Near the end of his brief life, A. Welby Pugin remarked that he had done the work of a hundred years in forty. The greater part of this work was devoted to his architectural practice and the design of more than a hundred buildings, the most notable being the new Houses of Parliament, whose elevations and ornamentation he designed for Sir Charles Barry. The lesser part of his extraordinary productivity consisted of an advocacy of the Gothic Revival in his polemical writings, but if less time and energy were spent on these books than on the buildings, they did have more influence, and Pugin himself commented near the end of his life that his writings more than anything else had revolutionized the taste of England. England's renewed taste for medieval architecture, first apparent in Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill and in William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey, had developed rapidly by...