"I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer": Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column

The Athenian Mercury—a one-page, two-sided periodical published in 1690s London—included the world’s first personal advice column. Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prize–finalist Mary Beth Norton’s “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer” is a remarkable collection of questions and answers drawn from this groundbreaking publication.

In these exchanges, anonymous readers look for help with their most intimate romantic problems—about courting, picking a spouse, getting married, securing or avoiding parental consent, engaging in premarital sex and extramarital affairs, and much more. Spouses ask how to handle contentious marriages and tense relationships with in-laws. Some correspondents seek ways to ease a conscience troubled by romantic and sexual misbehavior. The lonely wonder how to meet a potential partner—or how to spark a warmer relationship with someone they already have an eye on. And both men and women inquire about how to extract themselves from relationships turned sour. Many of these concerns will be familiar to readers of today’s advice columns. But others are delightfully strange and surprising, reflecting forgotten social and romantic customs and using charmingly unfamiliar language in which, for example, “kissing is a luscious diet,” a marriage might provide “much love and moderate conveniency,” and an “amorous disposition” can lead to trouble.

Delightful and entertaining, “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer” provides a unique, intriguing, and revealing picture of what has—and hasn’t—changed over the past three centuries when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.