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

Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Emerita, Cornell University

Nov. 20th from 10:30-11:30am- In Person & Zoom

Description: Mary Beth Norton will introduce and discuss anonymous letters requesting personal advice from a group of self-described experts that appeared in the Athenian Mercury, a twice-weekly inexpensive broadsheet published in London from 1691 to 1697. Widely understood to be the world’s first personal advice column (see Wikipedia) the Mercury began as a version of Google for the seventeenth century; that is, its founder, the printer John Dunton, termed it “the question project” and declared that its experts would answer questions on such topics as religion, science, history, mathematics, and so forth. And the Athenians did that. But at the instigation of their readers, who began to ask for advice on courtship, marriage, and sexual relations, the Athenians controversially ventured into the territory now occupied by personal advice columnists like Carolyn Hax of the Washington Post and Eric Thomas, the latter the syndicated successor to Freeville’s own Amy Dickinson.

In this interactive presentation she will be assisted by three other members of CAPE—Tim Mount, Jane Powers, and Joe Thomas—who will read and respond to some of the letters that she selected, edited, and modernized for publication in her recent book, “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,” published by Princeton University Press in April 2025.

Bio: Mary Beth Norton arrived at Cornell as an assistant professor in 1971, the first woman ever hired (or interviewed) by the History Department. After earning degrees from the University of Michigan (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A., Ph.D.), she taught for two years at the University of Connecticut in Storrs before spending 47 years at Cornell until her retirement in 2018, thus successfully avoiding a full half-century as a professor. In her time at Cornell she served two terms as Faculty Trustee, was Speaker of the Third University Senate (now long defunct) and the Faculty Council of Representatives/ Faculty Senate, and published six monographs on early American history, including 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, which won the George Washington Prize for the best book on the Revolution published in 2020. At the Harvard Commencement this past May, she was awarded a Centennial Medal by the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, primarily for her role as a pioneer in the field of early American women’s history, as epitomized by her ground-breaking Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, first published by Little, Brown in 1980 and still in print with Cornell University Press.