Book: The Professor at the Breakfast-Table

Overview
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860) returns to a Boston boardinghouse where a wry, warm, and scientifically minded narrator, the Professor, holds court over morning coffee. Serialized first and then issued as a book, it blends anecdote, essay, sketch, and occasional verse into a conversational portrait of mid-19th-century American manners and ideas. Holmes uses the breakfast table as a small theater in which medicine, theology, aesthetics, and social satire trade places, capturing the tempo of a city and a class while probing more intimate questions of identity, suffering, and sympathy.

Setting and Structure
The narrative unfolds as a sequence of breakfast conversations interleaved with diary-like reflections and dramatic asides. The boardinghouse is a microcosm of Boston: respectable, curious, sometimes pretentious, always talkative. Holmes choreographs quick turns from playful epigram to clinical observation to moral fable, letting digressions accumulate into a composite portrait. The episodic design keeps the tone buoyant, yet the chapters steadily advance several private stories that lend the whole a novelistic spine.

Characters and Arcs
The Professor stands at the center: a physician-philosopher whose skepticism is humane rather than cold, and whose impulse to dissect is matched by a wish to console. Around him cluster recognizably Holmesian boarders: the landlady with her strong opinions, her daughter on the cusp of romance, a divinity student testing doctrine against experience, and a brash shop-clerk dubbed the Koh-i-noor, whose glittering self-regard makes him both comic and faintly menacing.

Most affecting is the Little Gentleman, a diminutive, embittered lodger with a quick tongue and a guarded heart. He is proud, solitary, and plainly unwell. The Professor’s clinical curiosity softens into friendship as he senses the pain beneath the man’s prickliness. Hints of a long-standing wrong and of an unseen antagonist flicker through their exchanges. By degrees the Little Gentleman’s story surfaces, marked by physical affliction, thwarted connection, and a fierce insistence on personal dignity, and culminates in a death that is neither melodramatic nor tidy, but illumines the book’s moral center: the claim of sympathy over mere analysis.

A quieter arc plays through the landlady’s household, where the daughter’s suitors test the difference between show and substance. Holmes resolves the domestic thread with a decorous rightness, allowing gentleness rather than bravado to win out, and leaving the Professor in the role he prefers, observer, sponsor of kind unions, protector of the vulnerable.

Themes and Ideas
Holmes sets medical materialism against spiritual consolation without reducing either to caricature. He mocks phrenology and mesmerism, pricks the bubbles of cant and sectarian severity, and still makes room for awe before the mysteries physiology cannot exhaust. The boardinghouse talk asks what a soul amounts to when weighed beside heredity and habit; how much character we inherit and how much we choose; what education should cultivate in citizens and in women; where genius shades into morbid sensitivity; why religion hardens when it forgets charity. The Professor’s answer is a temperate liberalism, witty, empirical, allergic to cruelty, that insists on kindness as the final wisdom.

Style and Significance
Holmes writes as a consummate table-talker: aphoristic, metaphor-loving, fond of medical analogies that snap back into humane insight. The sparkle of the scene couched around the breakfast table frames pointed critiques of pretension while preserving the dignity of even his least admirable figures. As a companion to The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, this volume darkens the palette, deepens the pathos, and proves that the genial essay can carry the weight of loss and moral inquiry. It stands as a portrait of Boston Brahmin culture at its most ingratiating and self-aware, and as a defense of good sense joined to good feeling.