"I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"
Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column
-
- 20,99 €
-
- 20,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A fascinating collection of questions and answers—about courtship, marriage, love, and sex—from a seventeenth-century periodical
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
