Coffeehouse Confessions: Love, Sex, and Advice in 1690s London | Mary Beth Norton | I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:10

I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:13

Centuries before Reddit, relationship podcasts, and even Dear Abby, people sought advice from total strangers.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:21

Romantic drama has a very long history.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:25

My guest today is Dr. Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlin Alger Professor of American History Emeritus, and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the History Department at Cornell University. She is the author of I humbly beg your speedy answer: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column, published by Princeton University Press.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:47

Welcome, Mary Beth. I am so glad you could join me here on the Clio Dialogues.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 0:52

I'm glad to be here.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 0:53

When I started teaching years ago, I taught women's history and I used Liberty's Daughters so heavily, and so it is just an honor to meet you and be able to talk to you.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 1:04

Well, I'm glad you like Liberty's Daughters. My whole aim in that book was to let women speak for themselves, because at the time that I wrote it, all the things that purported to be women's history were really what men wrote about women at a particular time. So the whole idea of that book was to give women voice.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 1:21

I love that. That's that's why it's so good.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 1:24

Maybe that's why everybody still likes it and uses it. Right.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 1:27

So your new book is about the world's first personal advice column, which I find so fascinating because personal advice columns are still around today. They're very popular. I like to read the New York Times "Social Qs". Have you always been interested in personal advice columns?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 1:44

I have. When I was a kid, my mom subscribed to Ladies' Home Journal, and every month I would read the column, "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" So I started very early. I must have been 10 or 11. And ever since I've read personal advice columns with great interest. I used to read Ann Landers and Dear Abby and then Amy Dickinson, and then I eventually met Amy Dickinson, who lives close to Ithaca. So I had various connections with her. And now I read her successor, Asking Eric, and I read Carolyn Hacks in the Washington Post. I just have always been interested in personal advice columns. And therefore I was very interested when I found the first one in the course of my research for another book.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 2:26

So it it just really caught your attention because you're like, wow, they were doing this back in the 17th century.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 2:32

Yes, exactly.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 2:33

The funny thing about this column that you focus on is that it didn't begin as a personal advice column.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 2:39

That is correct. And that's what is really fascinating about it. It's actually doesn't start it didn't start out as a personal advice column at all. It's a broadsheet publication which was aimed at denizens of coffee houses in late 17th century England. And what its real purpose was is kind of Google for the 17th century, or maybe Wikipedia. The guy who started it, a printer named John Dunton, had the brilliant idea of a question and answer journal. It's not really a journal, it's just a broadsheet publication, two-sided, came out twice a week. Originally it was going to be once a week, but it was so popular he expanded it to twice a week. All done by questions and answers. The people who hung out in coffee houses in 17th century England had very wide-ranging conversations about a variety of topics. Dunton says he was walking in the park with a friend one day when the idea for this came to him. And the idea was that people would send in questions and he and his associates would answer them. And his associates were his two brothers-in-law, one who was a minister and one who was a mathematician. But they called themselves the Athenian Society, because the journal was called the Athenian Mercury. And you may ask why it was named after Athens, and it was because of a verse in Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament about the Athenians asking lots of questions. The idea was that people who had questions on any topic, except politics, they wouldn't answer political questions, because it's right in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, and politics was extremely fraught in England at the time, and there was a censorship law. And so he had to worry about the censors. And in fact, at one point they did answer a political question, and they did get shut down by the censors for several months. He always was very careful after that, even when they got rid of the censorship law in 1695. I should say that the journal started in the spring of 1691. But the idea was that anything else was fair game. Religion, history, literature, science, you name it, they'd answer he and his associates, the Athenian Society, and that's what they expected. And for the first six weeks or so, when indeed it was a great success, it went viral, we would say, in modern terms. It became a great cultural phenomenon in London in the early 1690s. One of my favorite questions early on was, Who did Cain marry? Because Cain, of course, was the only child of Adam and Eve, at least in the beginning. And so who did Cain marry?

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 5:11

Do you remember what the answer was?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 5:12

I do not remember what the answer was. Another question was, did Adam and Eve eat actual apples? And I also don't remember the answer to that one. After six weeks or so, they got a series of questions from a man verging on the personal. They were things like, Don't people today marry too young? Or don't too many people marry for money? Or one question that I was especially interested in is who's worse off in a marriage, a woman or a man? The guy sent in three 13 questions that all verged on the personal. And so they answered all 13 questions.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 5:45

You mentioned that the Athenian Mercury was originally aimed at men in coffee houses. So how did women become a part of the conversation?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 5:53

Now it's interesting because there were women who worked in coffee houses, but they were not the patrons of the coffee house. Yet a lady in the country, quote unquote, somehow got her hands on one of their issues, and we don't know how. Was she in London and walking around the street and did she pick up a broadsheet, or did a male friend or husband of hers or something like that pick it up? I don't know. But she wrote in a letter and she said, Will you answer questions from ladies as well as from gentlemen? It's clear they didn't anticipate this, but they said, Um, why yes, we will do that. And so they proceeded to answer questions from women throughout the entire period of the of the publication, which lasted for about seven years. What began to happen was that individuals started to write much more personal questions. One of the first questions from a woman was, How do I meet a good man? How do I find a man to marry? And basically they said, Go to where the women are the fewest, that is, the colonies, and you will find a husband there. And indeed, I do know from previous research that women did go to the 17th century colonies in search of husbands. So it was not necessarily a bad piece of advice.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 7:01

Advice that really changed their lives.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 7:03

Yes, and the questions were sometimes very personal and sometimes involved confessions of misbehavior. Some of them also were clearly jokes, and they treated them as jokes. And one of my favorite questions along those lines was I could just see the young men sitting around a table in the coffee house making this one up. And it was all about how they wanted to find a wife for a good friend of theirs, and he had the following characteristics. He was this, he was that, and so forth. And on top of everything else, he had a great head of hair. And that was clear that that was a joke. And when they answered the question, they answered it like a joke. They said, with all those great qualities, you don't need us to find him a wife. He can find it himself.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 7:44

Interesting.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 7:45

There were a lot of courtship questions, a lot of questions about how people should behave in courtship. Questions from both men and women, but women saying, How do we know whether we should trust this guy who is quoting us? And actually the three men who were answering the questions were really quite cynical about the men who were courting the women in question. And they would usually, when the women especially would say things like, He'd made an attempt on my honor, should I now trust him? They said, Absolutely not, cut the jerk off. They were very rational and reasonable.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 8:15

Rational and reasonable, that's interesting. I wonder, when you started this project, were you more interested in the questions people were asking or in the answers that the Athenians were giving?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 8:26

When I started to work on the book, or I started to work on the questions, I was more interested in the questions and the answers. But the more I got into it, the more interested I was in the answers.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 8:36

You described the Athenians as sympathetic to women in many of their answers.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 8:41

Yes. It's an age known for its misogyny, but the Athenians prided themselves on being sympathetic to women, and for the most part, their answers to men and women were pretty even-handed. That is, they would say the same things to men and women both. If they told the men they were misbehaving, they would also tell the women they were misbehaving, and they would also offer the same kinds of prescriptions to both men and women. And one of the things I appreciated was that when when men or women would confess great sins, some of which we might see as sins today, others of which we might not, they would say things like, You don't owe apologies to anyone on earth, apologize to God, that is, be penitent, go to church more often, that sort of thing, and just behave yourself properly in the future to reform yourself. They did tell one guy who said, I have made love to two different women, I don't want to marry either one of them. How do I get out of this? They said, You shouldn't marry anyone. Unless both of these women release you from whatever promises you made to them, then you could marry someone, but otherwise, forget it, you can never marry.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:47

Wow, that's pretty severe.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 9:48

Yes. They could be, remember, one of them was a minister, they could be very harsh with the people who questioned them.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 9:54

Yeah. Do you see any limits to their generosity to women?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 9:58

Not really. As I say, they were about as generous to women as they were to men. And in other parts of the questions, they did, for example, promote women's education to a much greater extent than what other people did at the time. And so they were in fact lauded by women, and they ended up with quite a number of correspondents who were women who appreciated their concern for women and their care for women. I should add that all of the questions were anonymous, and so we don't really know who the questioners were. We don't know whether these were true statements or whether they were fictional. Sometimes questioners would say, I'm writing on behalf of a friend, and they saw through that right away. But yeah, they were generous to women as well as to men. They were also very harsh. I mean, they were very moral. They would tell people that they had badly misbehaved. If they had in fact badly misbehaved, they wouldn't let them off the hook.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 10:49

So you mentioned friends, and uh sometimes people referred to their parents as their friends.

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 10:54

Yes. It's a very common locution in the 17th century to refer to all sorts of close people. Instead of referring to parents as parents, they would refer to them in a group that included friends, and that they would use the word friends. I did a severe editing of this book to make it accessible to modern readers, but I never changed the word friends because sometimes it's ambiguous. You don't know when they say consult your friends about this. What what do they mean? But other times they'll say, if one of your friends is a parent, then pay more attention to that person. They didn't always differentiate, and so I decided not to differentiate unless they were very explicit.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 11:33

That makes a lot of sense. People, when they read your book, they will see that there are a lot of things that are familiar. There's heartbreak, there's jealousy, there's uncertainty. Does this person like me? Should I approach them? But the social and cultural structures of the day and time were very different from modern day. Can you talk a little bit about some of those differences?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 11:54

Sure. The context was very different. For example, one thing that turns up that I hadn't really anticipated in these letters is that sometimes people didn't know whether they were married or not.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 12:05

How do they not know that they were married?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 12:08

Um, there is no law, it turns out, in England defining what marriage is until 1753. And these letters are from the 1690s. So really 60 years earlier. In those days, what defined what marriage was was simply the church. And the church said you should be married by a priest in a church. But many times people didn't do that because the church also placed great emphasis on mutual promises made by the couples. People would promise each other that they would marry at some future time. But then the question was, did that actually itself constitute a marriage? Did that promise make a marriage? Sometimes the Athenians said, yes, it did, that that was the equivalent of marriage, because what was really important was that members of a couple would agree with each other about what their relationship would be. There were all kinds of people who wrote in and said things like, divorce is tedious. And so I didn't want to go through that. And I just I lost interest in the woman I was married to, and I had several children with her. But I'm now with another woman, and we have promised to be faithful to each other before God. Isn't that sufficient? And then they would say, no, it's not sufficient. They were very clear about that.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 13:21

So the Athenians were clear about it, but the people themselves were often confused?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 13:26

The only word I can use to describe it is marriage is really fungible for them. One of my favorite letters is a guy writes in and says, Well, this man died and I owed him some money. Which wife of his do I give it to? He has two different wives. Which wife is the one that I should pay the money that I owed this guy? And so it's very matter-of-fact that the man had two wives and the guy wants to know which one he should pay off.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 13:51

Was it difficult to get a divorce at that time?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 13:54

At that time, divorce could only be obtained from church courts, and only if one party had committed adultery. And then the separation was only from bed and board or for support. Neither party could remarry. Whether you were the victim or the aggressor, you could not remarry until the other person died because marriage was seen as forever.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 14:16

So I wanted to talk about ghosting. We think of this as being particularly modern with texting and with dating apps, but it appears that 17th century people also ghosted each other. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 14:28

They use the word slighting. And in fact, there were often letters from one person in a courting couple saying, I'm now being slighted by the person who I was courting or who was courting me, and what do I do about it? Usually they would say the other person obviously isn't interested, and so slight that person back. So mutual ghosting, shall we say.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 14:48

Mutual ghosting. So their advice was basically get over it. Right, right. Bringing the past and the contemporary together, I'm curious about why do you think people seek advice from strangers?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 15:01

I would like to know that. I mean, it's something I think it's a very interesting question, and I wish I knew the answer to it. Today people could go to therapists, shall we say, and have confidential conversations. I could say that for the 1690s, the people who wrote to the Athenians clearly didn't want to say to people they knew what they told the Athenians. They wanted advice, and they wanted advice from men who were experts, who purported to be experts. They had problems that they wanted to talk over, but not with someone who was a friend or a neighbor or a relative. Maybe you didn't want to reveal some deep dark secret of your own behavior or some deep dark concern you had that you didn't want anyone else to know about except maybe a stranger, who in this case would in the case of the Athenian Mercury was an anonymous expert. So today people could go to therapists, but maybe people today also have hesitancy about talking to therapists, or maybe they just don't want to have a therapist. I mean, maybe they just want to talk to AI or a chatbot or something like that. You want to get advice you can believe, but not from someone that you know who might tell other people about it.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 16:15

So part of the appeal of the advice column is the anonymity. Can you give us another example from the Athenian Mercury of a problem or of a person for whom the anonymity may have been their motivation?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 16:27

Sometimes people did, in fact, confess things to the Athenian Mercury that they would not want others to know. For example, there was a woman who wrote in that before she was married she had had sex with some other guy. And she said specifically, on my marriage night, I arranged it so my husband didn't know this. So obviously she had faked something on her marriage night, but she said, This is really killing me. I'm feeling very guilty about what I did to him. I'm feeling as though I did this terrible thing to my husband, and I can't eat sufficiently. I'm wasting away to a skeleton because I am unable to resolve my guilt. So how should I deal with that? And so she's one of the ones they say, you should have married the first guy. That was always their prescription. You should marry the first person you had sex with. But when they're confronted with a situation like this where someone can't do that, they say, you don't owe apologies to anyone on earth. Just apologize to God, be properly penitent, and you will be all right. So, I mean, I thought that was a very generous response to her. She's really being consumed by her own guilt. They say, It's okay. In your devotions to God, you can reveal this truth, but you don't have to reveal it to your husband.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 17:42

Hmm. Interesting. Wow. I'm wondering how has this book been received?

Guest, Mary Beth Norton 17:48

Well, it was published simultaneously in England and the US. And I did work very much to make the prose accessible to today and yet retain the flavor of the 17th century. And reviewers have commented that I did that. Although there have been a few nitpicky historians who've been mad that I did not retain the original 17th century language. But I assure you, as my editor said, if I'd done that, no one would have read it. Because the 17th century was addicted to long, convoluted sentences, often with double negatives. In England, it was widely reviewed in newspapers, and it was widely reviewed by advice columnists, which I thought was fun. And the advice columnists usually said, gee, this reads just like my mailbox, you know. People today recognize that these are sort of human problems that have existed for the last 300 years and are probably going to continue to exist for the next 300 years. I do hope people get that out of it with all the exotic things that you do find in it, such as the lack of knowing whether you're married or not. I do hope that people will read it and recognize that what we have here is a human condition and that the same kinds of problems have come up again and again over time. And I do hope people will find the book as delightful to read as I found working on it. I mean, I just enjoyed doing it so much. This was my fun project. It may sound terrible to have fun with people's problems in the past, but I did find it extremely intriguing to see what people were talking about in the past and how similar they seemed to the things that were happening today.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry 19:25

To learn more about this and any book featured on the Clio Dialogues, read Clio's book reviews at Cliodialogues.com. This has been the Clio Dialogues. Please like, follow, and subscribe. And join me again next time because history isn't finished with us.