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

by Mary Beth Norton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691253992
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University. Her books include the Pulitzer Prize–finalist Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power in the Forming of American Society; 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, winner of the George Washington Prize; In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692; and Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“From the coffeehouses of seventeenth-century England to the sipping spots of contemporary America, Mary Beth Norton’s collection of the world’s first advice column demonstrates the timelessness of personal dilemmas: How can I find love? How can I flee? How can I silence my mother-in-law? Why do I feel this way? 'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer' shows that it was ever thus. We owe the compassionate advice-givers of the Athenian Mercury gratitude for inventing an indispensable genre, and further gratitude to Norton for discovering and reviving this interesting and entertaining work.”—Amy Dickinson, “Ask Amy” advice columnist

"'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer' is a captivating and delightful anthology of the seventeenth-century’s romantic travails (as depicted in one relevant periodical). It’s a total page-turner, both poignant and often hilarious. And if you put a copy in a perfumed envelope, it’ll probably be the perfect gift for that special friend too.”—Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony

“Mary Beth Norton, one of the foremost historians of early American women and gender, gives us a look at the early modern version of Dear Abby meets Modern Love, uncovering what folks in the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world were wondering—and willing to ask an advice column—about love and sex. Ranging from the physiological to the philosophical, the questions are as revealing as the answers.”—Karin Wulf, author of Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia

Editorial Reviews

"[A] colorful sampling of reader inquiries on romance originally printed in the late-17th-century English newssheet the Athenian Mercury. . . . 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."

Publishers Weekly

"[“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”] shows how eternal our preoccupations with love, sex, and romance are—and both how much and how little has changed in the last few centuries."—-Sophia Stewart, The Millions

"Entertaining."—-Ed Bedford, The Indiependent

"[A] delightful compendium of 17th-century advice to the lovelorn."—-Judith Flanders, Wall Street Journal

"Entertaining and instructive."—-Erica Wagner, Financial Times

"Mary Beth Norton has unearthed an astonishing collection of letters."—-Bel Mooney, Daily Mail

"Peering into the prurient details and private lives of others has enduring appeal. [This] work offers an opportunity to revisit what Helen Berry has aptly described. . . as the best ‘public transcript’ of what interested seventeenth-century readers."—-Melanie Bigold, Times Literary Supplement

"Fascinating. . . . Reading this book provides all the pleasures and insights of [modern] advice columns with the added charm of the writers’ antique diction, their pained earnestness and Norton’s illuminating commentary."—-Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Amusing . . . [It sheds] light on both early modern social mores and things that have remained stubbornly unchanged."—-Natasha Simonova, History Today

"A cheerful . . . dive into the messy realities of courting, sex and marriage in the 1690s."—-John Callagher, The Irish Times

From the Publisher

"Fascinating."

Slightly Foxed