Key to All Mythologies by Edward Casaubon

Title: Key to All Mythologies 

Author: Edward Casaubon

Publisher: unfinished on the author’s death

Source book: Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by George Elliot

Edward Casaubon is a pompous and ineffectual middle-aged scholar who marries Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, because he wants an assistant to help him write his book. Sadly for him he never completes his ‘masterwork’. But what a rotten reason for asking someone to marry you.

I haven’t read Middlemarch. I know it’s very highly thought of, but I was made to read Silas Marner by George Elliot when I was at school and it really put me off her work. And when the BBC’s TV version was shown to much acclaim I was in Australia; so I missed it. But it’s surprising how much you can look up online.

A Key to All Mythologies is meant to expose the correlations and confluences that link all cultural belief systems and superstitions to Christianity. It has become a byword for the mind-numbingly recondite and is typically thought of as a scene of arid and misguided pedantry. Or so I read. Casaubon focuses on detail to such an extent that he cannot hope ever to finish his enquiries, and has bitten off more than he can chew.

Casaubon leaves his notes to Dorothea in the hope that she will be able to complete his great work, but she comes to realise that it will never amount to anything; it is doomed to be outdated and irrelevant.