Emmanuel Burden, Merchant, of Thames St., in the City of London, Exporter of Hardware: A Record of His Lineage, Speculations, Last Days and Death

Hilaire Belloc was never content to simply tell a story. He wanted to dismantle the forms stories take. In this peculiar, magnificent work, he does exactly that by writing a full biographical account of Emmanuel Burden: a hardware merchant on Thames Street who sold nails, hinges, and unspecified 'sundries' to anyone who asked. Belloc treats this unremarkable man with the gravity of a Churchill or a Gladstone, tracing his lineage, cataloging his philosophical convictions, chronicling his rise to modest wealth, and narrating his final days with funeral precision. The joke, of course, is that Burden deserves none of this. Or perhaps he deserves all of it. The satire cuts both ways: at the pomposity that demands great men receive great biographies, and at the blindness that assumes a man who sold door handles could never merit our attention. Published in 1904, this is Belloc at his most playful, constructing an elaborate monument to a man the world forgot, and asking us whether the world was right to forget him.