The World of Mr Casaubon

This book explores the intellectual contexts for Mr Casaubon, a central character in George Eliot's classic and much-loved novel Middlemarch.

1. Prologue: Casaubon's dubious bequest; 2. The key to all mythologies; 3. The legacies of the ancients in Enlightenment mythography; 4. The obsessions of Jacob Bryant: Arkite idolatry and the quest for Troy; 5. The dispute of the Orient: Anglo-French rivalries in an Age of Revolution; 6. Fish-gods, floods and serpent-worship: from apologetics to anthropology; 7. Epilogue: the keys to all mythology in 1872.