People making small talk, 1842. Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Ph

People making small talk, 1842. Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library

In 1818, future first lady Louisa Adams wrote to her father-in-law, John Adams: “How much practice…is required to receive company well, and how much the greatest talents are obscured by that want of ease and small talk which, though in itself trifling, always produces the happy effect of socializing a company and by insensible degrees warming it into brilliancy and solidity. This is one of those arts that everybody feels, but few understand, and is altogether inexplicable.”

Louisa believed the ability to make small talk was so important that, four years later, in a letter to her husband, John Quincy Adams, she listed it as the first ingredient in her recipe for a successful presidential candidate.

Take a good deal of small talk; a very little light literature; just sufficient attention to dress to avoid the appellation of a dandy: a considerable affectation of social affability; with as much suavity as will induce the fawners who surround him to fancy they rule him; a fine house, a showy carriage, and a tavern kind of keeping establishment; and you have the man whose popularity will carry everything before him.

As Louisa knew, small talk does not always come naturally. For a guide to how it used to be done, see “How to Make Small Talk in the 19th Century.”