Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1861. The novel contains what is generally, incorrectly thought of as the first use of the term Boston Brahmin, which is described as “Thee harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy.” Also, “He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England,” and “Boston Brahmins . . . with their houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly of Beacon Street, their ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelains, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of the mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness.”