- Hello, thanks for coming to this lecture, which will, I hope, uncover for you the key to all narratives, not just all novels, although I'm only going to be talking about novels today, and that is coincidence. If you want to know how a novel works, look at how it uses coincidence. And that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at how some novels, some of which I hope will be familiar to you, how they deploy, how they even court coincidence. And it might sound paradoxical to talk about a novelist using or courting coincidence, because very often, a reliance on coincidence is what we declare, what we detect to be the problem, the weakness, maybe even a fatal weakness of a novel, and of a novel in particular, I think, because it's fine to have laughable coincidences in a Shakespeare comedy or a Hollywood rom-com, there's two future Gresham lectures for you,(audience laughs) but surely, novels have to obey the laws of probability. So I want to start with one or two novels which don't, and my first one's actually a rather notorious example of a successful, and I think rather beautifully written novel, which disobeyed those laws, and which, when you read it now, continues to disobey them. And here is, you might recognize this rather good looking chap, this is the novelist Sebastian Barry, albeit a decade ago, and it's one of those slightly proud, slightly embarrassed prize winner's photographs, that's why he's in black tie. And it's from 2008, so 14 years ago, and he's just won the Costa Book of the Year Prize for the novel that he's clutching there, displaying there,"The Secret Scripture." It's a really good novel, one I think I know quite well, and I wanted to start with this, and I've talked to him about it, I'm sure he wouldn't mind this, I believe, I trust he wouldn't mind I start with it, because his winning the prize on this particular evening in 2008 was a rather odd event, its oddness to do with coincidence, because the chair of the cost Costa Prize judges, the journalist and former politician Matthew Parris, actually took the unusual step of announcing not only that"The Secret Scripture" had won, and it had been a close-run thing, but the judges really liked it, the usual stuff, but also he took the unusual step of saying that the novel was so good that it had won despite its ending. And he was quite specific about it. There are lots of reports, here's the one from "The Independent,""The novelist Sebastian Barry"was named the winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award"last night"in spite of writing a novel that was,"according to the judges,"'flawed in many ways.'"Matthew Parris, the columnist and chair of the Judges,"said the competition between Barry and Adam Folds,"who nearly claimed the prize"for his poetic work 'The Broken Word,'" and coincidence free, I hope,"was extraordinarily close."Parris said the judges agreed to give the prize"to Barry's book"despite its less than perfect ending."'It was an extraordinarily close finish among the judges,'"said Parris,"there was huge support for both."The feeling among judges"was that there was a lot wrong with it," you can imagine poor, old Sebastian Barry reading about this over his flat Champagne the next morning."There was a lot wrong with it, it was flawed in many ways,"almost no one liked its ending."For some, this was fatal," I think he's saying,"I don't think the ending works,"nobody thought the ending worked,"but there was a feeling among the judges"that many great works of literature are also flawed." It goes beyond damning with faint praise, doesn't it, there's no praise at all, really. But I think Matthew Parris was sort of saying it must be a really good novel that it garnered admiration despite this, despite its ending. What irked the judges, so irked them that they wanted to attach this caveat to their decision, was a coincidence. In fact, it was a coincidence widely noted by reviewers of the novel, and you know that law of reviewers who review novels, they're not allowed to talk about the ending, but the reviewers of"The Secret Scripture" couldn't help themselves. In "The Daily Mail," fellow novelist Michael Arditti did the same as Parris, he praised the novel, but then concluded,"Sebastian Barry sets up a series of subtle correspondences"between past and present"only to destroy them all in the final pages"with a coincidence so improbable and sentimental"that all vestige of credibility is lost." I'm going to do a bit of plot summary for you. Bear with me, as they say on the phone, bear with me, because it will be fairly brief, and if you haven't read the novel, you need to know it. So "The Secret Scripture" consists of two interleaved first-person narratives. One of the narrators is Roseanne McNulty. She's nearly 100 years old, she's been an inpatient in an Irish mental hospital, that's the phrase used, for half a century. The other narrator is the psychiatrist in charge of her case, Dr. Grene, who's intrigued by her history, her case notes have been lost or destroyed, and begins digging into her past. And actually, at a crucial stage in the novel, Dr. Grene discovers her narrative which she's writing, and has hidden under floorboards, and so his narrative is informed by reading hers. Roseanne's story is also a kind of little history of Ireland in the early decades of the 20th century. She's brought up a Protestant and has incurred the enmity of the local priest, a brilliant depiction of a grim and unyielding believer, Father Gaunt. Father Gaunt wrongly believes that Roseanne, as a young woman, has been having an extramarital affair, and he persuades Roseanne's husband to have their marriage annulled. She's ostracized by her rural community, and lives as a kind of hermit, yet she becomes pregnant, actually, by, spoiler alert, her former husband's brother, and she has a child, who's taken away from her. The priest then ensures that she is branded a nymphomaniac, sectioned, and confined in this mental hospital. Dr. Grene's increasingly obsessive researches take him to England, to a Catholic orphanage, where he's discovered Roseanne's child ended up. The child was a boy, and was given up for adoption. I don't know if you're beginning to sense where we're going. The orphanage still has the records, the adoptive parents were Mr. And Mrs. Grene, of Padstow, Cornwall. Dr. Grene is in fact Roseanne's son. There's a little bit of machinery

the caretaker at the hospital turns out to have been the son of the man with whom Roseanne was supposed to have had an affair, she didn't, and this son has actually deliberately sought her out, watched over her, he knows that Dr. Grene is her son, and he's tried to bring them together. But still, still, it doesn't really get rid of that breathtakingness. And Sebastian Barry himself is often asked about it, and I don't know if you've ever watched or heard a Sebastian Barry interview, he's a brilliant interviewee, and he's very good at turning it into an achievement rather than a problem. He is in the habit of referring to it as a Dickensian ending. And I myself interviewed him once at a public event about his novel, and we talked about Dickensian endings, and that's, in a way, what perhaps Matthew Parris was referring to when he talked about many great novels being flawed, but he was seen to be suggesting that even though lots of great novels have coincidences to tie them up at the end, it's always a problem. Well let's look at a truly Dickensian ending, let's look at a great work of literature that similarly plumped for a coincidence, a howling coincidence, to provide the readers with the sense of an ending. It's the revised ending that Charles Dickens wrote for "Great Expectations," it's the ending that's in every paperback edition in our shops, and it's the ending that we all read, and have read ever since the book was published, but it's a changed ending, because Dickens was persuaded by his friend, the uber-mediocre novelist Bulwer-Lytton that Dickens' readers, long cultivated over 2 1/2 decades by the time that "Great Expectations" was published, would just resent the ending that he first wrote for "Great Expectations." The ending Dickens first wrote, in that original ending, which Lytton saw in manuscript, Pip, remember, Pip's obsessed with Estella, he meets her in later life in the street, in London. Now I want you to remember that, because meeting people in the street in London, or somewhere in London, is going to come back in the this lecture. He meets her in the street, in London, he discovered she's now married to a Shropshire doctor, that's the nearest Dickens could get to an absolutely colorless fate for someone to have, she's married to a Shropshire doctor, and she and Pip have a conversation. And actually, the original ending, which is often reprinted as an appendix in the back of decent editions now, I recommend it to you if you're interested in the novel, it's a wonderful ending, but Dickens ditched it. Here's a bit of the improved version. In the improved version, Pip return to Kent to see Joe, Joe Gargery, who is his brother-in-law, and who, after Mrs. Joe's death, has married Biddy, and they've now got children. And in the evening, Pip, who's now in his early to mid 30s, has been working abroad in the East. A sadder and a wiser man, he walks to the ruined Satis House, where he once visited Miss Havisham and Estella."A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon,"and the moon was not yet up to scatter it,"but the stars were shining beyond the mist,"and the moon was coming,"and the evening was not dark."I could trace out everywhere"where part of the old house had been,"and where the brewery had been,"and where the gates, and where the casks."I had done so,"and was looking along the desolate garden walk"when I beheld a solitary figure in it."The figure showed itself aware of me as I advanced."It had been moving towards me,"but it stood still."As I drew nearer,"I saw it to be the figure of a women."As I drew nearer yet,"it was about to turn away"when it stopped and let me come up with it."Then it faltered, as if much surprised,"and uttered my name,"and I cried out, 'Estella!'" They meet, and in the still slightly ambiguous ending, in the final sentences of "Great Expectations," we are left with the prospect that Estella, who is not married, she's a widow, and is available, Estella and Pip might end up spending the rest of their lives together. But Dickens left us his own acknowledgement of the sheer unlikeliness of this encounter. In the course of their exchanges,

"We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said,"'After so many years,"'it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella,"'here where our first meeting was."'Do you often come back?'"'I have never been here since.'"'Nor I.'" It's a bit more than 11 years since Pip came to Satis House. On the one day, the one evening, the one hour that he chooses to revisit the place for one last time, the woman he loves also chooses to visit it for the first time, in her case, for something like 13 years. Bang, they're in with a chance. But Dickens seems to be almost signaling to us, what a chance it is. You want this happy ending, he's saying, see how improbable it must be. Of course, in his original ending, which wasn't a happy one, in that Estella and Pip are forever severed, they meet in London, and in London, all encounters are possible, all coincidences. And I thought we might look next at a kind of London coincidence, and this is from Henry James' "The Golden Bowl." And I wanted to have a bit of Henry James because I wanted to show that, okay, Dickens likes coincidences, and we're going to come back and look at another one of his in a second, but Henry James, Mr. Super Subtle himself, Mr. Psychological Complexity, so scornful as he was as a critic and reviewer of melodramatic effects in fiction, surely he doesn't need coincidences, but he does. And here is an example from his last, longest, most complicated, some would say most unreadable of all his novels, sorry, the second last actually, but a very serpentine read, "The Golden Bowl." This is Maggie, the central character, although there are four main characters, but she's really at the center of it, explaining here to her husband, Prince Amerigo, who is in fact having an adulterous affair with her friend Charlotte, who is also her father's wife, you got that? Maggie, friend Charlotte, Maggie marries Prince Amerigo, Prince Amerigo's old flame is Charlotte, although Maggie doesn't know this, Maggie's father is a rich widower, she thinks he needs company. She sort of persuades him and her friend Charlotte to get married, but soon after this, Charlotte and Amerigo resume their relationship, of course secretly, they're adulterous, now, relationship. She's explaining here how she's detected his relationship with her father's young wife, Charlotte. By chance, Maggie has bought a golden bowl in a shop in Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is Henry James' signal for really weird and out of the way, not where respectable people usually shop for objets d'art. And it's a golden bowl that Prince Amerigo and Charlotte once, four years earlier, rejected for being flawed. And we've seen the scene, we have, Maggie hasn't, where they decide not to buy the bowl. The shopkeeper, after Maggie has bought the bowl, visits her home, and she's married, she's got one child with Prince Amerigo, the shopkeeper visits her home, unlikely, but not coincidental, I guess, he's wracked with guilt because he's overcharged her. He's overcharged her because the bowl, which is crystal, but overlaid with gold, is flawed, it's got a flaw in it. And when he visits her to confess this, he sees photographs, one of the earliest novels in which one of those tropes of TV thrillers, where a character sees a photograph in an unexpected place of somebody they recognize, that trope is used. The shopkeeper sees photographs of Prince Amerigo, her husband, and Charlotte, and he tells Maggie that he's seen them together on this occasion four years earlier, where they thought of buying the bowl. And he also lets her know that they were having an intimate conversation. Another important little twist of it is that Charlotte and Amerigo talk in Italian to each other, especially when they're being intimate. The shopkeeper, unfortunately for them, understands Italian. So the bowl, this bowl, is the novel's central symbol, and there's lots of academic stuff about the symbolism of the flawed bowl which, at a crucial stage in the novel, of course gets smashed, you'll know that, I'm sure, but what's less often pointed out is that the bowl is the very embodiment of coincidence. One object, in one shop, in London that two people once looked at and almost bought, and four years later, the women who is married to one and best friends with the other goes into that same shop and buys that bowl. And here, Prince Amerigo and Maggie, husband and wife, talk about that coincidence.

"'I agree with you that the coincidence is extraordinary,"'the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays."'But I don't see, you must let me say,"'the importance or the connection,'"'Of my having made the purchase"'where you failed of it?'"She had quickly taken him up,"but she had, with her eyes on him once more,"another drop into the order of her thoughts,"to which, through whatever he might see,"she was still adhering," that's a sample of late James prose for you."'It's not my having gone into the place"'at the end of four years"'that makes the strangeness of the coincidence,"'for don't such chances as that in London easily occur?'" She has her explanation, a coincidence is never a never a coincidence in London. Geography often has something to do with coincidence in fiction, actually, and indeed, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word coincidence, which is still used in geometry, I think, sometimes, starts being used in English to mean the occupation of the same space. Only quite late, at the end of the 17th century, does it start meaning, and this is what the OED calls it, a notable concurrence of events or circumstances having no apparent causal connection. And first use is a great lover of making up funny or new words, or using old words in unexpected ways, Sir Thomas Browne, in the 1680s. And this sense of the same space, of bumping into people, of, in the case of "The Golden Bowl," finding the same thing in the same place as somebody else is really essential to the working of coincidence in fiction. When coincidences happen outside London, they're much less likely to be credible. And I was thinking of incontrovertibly great novels, to answer Mathew Parris' point, that have the most absurd possible coincidences, and here is my top choice. It's an unproblematic top choice for me because it's a wonderful novel, it's a novel I love, Charlotte Bronte knew what she was doing, and what she's doing is extraordinary. A little plot summary

the heroine of "Jane Eyre" discovers, at the altar, it really is at the altar, isn't it, that Mr. Rochester, the man she loves, is already married. She flees from Thornfield, his home, in despair, like one delirious, she tell us. She travels blindly across England until her money runs out, she finds herself somewhere in some what she calls north-midland shire, where she's never been before. She wanders across moorland to a hamlet, where she tries to find charity, gets none. For two nights, she sleeps in the open, wanders back across the moor, finds an isolated house in the middle of nowhere, she's turned away by the housekeeper, she sinks down on the wet doorstep, welcoming death, exhausted, famished, despairing, ready to die. But a man arrives, it is a clergyman, St. John Rivers. The house belongs to his two sisters, Mary and Diana. They ask jane Eyre what she's called, she tells them Jane Elliott is her name, she says. They take her in. Eventually, St. John Rivers finds her a job teaching in the local school, she's been saved. And you'll know that, eventually, St. John Rivers is going to try and persuade her to marry him, another story. He discovers also, St. John Rivers, after a few months, her true identity, because news of the extraordinary events at Thornfield has spread far and wide, mainly because Mr. Rochester has been searching for her, and has advertised for her, and she admits she's Jane Eyre. And when she admits that she's Jane Eyre, not Jane Elliott,

"'You are not perhaps aware that I am your namesake,"'that I was christened St. John Eyre Rivers?'"'No indeed."'I remember now seeing the letter E"'comprised in your initials"'written in books you have at different times lent me,"'but I never asked for what name it stood."'But what then, surely?'"I stopped, I could not trust myself to entertain,"much less to express the thought that rushed upon me,"that embodied itself,"that in a second stood out a strong, solid probability," it's the opposite of probability, I think,"Circumstances knit themselves,"fitted themselves, shot into order,"the chain that had been lying hitherto"a formless lump of links"was drawn out straight,"every ring was perfect, the connection complete."I knew by instinct how the matter stood"before St. John had said another word,"but I cannot expect the reader"to have the same intuitive perception,"so I must repeat his explanation." He is her cousin, they have the same uncle. That uncle has died a rich man in Madeira and left her a fortune. She, magnanimously, will share it out with Diana and Mary, thus preventing them having to endure the terrible fate of living as governesses, which was her fate once. What a coincidence. She wanders somewhere in England, she knows not where, falls almost unconscious at a doorstep, and the house belongs to her long-lost cousins who give her the news of her fortune. Later, on the brink of accepting that perhaps she must marry the coldly virtuous St. John, she seems to hear a voice, Rochester's voice, calling to her. She returns to him, she finds him crippled, blinded, he's been in a fire that's destroyed Thornfield and killed his wife, he tried to save her, and he tells Jane that he has indeed called out to her."Reader, it was on a Monday night, near midnight,"that I too had received the mysterious summons,"those were the very words by which I replied to it."I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative,"but made no disclosure in return."The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable"to be communicated or discussed."If I told anything,"my tale would be such"as must necessarily make a profound impression"on the mind of my hearer,"and that mind,"yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom,"needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural."I kept these things, then,"and pondered them in my heart." It's a very characteristic thing for Jane Eyre to say, very often, when she tells us things as the reader, they're things that she doesn't tell to any of the characters, not even, perhaps not especially, Mr. Rochester. And this is what she says about these strange coincidences: they are in explicable by the laws of probability, but these are not the laws by which Jane Eyre's story functions."Presentiments are strange things,"and so are sympathies, and so are signs,"and the three combined make one mystery"to which humanity has not yet found the key."I never laughed at presentiments in my life"because I have had strange ones of my own."Sympathies, I believe, exist,"for instance between far-distant, long-absent,"wholly-estranged relatives,"asserting, notwithstanding their alienation,"the unity of the source to which each traces his origin,"whose workings baffle mortal comprehension."And signs, for aught we know,"may be but the sympathies of nature with man." That's the zone, the realm in which Jane moves, the sympathies of nature with man. With the very force of her conviction, Charlotte Bronte's narrator dares us to disbelieve what she's telling, or finding it unlikely. Hers is but one way of making sense of the coincidences on which, I think, all Victorian novels seem to turn. Here's a very different kind, this is George Eliot's "Middlemarch." You won't get mystical presentiments in "Middlemarch," a great novel of ordinary men and women, but you still get the guiding hand of coincidence. Here, the shady, boozy John Raffles has turned up to squeeze some money out of his stepson, Joshua Rigg, who has just inherited a small fortune from the rich miser Peter Featherstone. Joshua Rigg is Featherstone's illegitimate son. Rigg was beaten by Raffles when he was a boy, and is anything but welcoming, but while threatening Raffles if he ever comes again, Rigg agrees to give him one sovereign and a drop of brandy."He jerked forward the flask," he is Raffles,"He jerked forward the flask"and Rigg went to a fine, old oaken bureau with his keys,"but Raffles had reminded himself"by his movement with the flask"that it had become dangerously loose"from its leather covering,"and catching sight of a folded paper"which had fallen within the fender,"he took it up and shoved it under the leather"so as to make the glass firm."He played this part now with as much spirit"as if his journey had been entirely successful,"resorting at frequent intervals to his flask," this is now, he's in the coach on the way back afterwards."The paper with which he had wedged it"was a letter, signed Nicholas Bulstrode,"but Raffles was not likely to disturb it"from its present, useful position." Eliot's placed her note, it just just happens to be at hand at just the moment when it's needed for another purpose. Sure enough, when Raffles reappears later in the novel, he's read the note. He accosts the aforementioned Nicholas Bulstrode, the puritanical banker whose wealth is vast, whose position in Middlemarch society seems unassailable. Raffles has been triggered, as we might say, he's been led by the letter to find Bulstrode, for he knows the secrets of his past. The secret is that Bulstrode concealed from the rich, elderly widow Mrs. Dunkirk, whom Bulstrode married years earlier, that her daughter was still alive, so he ensured that when Mrs. Dunkirk died, he, Bulstrode, would inherit all her money."'I did not expect to see you"'in this remote country place,'" Bulstrode says."'Well, it belongs to a stepson of mine,' said Raffles,"adjusting himself in a swaggering attitude."'I came to see him here before."'I'm not so surprised at seeing you, old fellow,"'because I picked up a letter,"'what you may call a providential thing."'It's uncommonly fortunate I met you, though,"'for I don't care about seeing my stepson,"'he's not affectionate,"'and his poor mother's gone now."'To tell the truth,"'I came out of love to you, Nick,"'I came to get your address,"'for look here,'"Raffles drew a crumpled paper from his pocket." Of course, he's about to set out to blackmail Bulstrode. The intrusion of Bulstrode's past into the novel is essential, and it can only be managed by coincidence, something out of the run of the chain of probability that you've been following up to now in the novel. Coincidence is like a novelist's way of jolting the plot, and when it comes to unlikeliness, but still a necessary jolt, here is an early 20th century example to illustrate it's not just the Victorians. This is E.M. Forster's "Howard's End," another strong contender for absurd coincidences, and it's the wedding reception of Evie Wilcox. Leonard Bast and his now wife, Jacky, although they lived in sin for some time before, arrive with Margaret Schlegl's sister Helen. Margaret Schlegl is engaged by now to Henry Wilcox, this wealthy widower, Anthony Hopkins, you remember, and Jacky becomes drunk at the reception."'She's overtired,' Margaret whispered."'She's something else,' said Henry,"'this won't do, I can't have her in my garden"'in this state."'Is she,' Margaret hesitated to say drunk."Now that she was going to marry him,"she'd grown particular."He discountenanced risque conversations now."Henry went up to the woman."She raised her face,"which gleamed in the twilight like a puffball."'Madam, you'll be more comfortable at the hotel,'"he said sharply."Jacky replied, 'If it isn't Hen."'Ne crois pas que le mari lui ressemble,'"apologized Margaret," don't think that the husband's like her,"'Il est tout a fait different.'"'Henry,' she repeated quite distinctly."Mr. Wilcox was much annoyed."'I congratulate you on your proteges,' he remarked."'Hen, don't go,"'you do love me, dear, don't you?'" A first-time reader, I think, is likely to take as long as the unworldly Margaret to catch onto the truth. Henry Wilcox isn't grumpy about the presence of a vulgar drunk, like Eliot's Bulstrode, he's being made to confront his past. Margaret may be in her 30s and intellectually sophisticated, but she's sexually innocent, as her husband-to-be fails to comprehend."Margaret began to grow frightened."'I don't know what it's all about,' she said,"'Let's come in.'"But he thought she was acting,"he thought he was trapped,"he saw his whole life crumbling."'Don't you indeed,' he said bitingly, 'I do,"'allow me to congratulate you"'on the success of your plan.'"'This is Helen's plan, not mine.'"'I now understand your interest in the Basts,"'very well thought out."'I'm amused at your caution, Margaret."'You're quite right, it was necessary,"'I am a man and have lived a man's past,'" that's a good one, isn't it, more people should try that one when interviewed by the press."'I am a man and have lived a man's past."'I have the honor to release you from your engagement.'"Still she could not understand."She knew of life's seamy side as a theory,"she could not grasp it as a fact."More words from Jacky were necessary,"words unequivocal, undenied." As if in politeness to his heroine, Forster doesn't tell us what Jacky actually says. Out of all the possible candidates in the wide, wide world, it was Jacky who was Henry Wilcox's mistress 10 years earlier. Forster didn't actually need this coincidence, he could have found another way of revealing that Henry hadn't been faithful to Ruth Wilcox, his first wife, he wanted the coincidence, he wanted not just to show Margaret that her fiance was not the upstanding person he pretended to be, but also he wanted to show that Henry Wilcox, in all the arrogance of his wealth, was not really above the Basts at all. You might remember the much talked about epigraph to "Howards End," "Only connect," Forster was determined to connect Henry Wilcox with the Basts. And maybe he gets away with it too, he gets away with a coincidence by letting Margaret's confusion take possession of the scene. There's an art of smuggling coincidences, not all users of coincidence want to do smuggling, but some do. Here is a skilled smuggler of coincidence, it's Jane Austen. The opening chapters of "Persuasion" tell us how the feckless Sir Walter Elliot's lawyer, Mr. Shepherd, has found a tenant who will rent Sir Walter's home. The tenant is an Admiral Croft. Mr. Shepherd reassures Sir Walter and his daughters, Elizabeth and Anne, that the admiral has a wife, so the property will be well looked after. It's always better, he says, when a women is in the case."'And a very well-spoken, genteel, shrewd lady"'she seemed to be,' continued he," that's Mr. Shepherd,"'asked more questions about the house, and terms, and taxes"'than the admiral himself,"'and seemed more conversant with business."'And moreover, Sir Walter,"'I found she was not quite unconnected in this country"'any more than her husband,"'that is to say"'she is sister to a gentleman who did live amongst us once,"'she told me so herself,"'sister to the gentleman"'who lived a few years back at Monkford."'Bless me, what was his name?"'At this moment, I cannot recollect his name,"'though I've heard it so lately."'Penelope, my dear,"'can you help me"'to the name of the gentleman who lived at Monkford,"'Mrs. Croft's brother?'"But Mrs. Clay," that's Mr. Shepherd's daughter,"was talking so eagerly with Miss Elliot"that she did not hear the appeal," Anne will have to supply the name."'You mean Mr. Wentworth, I suppose?'" He is the brother, Mr. Wentworth, of the man, Captain Wentworth, whom Anne loved, and still loves, the man to whom she was engaged, from whom she was persuaded to part eight years earlier. Austen wants to bring him back, of course she does, that's what the novel's about, and so she makes him, by coincidence, the brother-in-law of the man who will move into Anne's once family home, and how elegantly, by what sleight of hand she does that."'You mean Mr. Wentworth, I suppose?'" In all these examples I'm looking at, the novelist has to have some kind of logic or rationale for getting the coincidence in. Before the Victorians, or before the 19th century, I think it wasn't felt to be necessary. Here's an example from a mid 18th century novel by Henry Fielding, and they, just like Shakespeare comedies, or Shakespeare's late plays, things like "The Winter's Tale," they use coincidences and amazing coincidental discoveries without any embarrassment at all, reveling in them. This is the denouement of his first novel, "Joseph Andrews." The hero is apparently a humble servant, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. He's expelled from his position for declining the sexual advances of his mistress. He wanders the country with his companion Parson Adams. One night, fleeing thieves, they turn up at the isolated home, yeah, Charlotte Bronte had read Henry Fielding, of a Mr. Wilson, who takes them in, and narrates his own life story, actually. He promises to visit Adams if he ever later passes through the parish. And right near the end of the novel, that's what Mr. Wilson does, he turns up just as Joseph's supposed parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, are recalling how their daughter was taken from them as a baby and a sickly boy was substituted, with a strawberry birthmark."The reader may please to recollect"that Mr. Wilson had intended a journey to the west"in which he was to pass the Mr. Adams' parish,"and had promised to call on him."Mr. Adams had no sooner mentioned"the discovery of a stolen child,"and had uttered the word strawberry"that Mr. Wilson, with wildness in his looks"and the utmost eagerness in his words,"begged to be showed into the room."Joseph complied with the request of Mr. Wilson," let's have a look at you,"who no sooner saw the mark than,"abandoning himself"to the most extravagant rapture of passion,"he embraced Joseph with inexpressible ecstasy"and cried out in tears of joy,"'I have discovered my son,"'I have him again in my arms.'" He also, Mr. Wilson, of course is a gentleman with a decent degree of affluence, and so Joseph gets what he deserves. The novelist is really god, the novelist is like a benign deity arranging providential outcomes, remember that sarcastically used word of Raffles about him turning up to blackmail Bulstrode, providential, providential that he discovered that bit of paper. The comic coincidences that belong to Fielding's novels are the comic coincidence of a Christian view of the world. Of course, even novelists, whatever their private faith, but novelists nowadays don't have that confidence in providence to rely on. Here's an artful example of what they have to do instead. This is the beginning of chapter 16 of David Nicholls' ingenious and hugely bestselling 2009 novel "One Day." Chapter 16, "Monday Morning,"Monday 15 July 2002."Belsize Park.

05."It's already bright and clear outside,"but neither of them move just yet." Them are the two central characters, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. In the first chapter of the novel, they are students. After their final exams in Edinburgh, they spend the night together, but without consummating their relationship, they go their separate ways. They love each other but they keep missing each other in every chapter that follows. And the USP of the novel is that each chapter is a year apart, each chapter being set on the same day, the 15th of July, St. Swithun's Day, in each subsequent year. Finally, in chapter 16, oh happy ending, apparently, except we've quite a few pages to go, they're together, and married, and living, where could be happier, Belsize Park.(audience laughs) But the date means something, spoiler alert again, I'm afraid. Two chapters later, two years later, 15th of July, 2004, Emma is cycling to work, she's knocked off her bike, and in the last sentence of the chapter, dies. Quite a coincidence that it should be on the very same one day on which they first came together. But the novel's ingenious structure has beautifully disguised the novelist's manipulation of events. Immediately after her death, we turn the page and find this, an epigraph, which Nicholls said, this passage in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" originally gave him the idea for the novel, it's very Hardy. She is Tess,"She philosophically noted dates as they came past"in the revolution of the year,"the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge,"with its dark background of the Chase,"also the dates of the baby's birth and death,"also her own birthday,"and every other day individualized by incidents"in which she'd taken some share."she suddenly thought, one afternoon,"when looking in the glass at her fairness,"that there was yet another date"of greater importance to her than those,"that of her own death,"when all these charms would have disappeared,"a day which lay sly and unseen"among all the other days of the year,"giving no sign or sound"when she annually passed over it,"but not the less, surely there." Sly and unseen, and sly and unseen it was in "One Day," although hiding, we might think, in plain sight. Coincidences abound in Hardy's fiction, and here's a passage. We've probably got time to dwell on this one, wonderful though it is, which is from later in the novel, which is when Angel is saying how glad it is that Tess Durbeyfield is in fact Tess d'Urberville, that she's not from the low origins she once thought. And he ponders on this name, and he says in the second, long paragraph,"'Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom millionaires"'would jump at such a possession,'" such a name."'By and bye,"'there's one of that kidney who's taken the name,"'where have I heard of him?"'Up in the neighborhood of the Chase, I think."'Why, he's the very man"'who had that rumpus with my father I told you of,"'what an odd coincidence.'" Of course. Tess is agitated to hear this, she knows that coincidence is a bad, bad sign in the Hardy world she lives in, it's a sign that Alec, who was that man who had the rumpus with Angel's dad, his dad is the vicar who tries to convert Alec to virtue, she knows that he is possibly going to turn up again, that these coincidences are ominous signs. Of course, the happiness that Angel thinks he's enjoying with Tess is going to be shattered by his discovery that Tess is not the pure women that he thinks that she is, something has happened between her and Alec d'Urberville. These are tragic coincidences in Hardy, but I wanted to end with a couple of examples of comic coincidences, of ways in which novelists might seek to highlight coincidences because they hilariously reveal the truth of things. And if we go back to Dickens, who Sebastian Barry recruited as his accomplice, he's certainly keen on coincidences, and his biographer and biggest fan, John Forster, highlighted it in his posthumous biography of Dickens."On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life,"Dickens liked especially to dwell,"and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly."The world, he would say,"was so much smaller than we thought,"we were all so connected by fate without knowing it,"people supposed to be far apart"were so constantly elbowing each other,"and tomorrow bore so close a resemblance"to nothing half so much as to yesterday." Here is such a coincidence, this is from "David Copperfield." Here, David meets Dora Spenlow, the daughter of his employer, and falls instantly in love with her, and she's got a companion. Because Mr. Spenlow's a widower, he employs a lady to be his daughter's companion."There was no pausing on the brink,"no looking down or looking back,"I was gone, headlong,"before I had sense to say a word to her."'I,' observed a well-remembered voice"when I had bowed and murmured something,"'have seen Mr. Copperfield before.'"The speaker was not Dora, no,"the confidential friend, Miss Murdstone."I don't think I was much astonished."To the best of my judgment,"no capacity of astonishment was left in me,"there was nothing worth mentioning in the material world"but Dora Spenlow"to be astonished about."I said, 'How do you do, Miss Murdstone?"'I hope you're well.'"She answered, 'Very well.'"I said, 'How is Mr. Murdstone?'"She replied, 'My brother is robust, I'm obliged to you.'" By a chance in a million, Dora's paid companion is the gruesome Miss Murdstone, forbidding sister of Mr. Murdstone, the man who married and sort of killed David's mother. But like David, we can't be much astonished, of course, she was bound to turn up again, wasn't she, who better to be a guard against the approaches of young men to Dora than the life-denying Miss Murdstone? And so crucial a point is it that Dickens instructed Hablot Browne, Phiz, his illustrator, to illustrate that moment."I fall into captivity," there's David, Dora, Mr. Spenlow, and there is Miss Murdstone. Later in the novel, another old friend, is it, turns up, David's former headmaster, Mr. Creakle, who now manages a model prison, and invites David and his friend Traddles to visit in order to appreciate his system for making sincere converts and penitents."Mr. Creakle directed the door of the cell to be unlocked,"and 27 to be invited out into the passage."This was done,"and whom should Traddles and I then behold,"to our amazement,"in this converted number 27,"but Uriah Heep."27 stood in the midst of us,"as if he felt himself the principal object of merit"in a highly meritorious museum."That we, the neophytes,"might have an excess of light shining upon us all at once,"orders were given to let out 28."I had been so much astonished already"that I only felt a kind of resigned wonder"when Mr. Littimer walked forth,"reading a good book." Mr. Littimer there, with his book, is Steerforth's former valet. Resigned wonder, it's a great phrase, a kind of oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The two model prisoners, the two performing penitents, are the two most sinister creeps and hypocrites in the novel, of course, in cells now next to each other. There's no keeping down a real rogue, and for our last passage, here is a great reader of Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, sending poor Pennyfeather, the naive protagonist of his first novel,"Decline and Fall," again to a prison, all sorts of people turn up in prison. Taking the rap, Paul is, on behalf of the women with whom he's infatuated, the honorable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, whom he planned to marry, he's sent to prison."Paul found another old friend at Egdon Heath Prison,"a short, thick-set, cheerful figure"who stumped along in front of him on the way to chapel,"making a great deal of noise with an artificial leg."'Here we are again, old boy,'"he remarked during one of the responses,"'I'm in the soup as usual.'"'Didn't you like the job?' Paul asked."'Top hole,' said Grimes,"'but the hell of a thing happened,"'tell you later.'"That morning, complete with pickaxes, field telephones,"and two armed and mounted warders,"Paul and a little squad of fellow criminals"were led to the quarries."Grimes was in the party."'I've been here a fortnight,' said Grimes"as soon as they got an opportunity of talking,"'and it seems too long already."'I've always been a sociable chap,"'and I don't like it."'Three years is too long, old boy."'Still, we'll have God's own beano when I get out."'I've been thinking about it day and night.'"'I supposes it was bigamy?' said Paul"'The same."'I ought to have stayed abroad,"'I was arrested as soon as I landed.'" Waugh does that brilliant thing of delaying a comic thing, the guy's name, until, "'Top hole,' said Grimes," as if it's so obvious at the beginning of the passage who this old friend is going to be that he doesn't even need to tell us. Of course it's Captain Grimes, the dissolute prep school master who was Paul's colleague when he himself was a master at the horrible Llanabba Castle Prep School, inevitable that he should turn up in the very same prison. And Evelyn Waugh cannot resist telling us why we will keep bumping into Grimes, why coincidences are so much a part of comic fiction, for Grimes escapes the prison and disappears into Egdon Mire, presumed dead."But later, thinking things over,"Paul knew that Grimes was not dead."Grimes, Paul at last realized,"was one of the immortals,"he was a life-force."Sentenced to death in Flanders,"he popped up in Wales,"drowned in Wales, he emerged in South America,"engulfed in the dark mystery of Egdon Mire,"he would rise again somewhere, at some time,"shaking from his limbs"the musty integuments of the tomb." Unlike many novelists, Hardy, Dickens, Waugh want us to notice their coincidences, the offense against probability is the very power of coincidence, the very reason that the novelist wants to use them. As I said at the beginning of the lecture, if you want to know how a novel works, look at how it uses coincidences. Thank you.(audience applauds)- "What do you think about the relationship"between coincidence and fate?"Hardy's prose seems to be filled with both,"not only in 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles,'"but also in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.'"- Well I completely agree with that, I think that when, in that passage I just looked at briefly, when Tess becomes agitated at this mention of the coincidence of somebody called d'Urberville having had an argument with Angel Clare's father, in a way, of course, she's agitated'cause she never wants to see this guy again, but also because she realizes she's part of a plot, and I think, I talked about the sense of place being very important to coincidence, she's part of a geography where certain people from your past are just inescapable. And sure enough, in Tess, she will meet Alec again, he's become preacher, hasn't he, when she meets him again. You cannot but meet people again in Hardy novels, that's what Wessex is about, it's a place of tragedy, but it's the territory in which these meetings and encounters seem unavoidable. You know that, when, in "The Mayor Casterbridge," Henchard sells his wife in his drunkenness early in the novel, you know she'll come back, of course she will come back to Wessex. So yeah, I would say Hardy, he's sometimes accused of using coincidence heavy handedly, and I would say he sort of does, but the heavy hand is the heavy hand of fate.- [Questioner] Thank you, Professor Mullan, for a brilliant lecture. Why do you think, why the change of sensibility from the Victorians, who clearly relished coincidence, to the likes of Matthew Parris, who are so uncomfortable with it, why the change?- I'm not sure, first of all, all the Victorians did exactly relish it, I think they needed it but they had to find different ways of making the necessity into a virtue, if you see what I mean. Dickens definitely relished coincidence, but I don't think that George Eliot, for instance, did, she needed it, but she had to manage it. And I suppose, I think one of the reasons, actually, is that we maybe find it harder to trust in novelists, and that means sometimes in narrators, who control and see everything. So it's as if coincidence is the pattern that the novelist reveals to us, it may surprise us, but think about it, it tells us something, and if there's a headline statement, I would say, some time around the 1920s, most at least literary novelists stopped believing in that, and most readers stopped believing in that anymore. So by some accounts, if you like, Forster's one of the last omniscient novelists, and even he's finding it hard to keep up the belief. And once you stop having that, perhaps coincidences become much more uneasy-making things, perhaps.- Professor Mullan, thank you very much for another great evening and a great lecture, thank you.- Thanks very much.(audience applauds)