As an avid reader of personal advice columns, historian Mary Beth Norton found the perfect confluence of interests in the Athenian Mercury, a London periodical published from 1691-97. Each one-page, two-sided broadsheet included questions from anonymous readers and responses from the publisher and his two brothers-in-law - and so the world's first personal advice column was born.
"I was fascinated by the personal stories the correspondents told," said Norton, who thought it would be fun to collect and edit the questions and answers. "The similarities and differences with modern people's problems intrigued me."
The resulting volume, "I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column," published April 22 by Princeton University Press.
Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Emeritus, in the College of Arts and Sciences, spoke with the Chronicle about the book.
Question: When and how did you first encounter the Athenian Mercury?
Answer: I first encountered the Athenian Mercury while researching a book in 2005-06, while I was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK. That book, "Separated by Their Sex," was published by Cornell University Press in 2011. But I had encountered the publisher of the Mercury, John Dunton, even earlier when I was writing a book on Salem witchcraft. Dunton, who had visited Boston in the mid-1680s, was the London publisher of Cotton and Increase Mather's works on witchcraft.
Q: How did you go about selecting which questions and responses to include? What were your criteria?
A: In the beginning I simply transcribed all the questions and answers on personal topics, because the Athenians also answered queries on other topics like science, history and religion, as well. About one-third of the questions turned out to be on personal subjects. After I had a more or less universal set of those responses, I started making the selections by removing letters that repeated the same problems or some that were very long and complicated or difficult to edit for modern readers. I do not claim that the book is comprehensive. Near the end of the process, I had the assistance of my editor at Princeton University Press. She helped with the final choices. With her aid I also modernized the prose. For example, in the seventeenth century writers commonly used double negatives in long, convoluted sentences that could be hard to understand. I shortened sentences, changed to positive verbs and updated the vocabulary when necessary for comprehension.
Q: Based on the questions, what can we surmise about the 17th-century advice-seekers? What has and hasn't changed in matters of love and marriage since the days of the Athenian Mercury?
A: Many of those who wrote to the Athenian Mercury were young, judging by the questions they asked about courtship and obtaining parental consent for their marriage plans, which was assumed to be necessary at the time. Some described significant conflicts with parents over their marital choices, either when they wanted to marry someone their parents did not approve, or when their parents wanted them to marry someone the young people preferred to refuse. Such conflicts appear to have involved both sons and daughters, although since the letters were anonymous, we have to accept the authors' self-descriptions.
Another issue that came up in numerous letters was marital difficulties caused by the unavailability of divorce. Separation agreements - or "divorce from bed and board" - could be obtained from ecclesiastical courts, but only if one party could be proved guilty of adultery. And such divorces did not allow either party to remarry. So unhappy husbands and wives wrote to the Athenians in search of solutions. Some reported that they had had chosen to separate informally from spouses or had found new partners without legal sanction. The Athenians criticized such behavior but recognized that such actions were common under the circumstances.
Today, of course, divorce and legal separations are more common, and parents are unlikely to be able to halt the marriages of their children entirely. So those are significant differences from the 1690s.
Q: Several centuries later, how does the advice from John Dunton and his associates strike you? Antiquated? Sensible? Timeless?
A: The Athenians were very moral, and I suppose their advice could be described as antiquated. How many people today are told by columnists to repent and attend church more regularly, for example? They did not hesitate to criticize those who wrote to them for the sexual misbehavior correspondents occasionally described. Yet they could often sympathize with the dilemmas faced, say, by young people who said they were deeply in love but had been forbidden to marry the object of their affection. So, too, they expressed concern for wives trapped in abusive marriages, at the same time that they could not offer advice beyond turning to the established church for financial and emotional assistance.
Q: What surprised you most about what you found in the pages of the Athenian Mercury?
A: Some of the answers were very witty. One of my favorites was a response to a question about whether a man should marry a woman he could not love in order to gain property or to satisfy his parents. They replied, no, he should not, and declared: "If a man marries a woman he cannot love, he will soon love a woman he cannot marry."
Q: Part of the fun of reading advice columns is seeing when somebody really whiffs it. What was the worst piece of advice you came across?
A: One of the worst was one they themselves changed. Perhaps their audience responded negatively (as today's readers sometimes do), although that is pure speculation on my part. They advised a young man not to let his intended bride know that he was deeply in debt before the wedding, after which he would gain legal control over her property and presumably be able to solve his financial problems. But about two months later they reversed themselves, advising a similar questioner to reveal his parlous financial circumstances prior to the ceremony, lest it cause trouble in the marriage once his wife learned the truth. It would be fascinating to know if both questioners followed the advice and, if so, what happened! But there was only one published follow-up in all the letters I read; it came in an instance involving parental disapproval of a marriage and the anguish that then afflicted the young couple in question. Although the Athenians usually told young people to obey their parents, in that remarkable case they said the parents were being unreasonable and their opinion could be ignored.
