25 September 2025

Piranesi reference in Strange & Norrell

It didn't make the cut in my list favourite excerpts in my post about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell but I wanted to highlight this quote either way (emphasis mine):

"Of course," remarked Strange to Childermass, "they make these scenes altogether too Roman — too like the works of Palladio and Piranesi, but they cannot help that — it is their training."

Entirely unconsciously, I would suppose, but nevertheless — with the benefit of hindsight — it comes across as a tiny bit of foreshadowing. More than a decade and a half after the release of Strange & Norrell, Susanna Clarke published her second novel.

The title? Piranesi.