Published November 1893
(First reading complete 26/10/2014)
Six Common Things was E F Benson's first* collection of ... well, stuff. Some of the sixteen pieces are straight fiction, others straight non-fiction, others sort of unidentifiable as one or the other. (For more of this irritating habit of EFB's see The Book of Months and A Reaping inter alia.)
The pieces are as follows ~ they're best read in order as things sometimes follow on from one another:
Once
Autumn and Love
Two Days After
Carrington
Jack and Poll
At King's Cross Station
The Sound of the Grinding
Blue Stripe
A Winter Morning
The Zoo
The Three Old Ladies
Like a Grammarian
Poor Miss Huntingford
The Defeat of Lady Grantham
The Tragedy of a Green Totem
The Death Warrant
The book itself is available online here.
VERDICT
It's no wonder the critics and the public were baffled by Six Common Things and steered well clear of it: it's a mess.
*Or second if you include the earlier Sketches from Marlborough (1888) which was published privately.
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