"I humbly beg your speedy answer" Letters on love & marriage from the world's first personal advice column

Norton (1774), a history professor emeritus at Cornell University, provides a colorful sampling of reader inquiries on romance originally printed in the late-17th-century English newssheet the Athenian Mercury, alongside responses from editor John Dunton and his brothers-in-law, Richard Sault and Samuel Wesley. Several letters focus on maintaining modesty during courtship, with the Mercury writers suggesting that women try signaling their romantic interest in men by "pull them by the nose," writing to them, or, if all else fails, telling them "frankly" in person. Other submissions seek guidance on navigating the need for parental consent before marrying, as when Dunton, Sault, and Wesley counsel a reader not to resign herself to marrying the unappealing suitor preferred by her parents. Other entries are more troubling, as when the Mercury writers condemn an unmarried woman who vocally supported gender equality as a threat to the "very order of nature" and encourage a woman who was sexually assaulted to marry her abuser. The intriguing exchanges offer a distinctive window into the conservative gender politics of the late Stuart period, in which women's purity was paramount and marriage was the goal to which all individuals were expected to aspire. This fascinates. (Apr.)