1226301
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Testy letter by the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table:
“ . . . my engagements force me to decline the very numerous invitations to undertake lesser tasks
which seem slight to those who propose them but mean interruption and fatigue to the writer . . . .”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809–1894. Physician and poet. Manuscript Letter Signed, O. W. Holmes, two pages, with integral leaf attached, 5” x 6”, [Boston, Massachusetts], January 4, [1892]. With original mailing envelope.
Holmes sends an unusually crusty letter declining an invitation from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Cleveland, Ohio. He writes to WCTU Treasurer Mary Ingham, complaining about his own “fatigue”and slamming her own sense of self-importance. In full: “I regret that my engagements force me to decline the very numerous invitations to undertake lesser tasks which seem slight to those who propose them but mean interruption and fatigue to the writer whose time is already too fully occupied. / Yours very truly . . . .”
By the time he wrote this letter, the venerable Holmes, the author of “Old Ironsides” and “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” was 82 years old. Holmes suffered from failing eyesight and a feeling that he was becoming antiquated. He noted that he had outlived most of his friends, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Russell Lowell.
This is a beautiful letter. It is in very fine condition, and we would grade it as extra fine were it not for one horizontal mailing fold. The accompanying mailing envelope has two 1887 blue 1¢ Benjamin Franklin stamps. It bears a frontal postmark from Boston and an incomplete postmark from Cleveland on the back. It is lightly soiled and is in fine condition.
Unframed.
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