Casaubon is "a notorious emblem of pedantry," of "abject antiquarian pointlessness" (27, 2). In The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain's Wars of Mythography, 1700-1870, the superb Colin Kidd seeks to rescue the mythographers from the condescension that has come through their being associated with Dorothea's loathsome husband.
To take on such a task, however, is to travel against the wind. Most obviously, the quest for a key to all mythologies has now been abandoned as wrongheaded. We have to curb our unreasonable but natural tendency to think of scholars from past centuries whose theories have subsequently been discredited as not really scholars at all. Casaubon, moreover, was an Anglican clergyman whose studies were intended to vindicate orthodox Christian beliefs, as were a whole cohort of figures in this subfield. Being on this side of the 1920s, and having all therefore been socialized into the fine academic pastime of ridiculing fundamentalists (a group that did not exist in Eliot's day), it is hard not to see all of this intellectual labor as just grist for that modern mill. There is so much to make us snicker: the claim that the Argonauts named their ship after Noah's Ark, that the I ching predicted the coming of Christ, that the Roman goddess Vesta is really a garbled depiction of Cain's wife, that the Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis are likewise Adam and Eve, and so forth.
Who...