The death of Mr Casaubon part way through the narrative of Middlemarch – at a point where even his wife, who had married him as an aspirant amanuensis, has come to recognise the futility of his project – is also meant to signal the extinction of Christian mythography as a viable form of intellectual life in the England of the 1830s. Already overtaken by pioneering developments in the German science of mythology, it was discredited and lacked any intellectual cachet, or so Eliot would have us believe. No longer could myth be used to support biblical truth; rather, the Bible had itself been exposed as a kind of mythology. A relic of a misguided, bygone antiquarianism, mythographical apologetics had no place in the reformed – and demythologised – world of social improvement and science.

However, as we have seen, the British wars of mythography did not come to an end in the 1830s. Across the four decades between the setting in which the action of Middlemarch takes place and the era of the book's publication, mythographers went on acquiring new forms of apologetic weaponry. Mere pea-shooters these might prove, as Eliot rightly perceived and as we know in hindsight, but at the time developments in mythography and in related bodies of scholarship such as Assyriology, Egyptology and Middle Eastern archaeology seemed to many commentators like the heavy artillery of a new military counter-revolution.