Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Genres: Essays, Fiction, Classics, Philosophy, Literature, Humor, 19th Century

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1857

About the author

American 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.

Reviews

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dollop of wit, pinch of wisdom, dash of elitism, and garnish of poetry.

[Adobe · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[William S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Kara]

Skimmed. I think I could get a lot more out of this in a classroom setting - some books need a tour guide.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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."

[Michael Percy · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Kathy Wolfe · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Kezia · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Lisa Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!)
:)

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great piece of literary Americana! The good doctor/poet shares some entertaining idea and great insights (such as "The Chambered Nautilus).

[Avis Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

He's too ADD to stay on a topic long enough to make it interesting.

[Dave]

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE - EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896)

[David Gross]

I 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.

[Kest Schwartzman · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sherry]

1939 edition - Hardback. Unable to find ISGN No.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 2 out of 5]

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."

[Jefferson Fortner · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Karl · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[JoeGo · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Alyssa Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Tom Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jolly good fun.

[Maja Jovicic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have given three stars if he hadn't insisted on insulting puns. It was punbearable.

[Anne Pyles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Occasional nice quotables, but not enough to keep reading. Did not finish.

[Michael Vawser]

Reprint 1920-1930
Biblio.com US$5.05

[Aaron Gertler · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Romantic and bucolic