The World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870 by Colin Kidd (review)

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 was the historical model for Casaubon? A popular answer has been the Oxford don Mark Pattison (1813–84). Kidd, however, discounts this theory. Pattison took to German scholarship with relish—the exact opposite of our Middlemarch antiquarian—and his ill-suited marriage came later: “less a banal matter of art imitating life than the wonderfully uncanny phenomenon of life imitating art” (16).

Kidd argues, instead, that the main analog for Casaubon was Jacob Bryant (1715– 1804). As was generally the case with Anglican apologists, Bryant’s key to all mythologies was the deluge narrative and the religion of Noah. He had an “indomitable Flood-fixation” (119). Evoking Bryant would seem only to provide yet more damning evidence for our original disdain for this entire enterprise. Kidd concedes: “In every single one of the major antiquarian spats in which he participated, he appears to have been on the losing side. . . . On every count Bryant seemed magnetically attracted to error and absurdity” (112). Edward Hungerford quipped that during his long scholarly life, Bryant “came to not a single correct conclusion” (qtd. in Kidd 112).

Still, things can be said even in his defense. Most unlike Casaubon, Bryant was a pleasant, friendly, likeable chap. Taking his critics in his congenial stride, he relished his publisher’s observation that “if they abuse you much longer, we must have a third edition” (qtd. in Kidd 113). Most of all, Kidd argues that although Bryant’s conclusions were wrong, he was a valuable and influential pioneer in terms of method.

A more important step toward curbing our condescension is to recall that finding the biblical narrative in the myths of ancient cultures from around the world was a major scholarly task pursued by numerous erudite and substantial figures across several centuries. The idea that the Roman god Saturn was a distorted memory of Noah might strike us as material for comic banter, but, as it was Isaac Newton’s idea, we can hardly retrospectively revoke everyone’s scholarly credentials who held it.

Far from being an exclusively orthodox hobbyhorse, moreover, the quest for the key to all mythologies was zealously pursued by an array of eminent freethinkers, infidels, and anti...