Important Letter of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the Great Poet, to His Son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Great Supreme Court Justice

It is the only letter we have ever seen from father to son, and a search of public sale records going back over 40 years fails to turn up even one other example

In 1871, the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a poem in tribute to his great-great-grandmother, Dorothy Quincy. She was born in 1709 to the Quincy family of Braintree, one of Massachusetts’ most distinguished families. She was the daughter of Judge Edmund Quincy, whose brother was the ancestor of Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams. Dorothy was the cousin of Josiah Quincy, the mayor of Boston. Her niece, named for her, married John Hancock.

Holmes’s ode honors the life of “Dorothy Q” and references a famous portrait of her that hangs in the Massachusetts Historical Society: This painting, dated circa 1720, depicts a young Dorothy. It descended through her family until it was bequeathed to the Massachusetts Historical Society by her great-great-grandson, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in 1936.

The poem on the painting: “On her hand a parrot green / Sits unmoving and broods serene. / Hold up the canvas in full in view, – / Look! there’s a rent the light shines through, / Dark with a century’s fringe of dust, – / That was a Red-Coat’s rapier-thrust! / Such is the tale the lady old, / Dorothy’s daughter’s daughter, told.”

In the poem, Holmes also rhapsodizes on what she meant to him. “O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.! / Strange is the gift that I owe to you; / Such a gift as never a king / Save to daughter or son might bring, / All my tenure of heart and hand, / All my title to house and land; / Mother and sister and child and wife / And joy and sorrow and death and life!”

Holmes was one of the great poets of his age, but he is also remembered as the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Holmes was the third-most cited American legal scholar of the 20th century. He was called the Great Dissenter because of his stand as a civil libertarian who protected the First Amendment from encroachments, particularly during World War I and the period of hostility to dissent that followed the war.

This is a letter from Holmes the father to Holmes the son. It is the only letter we have ever seen from father to son, and a search of public sale records going back over 40 years fails to turn up even one other example. In it, Holmes, Sr. discusses his poem “Dorothy Q”, mentions Dorothy Hancock, as well as his great-grandfather Boston merchant Jacob Wendell, and is filled with genealogy information on his family.

Autograph letter signed, Boston, September 28, 1876, to his son, whom he addresses as “Wendell”. “Dear Wendell, If you read your “Daily” duly never missing a day you would have some time within a couple of years or so a correction of the mistake of which you speak. Madam Dorothy Hancock, born Quincy, was niece of my great grandmother Dorothy Q. That is enough, I suppose, but I have the whole relationship made out, or have had it. And that reminds me to tell you that my nephew, William P. Upham, son of the late Charles Wentworth Upham, has brought together and had neatly bound and in the most perfect condition and arrangement nine folio volumes of family papers, including many of Jacob Wendell’s (you know well his famous flourish), and a great many letters to and from Dorothy Q. There are some old dated letters among them, and part of the collection would prove interesting perhaps to you as they have proved to me. If you are in Salem at any time [you] may call on my sister Anne in Essex Street. She will be delighted to see you, and you pass an hour over these volumes. I think with pleasure. The only genuine and original Dorothy Q. is always on exhibition (to friends and relations) at my house. If Mrs. Smalley or any other of your friends have a curiosity to see her, they are welcome at all times. Always faithfully yours, O. W. Holmes.”

An extraordinary and perhaps unique letter, filled with interest.