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

Colin Kidd is Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews and a Fifty-Pound Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and to the Guardian, and has lectured in all parts of the British Isles, in France and in the United States.

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.