“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”
Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column
Some of the questions about life and love in Mary Beth Norton’s book are timeless: “Do most persons marry too young?” “How shall a man know when a lady loves him?” “Why does love generally turn to coldness and neglect after marriage?”
Some, not so much: “A person was some time ago married to a young woman, but not bedded. She did after marriage solemnly promise that she’d never alter what she had done, but at a certain time would come and live with him. . . . Can she do this lawfully?”
Norton steers between the timeless and the time-lost in this all-too-slim book about The Athenian Mercury, the world’s first advice column. The Mercury was published in England from 1691 to 1697 and was produced by a three-person team headed by John Dunton, a London printer. The paper was printed in broadsheet format on both sides of a single large sheet of paper, with 10 to 20 questions garnered from the public—along with answers to them. As evidence of its success, a century after the Mercury’s demise, bound versions of its six-year run were still being sold, bought, and read, even in the Americas.
