Middlemarch · Treatise
The Key to All Mythologies
Edward Casaubon
A vast unfinished work intended to show that all the world's myths are corruptions of a single original revelation — compiled by a man who cannot read German, will not finish a chapter, and marries a young woman to be his secretary.
The Key does not fail because myth is unkeyable. It fails because Casaubon wanted a key more than he wanted to know anything.
Eliot is precise about the furniture of the disaster: pigeon-holes, synopses, a method that generates headings faster than arguments, a husband who cannot bear to be seen not writing and cannot bear to write. Dorothea, who has a mind, is recruited as lamp-oil. The tragedy is not that she married an old man. It is that she married a project, and the project was a way of not living.
Set it beside the Encyclopedia Galactica, which at least got to a 116th edition by being a lie that people kept working on, and beside Eco’s Plan, which is what happens when connectedness is treated as a toy and then as a faith. Casaubon’s name on Eco’s narrator is a warning label. The Key is the Plan without the joke and without the Devil. It is just a room in Warwickshire, and a woman walking out of it.
Nothing from the Key is quoted, because nothing from the Key was ever ready to quote. That is the entry.
On the readability rating. Characterised with a completeness that is almost cruel. Not a paragraph of the treatise. Eliot will not write Casaubon’s book for him. That would have been a mercy he had not earned.
In-world history
Begun long before Dorothea Brooke meets him at Tipton, continued in Rome on a miserable honeymoon, left as cupboards of notes at Lowick. Casaubon extracts a promise that she will carry it on after his death. She is released from the promise by discovering, in time, that the work is already obsolete — the Germans have moved, and he has not followed. Eco named the narrator of Foucault's Pendulum Casaubon on purpose.
Why it matters
The most exact portrait in English of scholarship as a form of death. Casaubon is not a fool. He is a mind that has mistaken accumulation for thought, and the Key is the object that mistake produces.
Appearances
- Middlemarch (1872) — George Eliot Casaubon's life-work, never finished, never publishable; Dorothea marries the man in order to help with the notes
Connected volumes
- Related to The Plan · Foucault's Pendulum
- Related to Encyclopedia Galactica · Foundation
- Related to The Marquis de Rollebon · Nausea
- Related to Slawkenbergius's Treatise on Noses · Tristram Shandy
- Related to The Dictionary of Received Ideas · Bouvard and Pécuchet
- Related to The Glass Bead Game · Castalia
- Related to The Life of Chernyshevski · The Gift
- Related to The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger · Things Fall Apart
Catalogue record
- Category
- Treatise
- World
- Middlemarch
- Imagined by
- George Eliot
- Language
- English, with a great deal of unread German
- First appearance
- Middlemarch (Blackwood, 1871–72)
- Readability
- Described
Sources
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (William Blackwood and Sons, 1871–72), especially Book I and the Lowick chapters of Casaubon's notes.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06