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The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table
You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing else. -from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table A superb example of a literary form that has long since fallen into disuse, this seriocomic one-sided conversation with the dictatorial "autocrat" was originally published in segments in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1857 and 1858. The unnamed speaker offers an entertainingly rambling series of observations on everything from the odd things that children believe to the unexpected benefits of old age, from the divide between the creative and the scholarly to a recommendation for drinking as a vice. An insightful and frequently hilarious discourse on American civic life, this is a forgotten classic of playful liberal intellectualism. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. Though he trained as a physician, he is best known for his verse, and was one of the most beloved poets of the 19th century. A regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, he also wrote novels. After his death, his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
340 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1857
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About the author
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
1,400 books97 followersAmerican physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, a professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard from 1847 to 1882 and father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, wrote humorous conversational pieces, including
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
(1858).
This professional nevertheless achieved fame, regard, and knowledge among the best poets of the 19th century. Holmes nevertheless wrote numerous medical treatises, essays, novels, memoirs, and table-talk books.
This professional nevertheless achieved fame, regard, and knowledge among the best poets of the 19th century. Holmes nevertheless wrote numerous medical treatises, essays, novels, memoirs, and table-talk books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
August 15, 2011
Reading this was almost like watching a really long episode of Fraser with none of the supporting actors - intelligent, funny in places, but awfully long-winded.
August 17, 2007
Another case of urging myself to tackle a classic author. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote these essays in the Atlantic in the 1830s and then packaged them into a book. The conceit is that a wise, garrulous denizen of a New England boarding house holds forth to fellow residents on various topics, including the advantages of old age, how to handle conversation, and other "right rules" for living. Enjoyable, but not earthshaking.
January 12, 2008
Unbelievably, I bought this because of the Mavis Beacon typing software. Many of the quotations in the lessons were drawn from this book. I enjoyed Holmes' musings.
June 7, 2019
A dollop of wit, pinch of wisdom, dash of elitism, and garnish of poetry.
January 14, 2017
In a year's worth of columns for the nascent Atlantic Monthly, an orator holds forth on shoes, ships, and sealing wax over a series of boarding-house breakfasts. His audience, among the clatter of silverware and tea cups, is alternately impressed and skeptical at his assertions.
The conceit of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table -- conversational lectures delivered daily to the same audience of fellow lodgers -- is brilliant at unifying Holmes' discursive rants into something cohesive and almost novel-like. The eponymous Autocrat responds to questions, tweaks his neighbors' foibles, and suffers retributive tweaks in turn. In his introduction, Herbert Brown sourly states that "[t]here is, of course, no semblance of plot," but I disagree. There is something that bears a passing resemblance to a plot lurking behind the essays. As the Autocrat discusses everything under the sun, his listeners indirectly reveal themselves and their personal histories. It's just that this background plot pales in comparison to the foreground essays.
Holmes declaims about everything in striking language, and even after its topical relevance has faded, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table can still be read with pleasure for its prose alone. Its poetry is another story. Holmes was particularly famous as a poet, and his poetry had immense popular success during his life. It is also dreadful. (There's a reason that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are now treated as the progenitors of the U.S. poetic canon. Everyone wants to forget about the Fireside poets. With good reason.) Holmes interjects his poetry on every third page, and these verses should be judiciously skimmed.
One hundred and fifty years after publication, some of the ideas in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table have acquired a musty smell of age. Women are sentimental ornaments; Indians (of varieties both American and Sepoy Mutineer) are savage brutes bereft of civilization. These observations are inevitably obnoxious to the modern reader, but I was more interested in something far more intrinsic to the essays: Holmes' elitism, his conservative view of class, and his frowns over social mobility and upward ambition.
"Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two." [24]
It is not odd for a Boston Brahmin with a distinguished family pedigree to uphold the value of "good breeding," but the fact that Holmes expends so much ink defending this position throughout The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table suggests that this aristocratic elitism was under assault in the greater culture. Holmes was writing during a transitional point in U.S. history in which, as a result of the ongoing Industrial Revolution, the power of Mayflower descendants and landed gentry was waning in favor of factory owners and oil barons. Even as he lectures on the natural order of things, the Autocrat is watching his throne erode beneath him.
The conceit of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table -- conversational lectures delivered daily to the same audience of fellow lodgers -- is brilliant at unifying Holmes' discursive rants into something cohesive and almost novel-like. The eponymous Autocrat responds to questions, tweaks his neighbors' foibles, and suffers retributive tweaks in turn. In his introduction, Herbert Brown sourly states that "[t]here is, of course, no semblance of plot," but I disagree. There is something that bears a passing resemblance to a plot lurking behind the essays. As the Autocrat discusses everything under the sun, his listeners indirectly reveal themselves and their personal histories. It's just that this background plot pales in comparison to the foreground essays.
Holmes declaims about everything in striking language, and even after its topical relevance has faded, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table can still be read with pleasure for its prose alone. Its poetry is another story. Holmes was particularly famous as a poet, and his poetry had immense popular success during his life. It is also dreadful. (There's a reason that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are now treated as the progenitors of the U.S. poetic canon. Everyone wants to forget about the Fireside poets. With good reason.) Holmes interjects his poetry on every third page, and these verses should be judiciously skimmed.
One hundred and fifty years after publication, some of the ideas in The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table have acquired a musty smell of age. Women are sentimental ornaments; Indians (of varieties both American and Sepoy Mutineer) are savage brutes bereft of civilization. These observations are inevitably obnoxious to the modern reader, but I was more interested in something far more intrinsic to the essays: Holmes' elitism, his conservative view of class, and his frowns over social mobility and upward ambition.
"Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice and I go for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the twenty-five daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of the two." [24]
It is not odd for a Boston Brahmin with a distinguished family pedigree to uphold the value of "good breeding," but the fact that Holmes expends so much ink defending this position throughout The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table suggests that this aristocratic elitism was under assault in the greater culture. Holmes was writing during a transitional point in U.S. history in which, as a result of the ongoing Industrial Revolution, the power of Mayflower descendants and landed gentry was waning in favor of factory owners and oil barons. Even as he lectures on the natural order of things, the Autocrat is watching his throne erode beneath him.
July 4, 2011
I wanted to like this book, and did not. The style was utterly self-important and stifling. The only essay I really enjoyed is when Holmes talks of his love for canoeing, on the Charles River and its tributaries. This is the book that made him an international celebrity - but its time is past.
Read
November 14, 2014Skimmed. I think I could get a lot more out of this in a classroom setting - some books need a tour guide.
January 1, 2026
(1858) Priceless. I liked it even when I had no idea what he was talking about, during those occasional bursts of learning, obsolete references, topical allusions, French and Latin, etc. It’s like when a virtuoso suddenly lets it rip.
The book is a collection of pieces published in The Atlantic (named, by the way, by Holmes) and all linked by the titular conceit, as if we are receiving dispatches from a Boston boarding house. My five stars are for the dry Yankee wit, the writing (often violently strong), the trip into the old-timey strangeness of our past, and for the sudden moments of heartache. I’m also glad I can help bump up the low rating from the meager amount of reviews here. (There should be at least one rating for every inhabitant of New England).
What I particularly liked was the intimacy of the writing. There’s a Joycean, or I should say Sternean proto-stream-of-consciousness. You are at the breakfast table, with its little running narratives, but first and foremost you are inside the head of the narrator, our winking autocrat: snooty yet good-humored, pontificating yet ever attentive, slyly self-deprecating. And then his thoughts are so discursive and spliced with reverie that, again, you find yourself going from one place to another without transition, quick as thought. For good measure, Holmes also throws in a literary miscellany of light verse, sketches, travesties, annotations, forms unknown, and whatever else strikes him.
The deadpan humor seems to me the model for that which you find in future essayists, such as Robert Benchley, AP Herbert, and EB White. But then for all I know the style came from Addison and Steele. One funny character trait of the autocrat is the way he treats fairly innocuous statements with withering silence. Anyone interrupting his “conversation” is already on thin ice.
The book is apparently very quotable, since I basically quoted the whole thing below. (The character limit forced many Sophie’s Choices). But first, some tidbits from Wikipedia:
Holmes was 5’3” (the autocrat himself is only 116 lbs). Coined the terms Boston Brahmin and anesthesia. He predicted the latter “will be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind.” Fireside poet. “Old Ironsides” helped preserve the USS Constitution. Poe called “The Last Leaf” one of the finest works in the English language. Holmes said he had “tasted the intoxicating pleasure of authorship" but compared such contentment to a sickness, saying: "there is no form of lead-poisoning which more rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow…” Invented the “stereoscope,” which lets you see images in 3D. Treated Washington Irving as he was dying. As dean of Harvard tried to admit black students but backed down after protests. Wrote a landmark study on germ theory. Was part of Dante Club. Writings on Emerson’s verse were influential (I need to read these). Son, the famous jurist, injured 3 times in Civil War. Holmes wrote about searching for him on one of these occasions. Donated $10 to help a destitute Whitman. “Outlived most of his friends, including Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He said, ‘I feel like my own survivor.... We were on deck together as we began the voyage of life.... Then the craft which held us began going to pieces.’”
__________________
Notes and quotes:
“You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought.”
“I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing.”
“A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the ‘dissolving views’ of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as eternity. [I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have brought her down better. God forgive me!]”
“[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world. I don’t believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one’s conversation, one cannot help Blair-ing it up more or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]”
I liked his sketch of typical blue blood family portraits: “The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist.”
“We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if he really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his discredit in every point of view, if he does not.”
“Man has his will, - but woman has her way!”
“When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal’s mind. All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of high intelligence…”
“Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered… The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers… Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door. The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at times.”
The whole “And all this for a bit of pie-crust!” is Proust’s madeleine passage.
On seeing someone’s name penned on the title page of an old book: “O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, - its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s Uncatalogued Library!”
“Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it… and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over…? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures… black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs - and some of them have a good many - rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine… The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus… You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.”
“I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births, - with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.”
“…at once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house, - plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the table, - all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert…” I love that I’ve kayaked the same waters as Holmes.
“…to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean.”
“I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city through and through…”
“…some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life.”
“…men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.”
Says Titian’s “Man with a Glove” shows the look of the true gentleman.
“When a lady walks the streets, she leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a right to see them.”
“These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.”
“Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside!”
“There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage. I don’t deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too, - the “Amen” belonged to that. - Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us. - “Male and female created He them.” - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]”
On a lost ship: “Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, ‘The Wasp has come!’”
“I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite.”
“…those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once from the precincts.”
I loved his descriptions of trees: “looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, - which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen.” Or standing helpless “while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted children.”
“There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.”
“I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in ‘Vathek,’ and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its heart, - a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand, - look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes. - No, I must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping school. - I wonder what nice young man’s feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.”
“A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about them.”
“Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.”
“I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow.”
Holmes tells a story ripped off by a book I remember from my childhood, called The Loudest Noise in the World.
“…this breathing-sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or four score years.” He means life.
“The great mystery of God’s providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls; - her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this.”
The book is a collection of pieces published in The Atlantic (named, by the way, by Holmes) and all linked by the titular conceit, as if we are receiving dispatches from a Boston boarding house. My five stars are for the dry Yankee wit, the writing (often violently strong), the trip into the old-timey strangeness of our past, and for the sudden moments of heartache. I’m also glad I can help bump up the low rating from the meager amount of reviews here. (There should be at least one rating for every inhabitant of New England).
What I particularly liked was the intimacy of the writing. There’s a Joycean, or I should say Sternean proto-stream-of-consciousness. You are at the breakfast table, with its little running narratives, but first and foremost you are inside the head of the narrator, our winking autocrat: snooty yet good-humored, pontificating yet ever attentive, slyly self-deprecating. And then his thoughts are so discursive and spliced with reverie that, again, you find yourself going from one place to another without transition, quick as thought. For good measure, Holmes also throws in a literary miscellany of light verse, sketches, travesties, annotations, forms unknown, and whatever else strikes him.
The deadpan humor seems to me the model for that which you find in future essayists, such as Robert Benchley, AP Herbert, and EB White. But then for all I know the style came from Addison and Steele. One funny character trait of the autocrat is the way he treats fairly innocuous statements with withering silence. Anyone interrupting his “conversation” is already on thin ice.
The book is apparently very quotable, since I basically quoted the whole thing below. (The character limit forced many Sophie’s Choices). But first, some tidbits from Wikipedia:
Holmes was 5’3” (the autocrat himself is only 116 lbs). Coined the terms Boston Brahmin and anesthesia. He predicted the latter “will be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind.” Fireside poet. “Old Ironsides” helped preserve the USS Constitution. Poe called “The Last Leaf” one of the finest works in the English language. Holmes said he had “tasted the intoxicating pleasure of authorship" but compared such contentment to a sickness, saying: "there is no form of lead-poisoning which more rapidly and thoroughly pervades the blood and bones and marrow…” Invented the “stereoscope,” which lets you see images in 3D. Treated Washington Irving as he was dying. As dean of Harvard tried to admit black students but backed down after protests. Wrote a landmark study on germ theory. Was part of Dante Club. Writings on Emerson’s verse were influential (I need to read these). Son, the famous jurist, injured 3 times in Civil War. Holmes wrote about searching for him on one of these occasions. Donated $10 to help a destitute Whitman. “Outlived most of his friends, including Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He said, ‘I feel like my own survivor.... We were on deck together as we began the voyage of life.... Then the craft which held us began going to pieces.’”
__________________
Notes and quotes:
“You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought.”
“I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing.”
“A great calamity, for instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning. For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the ‘dissolving views’ of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as eternity. [I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known better. The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have brought her down better. God forgive me!]”
“[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world. I don’t believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one’s conversation, one cannot help Blair-ing it up more or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]”
I liked his sketch of typical blue blood family portraits: “The great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging sleeves; parrot on fist.”
“We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if he really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his discredit in every point of view, if he does not.”
“Man has his will, - but woman has her way!”
“When one of us who has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal’s mind. All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of high intelligence…”
“Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered… The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers… Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door. The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at times.”
The whole “And all this for a bit of pie-crust!” is Proust’s madeleine passage.
On seeing someone’s name penned on the title page of an old book: “O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, - its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s Uncatalogued Library!”
“Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it… and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over…? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures… black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs - and some of them have a good many - rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine… The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus… You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.”
“I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births, - with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.”
“…at once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-house, - plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no chair drawn up at the table, - all the dear people waiting, waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great desert…” I love that I’ve kayaked the same waters as Holmes.
“…to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean.”
“I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city through and through…”
“…some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life.”
“…men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.”
Says Titian’s “Man with a Glove” shows the look of the true gentleman.
“When a lady walks the streets, she leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a right to see them.”
“These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.”
“Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside!”
“There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage. I don’t deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too, - the “Amen” belonged to that. - Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us. - “Male and female created He them.” - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]”
On a lost ship: “Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, ‘The Wasp has come!’”
“I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite.”
“…those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once from the precincts.”
I loved his descriptions of trees: “looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, - which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen.” Or standing helpless “while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted children.”
“There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.”
“I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in ‘Vathek,’ and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its heart, - a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand, - look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes. - No, I must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping school. - I wonder what nice young man’s feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility marry.”
“A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about them.”
“Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.”
“I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow.”
Holmes tells a story ripped off by a book I remember from my childhood, called The Loudest Noise in the World.
“…this breathing-sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or four score years.” He means life.
“The great mystery of God’s providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls; - her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this.”
November 10, 2010
Holmes presents an aristocratic, learned man of letters who lectures the various guests at his breakfast table on matters of aesthetics, religion, poetry, science, the character of America and Boston, etc. Although the autocrat is not presented unproblematically (various minor characters take sly jabs at him throughout), his musings are generally given to be wise and widely-informed. It seems the autocrat is a mouthpiece for Holmes himself, who published this work in short installments in the Boston press as they were completed.
Holmes was writing at a time of unprecedented race & class agitation, and yet is strangely mute on these matters. In the whole, he comes down on the side of established law and order and wealth, and would likely take a disinterested, theoretical approach to these topics, if any at all. The picture of the well-bred, well-learned and well-to-do gentlemen relies heavily on the radical disparity of wealth that was present in his time in this country. I found myself wishing he'd turn his eloquence, wit and intellect to the question of the growing push toward the civil war, or the institution of slavery in his society.
Altogether a good example of precision of thought and appreciation for culture, although his poetry appears frequently while not having aged well. Contains some good quotes.
"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
Holmes was writing at a time of unprecedented race & class agitation, and yet is strangely mute on these matters. In the whole, he comes down on the side of established law and order and wealth, and would likely take a disinterested, theoretical approach to these topics, if any at all. The picture of the well-bred, well-learned and well-to-do gentlemen relies heavily on the radical disparity of wealth that was present in his time in this country. I found myself wishing he'd turn his eloquence, wit and intellect to the question of the growing push toward the civil war, or the institution of slavery in his society.
Altogether a good example of precision of thought and appreciation for culture, although his poetry appears frequently while not having aged well. Contains some good quotes.
"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
August 15, 2016
This little book took me some time to read. At first, I thought I might write down some of the quotes from it, but soon I realised that each page had a memorable quote and I decided to leave the possibility that I will remember this book should any of the various quotes be needed again in the future. I daresay at this I shall fail but if I put it to memory that there are many important quotes in this work, I may well recover some of its hidden gems. I found Oliver Wendell Holmes to read like that other three-named American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, although less of a "Churchman", rather than a divinity address he had a divinity student at the boarding house table. This book was originally written as a series of articles for The Atlantic Monthly first written in 1857 with the first serial of this book appearing in its first edition. The work lends itself to being read in a stop-start fashion, as if it were meant to be serialised, and there is so much packed into so few sentences that it takes some time to absorb the sheer depth of wit, meaning, humour, learnedness, and intellect on display. The interspersed poetry had me wonder at times why poetry is so "on the nose" these days (Random House does not accept manuscripts of poetry, and recently, a quote on the movie The Big Short: "The truth is like poetry. And everyone fucking hates poetry"). I think we miss something as a result. But not so in Holmes' time. Nevertheless, this took a long time to digest, even though it is not a difficult read.
September 25, 2011
This selection of essays written by the father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes captures mid-19th century American thinking in Boston intellectual circles on a vast range of topics. Often quite witty and humorous (sometimes because the ideas are so out dated) but also dragging in other areas. Take each chapter on its own then take a break, just as the original essays were meant to be read, and you will have a better appreciation for the writing.
November 15, 2011
Hardly a classic but a nice jaunt into an American literary mind, with some wonderful nuggets and quotable quotes - although not enough to keep me interested. (It took me eons to finish.) I enjoyed the rhetorical devices, but it was nice to see some fragments of a plot develop toward the end. I have no brain for poetry, so can't comment on those portions.
July 19, 2010
So far, I enjoy the language of the times. This one is an 1860's edition so I am going carefully along (and trying not to sneeze from the mildew and dust which one can endure just to have a really old book in one's hands!)
:)
:)
November 6, 2007
A great piece of literary Americana! The good doctor/poet shares some entertaining idea and great insights (such as "The Chambered Nautilus).
November 4, 2020
He's too ADD to stay on a topic long enough to make it interesting.
Read
February 21, 2010THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE - EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896)
Read
March 24, 2013I got 3% into this and found myself thinking "isn't it over yet?" I'm skeptical that this was ever witty or interesting, but it sure isn't now.
September 8, 2014
hilarious. Clearly not something one picks up and reads all the way through- more something a person can pick up, read a paragraph, and put back down again.
Read
December 1, 20081939 edition - Hardback. Unable to find ISGN No.
September 27, 2017
I really wanted to enjoy this and be very impressed by it. No less than Mark Twain said in A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens: "I told him you & I used the Autocrat as a courting book & marked it all through ..."
However, I found much of tedious and really had to push myself through it. I think I can partly blame this one the publisher. The numerous footnotes and parenthetic passages could be made readable with a better layout: more whitespace and larger font. Perhaps I will try again some day. Many of the allusions, foreign phrases, and references are so dated that I often interrupted my reading to Google for more info. Such explanations could be part of an annotated text.
Still, much (20%?) sparkles here. Only one poem does for me, and I already knew of that: "The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story"
Here are some quotes that sparkled to me. I copied the text out of the Gutenberg version, although I believe the text the same:
"There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it."
"...the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy..."
Interesting the classist issues arising back them, then 1% I suppose:
"We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,—not a gratiâ-Dei, nor a juredivino one,—but a de-facto upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,—very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race,—I don’t mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton."
However, I found much of tedious and really had to push myself through it. I think I can partly blame this one the publisher. The numerous footnotes and parenthetic passages could be made readable with a better layout: more whitespace and larger font. Perhaps I will try again some day. Many of the allusions, foreign phrases, and references are so dated that I often interrupted my reading to Google for more info. Such explanations could be part of an annotated text.
Still, much (20%?) sparkles here. Only one poem does for me, and I already knew of that: "The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story"
Here are some quotes that sparkled to me. I copied the text out of the Gutenberg version, although I believe the text the same:
"There is no elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it."
"...the brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy..."
Interesting the classist issues arising back them, then 1% I suppose:
"We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,—not a gratiâ-Dei, nor a juredivino one,—but a de-facto upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,—very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race,—I don’t mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton."
January 20, 2024
I thought I would enjoy this more than I did. These twelve essays were contributions to the first twelve issues of The Atlantic Monthly magazine in the mid-19th century. Holmes was widely accepted in the social circles of the time as a brilliant conversationalist who was knowledgeable about many topics. The essays are meant to capture the sense of morning conversation among the residents of a boarding house in New England, and are a nod back to several decades earlier when Holmes was, indeed, a resident of a boarding house in Boston while he attended a medical college. The various characters are meant to represent types of people while also being somewhat based upon actual people that Holmes knew. Each essay does capture the sense of a group of people occasionally talking with one another (and interrupting one another). The most self-important “conversationalist” dominates the dialogue. There is a touch of humor and a wide range of subjects. However, I think that generational differences, and especially differences of epoch, left me a bit cold to it all. I kept thinking that I would soon get up from this much inflated table conversation and go about my business. Still, there are certainly passages that shine, insights that are interesting, and a budding romance that comes to fruition at the end. I wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the compilation, but as I said, I thought I was going to enjoy it more than I did.
September 2, 2024
Apparently Holmes wanted us to find the main speaker charming, albeit self-important. I found him utterly insufferable. Much of this book is, unfortunately. Reading this was 10% feast, 90% famine.
I have to credit that this work was not originally made to be a book. But as a book, it doesn’t work. The (sometimes) extreme arrogance; the unyielding wordiness… The abrupt jerking from one subject to another, and the MC’s obsessive compulsion with minutiae & over explaining— inside stories that were themselves tangential of a larger point— made getting into a reading flow impossible. If the pedanticism was supposed to be funny or endearing, the book form overwhelms us with too much at once, and kills the effect.
There are, however, exquisite gems of thought here. They usually appear when Holmes finally arrives at a point! lol. Seeing some early on and wanting to get them all is what led me to decide to drudge through the rest of the drivel (sorry, Holmes).
This is one book I would recommended NOT reading. Get the gems online. Or better, use the method the author endorsed… just talk to someone who has read the book and have them share them w/ you in a conversation.
I have to credit that this work was not originally made to be a book. But as a book, it doesn’t work. The (sometimes) extreme arrogance; the unyielding wordiness… The abrupt jerking from one subject to another, and the MC’s obsessive compulsion with minutiae & over explaining— inside stories that were themselves tangential of a larger point— made getting into a reading flow impossible. If the pedanticism was supposed to be funny or endearing, the book form overwhelms us with too much at once, and kills the effect.
There are, however, exquisite gems of thought here. They usually appear when Holmes finally arrives at a point! lol. Seeing some early on and wanting to get them all is what led me to decide to drudge through the rest of the drivel (sorry, Holmes).
This is one book I would recommended NOT reading. Get the gems online. Or better, use the method the author endorsed… just talk to someone who has read the book and have them share them w/ you in a conversation.
September 27, 2019
I burned out on this book pretty quickly, but I think that's entirely my fault. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is the kind of book that demands to be read at a leisurely pace. If you get greedy and consume too much of it at once, you'll be turned off the taste for a month. This book is a collection of observations, and no matter how cunningly one observation segues into the next, no matter how clever any one of those observations may seem, there is a limit to my appetite for quotable paragraphs and biting social commentary. You know those moments in novels where the writer pulls you aside to some corner of the fiction untouched by the actual narrative to make some witty observation about life? That's this whole book. And though I'm sure there are a lot of people who loved it, I can't shake the feeling that the author had a lot more fun writing it than anyone has ever had reading it.
July 28, 2025
the main takeaway from these series of essays: the truth repeats itself. this is not only in the content of holmes’s work, but also the themes his essays explore in comparison with modern life. the themes of aging, fame-seeking, and the role of the intellect in daily life reflect the modern mind in interesting parallels and diversions that make one appreciate how (dis)similar human beings are across times. the work is a bit boring at times and full of unnecessary insertions upholding classism and misogyny, but that’s the 1830s for you.
the best part of this book, though, is the love story hidden between its dense prose. if you can find it, it’s one of the sweetest, most subtle expressions of tenderness in literature.
the best part of this book, though, is the love story hidden between its dense prose. if you can find it, it’s one of the sweetest, most subtle expressions of tenderness in literature.
October 6, 2018
And an autocrat he is. so much so, scarcely anyone else can get in a word edgewise in this short novel/essay. However, if you are a fan of the humor of somewhat later 19th-century authors such as Twain or Bierce, you should appreciate the wit of the senior Holmes.
February 7, 2018
Jolly good fun.
March 13, 2022
I would have given three stars if he hadn't insisted on insulting puns. It was punbearable.
June 1, 2024
Occasional nice quotables, but not enough to keep reading. Did not finish.
Want to read
May 17, 2025Reprint 1920-1930
Biblio.com US$5.05
Biblio.com US$5.05
March 20, 2017
I was hoping for an on-the-ground look at America's pre-Civil War intelligentsia, and... sort of got it. Certainly a dispatch from a different world. (It is amusing to imagine the author trying the same shtick in the lobby of a modern-day Four Seasons.) Quite a few interesting ideas, though I only wound up saving one quote for my commonplace book. The poems weren't especially good.
I finished a third of this, which was about the right amount. Not enough interest per page to get further.
I finished a third of this, which was about the right amount. Not enough interest per page to get further.
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