Rosemary Hill. God's Architect: Pugin and The Building of Romantic Britain. London: Penguin, 2008. Xiii + 602. Paper 10.99 [pounds sterling]. Coincidence operates in Dickens's fiction no less remarkably than it did in his life. The agent of narrative energy in his novels, it brings together individuals, circumstances and events, initially without association, into a causal relationship in order to reveal a truth about the urban world we inhabit. Expressed in fictive terms, Chesney Wold and Tom-All-Alone's are connected: aristocrats and crossing sweepers, the rich and the poor, we learn in the course of 67 chapters, all belong to a single family. For proof, Dickens referred to life. One's personal experiences, he liked to maintain, were the source of wonderful surprises, a phenomenon John Forster memorably recorded as one of the "few things [that] moved his fancy so pleasantly." The world, he used to say, "was so much smaller than we thought it," connecting us by fate "without knowing it" (Forster 1: 5). Elaborating further on this phenomenon when at work on Little Dorrit, Dickens jotted down a variant of his idea. Why not start with this initial "uncertainty and this not-putting" of people together, meeting and parting "as travellers do," as "a new means of [narrative] interest"? This notion, recorded in 1855, in fact supplies an agenda that shaped all of his work, not just the opening chapters of his eleventh novel.
