SOURCE: "The Breakfast-Table Series," in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962, pp. 88-115.

In the following essay, Small analyzes the various pieces that make up the Breakfast-Table series. In each, Holmes created a different main character in order to emphasize and illustrate various issues in society that concerned him.

In December, 1884, when Holmes was opening the "New Portfolio" with his third and last novel A Mortal Antipathy, he devoted the first number to an introduction in which he talked over with "the whole family of readers belonging to my list of intimates" (VII [l]-32) his career as a man of letters up to that time. His first Portfolio began with the poems for occasions and for the "showy annuals," but its contents had "boyhood written on every page." The "best scraps" he justly selected from the first Portfolio were "Old Ironsides … a single passionate outcry when the...