The Romance of the Commonplace — Edition Insights

The Essay as Self-Exposure

In the introduction, Burgess admits that his earlier nonsense and fiction gave “no clue by which my real self might be discovered,” but the essay leaves him “all of a shiver with shame.” This is not mere modesty; it is a structural claim about the genre. He contrasts the essay with poetry (where a man “may so cloak himself in metaphor”) and fiction (where “escape for the story-teller is always easy”). The essay, he argues, “writes me down for what I am.” This framing suggests that the subsequent essays are not just observations but deliberate self-portraits. The reader is invited to read between the lines, treating each piece as both a discussion of life and a revelation of the author’s character.

Life as a Badly Constructed Play

In the essay “The Play’s the Thing,” Burgess extends his philosophy to performance. He quotes the old Duke in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno: “All the world’s a stage where are performed the worst of badly constructed plays… but performed with absolute perfection.” Burgess then advises readers to find “perfect acting” not behind footlights but in the street—watching a railway porter’s dialect, a fat woman with screaming children, or a Samoan beauty catching fish. Yet he immediately qualifies this: life is “incomplete,” and for aesthetic satisfaction we need “the threads to be brought together.” The tension between life’s raw material and art’s shaping hand is central. Burgess ultimately sides with “the good story badly told” over the polished but empty tale, calling this “the manly choice.”

The Romance of the Ordinary

The collection’s title promises romance in the commonplace, and the table of contents delivers: essays on “Getting Acquainted,” “Dining Out,” “The Art of Playing,” “The Use of Fools,” “A Defense of Slang,” “The Diary Habit,” and “Cartomania.” These are not abstract meditations but concrete, often humorous treatments of daily rituals. Burgess’s method is to take a seemingly trivial subject—like the game of correspondence or the tyranny of household gods (lares)—and extract from it a broader lesson about human nature. The excerpts show a writer who values wit over pedantry, and who believes that philosophy can be proven through lived experience. The book’s structure, moving from April essays to a closing “Sub Rosa,” reinforces this playful yet earnest approach.

Readers should approach The Romance of the Commonplace as a series of provocations rather than a systematic treatise. Burgess’s tone shifts between flippant and earnest, and his arguments often double back on themselves. The essays reward attention to his recurring metaphors—theatre, games, costume—and his habit of addressing an imagined interlocutor (like Celestine). The book is best read in short bursts, allowing each piece to stand as a self-contained meditation on finding value in the overlooked.

Leafing through Gelett Burgess’s gentle essays, I found myself smiling at his insistence that a shared meal holds quiet magic. That same unhurried wonder surfaced weeks later, unexpectedly, while rereading the Address delivered before the British Association assembled at Belfast — Story, Setting & Ideas. Both lift the veil from the familiar—Burgess from a teacup, the address from a scientific law—until the ordinary briefly glows, remembered.