Introduction

Summary

This business of conversation is a very serious matter.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

This book brings to the fore – or, it brings back to the fore – both an author (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior) and a verbal mode (conversation) that have almost completely disappeared from our maps of American literary and cultural history. Losing Holmes, we have lost a brilliant writer and a provocative thinker. We have also lost a key representative figure in the American Renaissance, both the best model and the best analyst of the dynamic of conversation that came to pervade many areas of mid-nineteenth-century American life – in what was known, after all, as America's “Age of Conversation.”

AN INTRODUCTION TO DOCTOR HOLMES

Holmes' life (1809–94) spanned most of the nineteenth century, and for much of that time he was a household name throughout America, recognized by his contemporaries as a national character, even a national institution. For foreign visitors like William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, or Oscar Wilde, a meeting with the tiny, hyperactive, loquacious Holmes became as much a part of the standard North American tour as a visit to Niagara Falls. Well into the twentieth century, the Holmes name still stood in most people's minds as a loaded, multivalent figure for a diversity of American possibilities.