The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

An interesting range of thoughtful opinions, imbedded in a look at American life in the 1850s, by the father of a future Supreme Court Associate Justice. Part of the charm of this book is in the fact that at that time horses had been the only means of human-assisted transportation for the last few thousand years (with the exception of the new-fangled railroad which was changing the world). Electronics were not even imagined. Automobiles were 50 years into the future.

Two oral practices flourished in antebellum America: the lecture (or sermon) and the conversation. Lectures, such as Emerson's "The American Scholar" and sermons, such as the abolitionist sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, are well-known examples of this era. But it was also known as the Golden Age of Conversation, and its greatest practitioner was generally agreed to be Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior. Holmes was considered an important American writer until the 1920s when he was excised from the American canon by the modernists. They depicted him as willfully provincial, and elitist. What those critics failed to understand was that the Autocrat is also a comic pose, and that Holmes is making sport of everyone, including elitists. Holmes' democratic view of conversation as an open, free-wheeling discourse where anyone could join the Autocrat at his table, as long as they enlivened the conversation, ran counter to the views of his more elitist friends in Boston's Saturday Club in Boston. Holmes loved to talk, and his love for talk made him a democrat, or perhaps a true republican. His Autocrat is a many sided character: stern and foolish, admonitory and celebratory, a polymorph who will don any temporaty mask necessary to keep the conversation alive. Holmes' playful metaphorical imagination is also a revelation. His gift for translating complex ideas into homey metaphors, aphorisms, and similes is nothing short of miraculous. In the words of another seriously comic American whom I'm sure Holmes would have delighted in, the Autocrat "floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee."The Autocrat of the Breakfast table begins "in media res," in the middle of a conversation, with the Autocrat attempting to set the rules for conversation at his table. They are generous rules, but even they are open to sabotage by his tablemates at the boarding house. He begins by banning "facts" from his table as impediments to conversation, (a condition that should prevail on today's too numerous current event talking head shows. But I, like the Autocrat, digress). Here's how the Autocrat starts: "I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the head of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension of the following arithmetical formula: 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a + b = c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egoists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures." "They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like this. "In other words, as Gibian says in his marvelous OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE CULTURE OF CONVERSATION: [The Autocrat] only asks us to study his beliefs the way a pragmatist would study the doctrines of any religion: "I don't want you to believe anything I say; I only want you to to try to see what

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is a demonstration of New England civility in the 1850s. I believe it went through more than 50 editions by the end of the nineteenth century, so it must have been very widely read at one time. The book is packed with amazing observations. Holmes takes the time to wonder why the sense of smell is the quickest path to memory. He rails against puns in a way that is better than punning. He points out human flaws and praises examples of good living. Trees come alive, through prosaic description and poetic flights. Would you like to go back to the 1850s and have a conversation with a Boston intellectual? Here's your chance. There are many old copies of this book sitting around, but it's nice that it's come back into print (again).... (it's also a quiet love story, by the way)

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is a demonstration of New England civility in the 1850s. I believe it went through more than 50 editions by the end of the nineteenth century, so it must have been very widely read at one time. The book is packed with amazing observations. Holmes takes the time to wonder why the sense of smell is the quickest path to memory. He rails against puns in a way that is better than punning. He points out human flaws and praises examples of good living. Trees come alive, through prosaic description and poetic flights. Would you like to go back to the 1850s and have a conversation with a Boston intellectual? Here's your chance. There are many old copies of this book sitting around, but it would be nice if it came back into print.... (it's also a quiet love story, by the way)

The imaginary scene is a boarding house breakfast. Conversation is dominated by a lively gent who's seen it all. He holds forth on women, school, philosophy, rowing, interrupted from time to time with verses such as the Deacon's Masterpiece. It's witty, poignant, and rightfully a classic.