Six Wives and Oliver Wendell Holmes

Restaurant decor - the creation of a class of persons who style themselves as interior designers - is often bad, often merely bland, and often has an element of the random or downright bizarre. The other day I was eating in an Italian - or rather Italianate - restaurant, one of a small chain. Here the decor was generally bland to the point of being unnoticeable - a kind of creamy beige prevailed - but the graphics introduced that mystifying random note. Much of one wall - where you might reasonably expect something vaguely Italian or Mediterranean - was given over to stylised representations of all six wives of Henry VIII (no, this was nowhere near Hampton Court) with their names writ large in 'Gothic' script. Stranger still, another wall was embellished with a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes. The quotation itself was fair enough - 'The true essentials of a feast are only fun and feed' - but Oliver Wendell Holmes, for heaven's sake! There's a name that must mean little or nothing to today's readers - a giant of 19th-century American letters who is today probably even more forgotten than his fellow giants Longfellow, J.R. Lowell and Whittier. His most popular works were the Breakfast Table series of conversational essays, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The Poet of the Breakfast Table and The Professor at the Breakfast Table - and these were popular indeed, selling in such numbers even on this side of the Atlantic that they are still a frequent sight on the shelves of charity shops (I suspect second-hand bookshops have given up even trying to sell them). I must admit I have never knowingly read anything of Holmes's - is he worth looking into? Perhaps one of my American readers will know... Certainly his work (or at least one of his titles) was so familiar to English audiences that when Chivers launched its thick-cut Olde English marmalade in 1907, it commended it as 'the aristocrat of the breakfast table'. The label on the jar still bore that legend when I was a boy - which caused me some confusion when I first became aware that there was a book of more or less the same name. But I managed to live with it - just one more bewildering feature of a bewildering world...