Essay
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1857
Opening lines
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In a Boston boarding house, a boarder takes up the sentence he was uttering twenty-five years earlier when he was interrupted, and never lets go of the floor again. He holds forth twelve times in a row before the other lodgers, identified by their trade, their features or their place at table, on arithmetical minds and algebraic minds, puns, women, old age, horses and trees, slipping verses in between courses. A pale schoolmistress in mourning listens to him.
Context
In 1831 and 1832 the author had given two essays of the same title in a Boston magazine; in 1857, the first sentence of the text takes up the one he had left hanging a quarter of a century earlier. James Russell Lowell agreed to edit the Atlantic Monthly only on condition that Holmes contribute to it; it was Holmes who found the name of the magazine and proposed reviving the Autocrat. The series ran there in twelve instalments, from November 1857 to October 1858, with poems such as The Chambered Nautilus, and the volume was published by Phillips, Sampson in 1858.
Who it is for
Twelve talks that can be read separately, interspersed with verse. The medical and Bostonian allusions of 1857 are numerous, and an annotated edition helps.
Prizes and reception
The volume sold ten thousand copies in three days, the series secured the success of the fledgling magazine, and the book has remained its author's most enduring work.
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