<i>“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer:” Letters on Love and Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column.</i> By Mary Beth Norton.

In “I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,” Mary Beth Norton selects, edits, and introduces relationship advice that appeared in the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury (often shortened to Athenian Mercury) in the 1690s. John Dunton founded the broadsheet periodical in 1691 with the intention of answering questions submitted by readers. Although the subtitle bills Norton's book as “Letters on Love & Marriage from the World's First Personal Advice Column,” she clarifies in the introduction that the Athenian Mercury solicited and answered questions on a variety of topics such as science, medicine, military tactics, law, and the Bible. It “published thousands of inquiries and replies on a wide variety of topics,” Norton notes, yet “at the instigation of its readers, it also developed into a source of published advice on personal matters, the world's first” (1). Rather than taking the format of a modern advice column, questions and answers about love and marriage often ran interspersed with other content.Norton's anthology of advice contains an introduction, six thematic chapters (featuring questions and replies about courtship, choosing a spouse, parental consent, promises and vows, matrimony, and dangerous liaisons), a brief coda, suggestions for further reading, and an index. She provides helpful historical context early on, preparing readers for chapters that consist almost entirely of material originally published in the Athenian Mercury. For instance, she explains that Dunton enlisted his brothers-in-law, Richard Sault and Samuel Wesley, in answering questions submitted to the Athenian Mercury. Collectively, they comprised the Athenian Society (or the Athenians, as Norton calls them), though they gave the impression that their ranks included a larger team of experts. The enterprise met with such enthusiasm that Dunton quickly expanded it from a weekly to twice-weekly publication. Individual subscribers purchased it, and coffeehouses made it available to patrons. After twenty issues, Dunton bound them together with an index. Meanwhile, the broadsheet's popularity spawned imitators.That the Athenian Mercury featured so many queries on courtship, marriage, and sexual behavior was not something that Dunton and the other Athenians anticipated. A sudden surge of women submitting questions and reading the responses also took them by surprise. Dunton hastily revised second volume's title page “to reflect openness to female as well as male querists” (7). Readers transformed the Athenian Mercury into a different sort of publication than Dunton first envisioned, especially considering that approximately one-third of the questions concerned personal relationships. Dunton sometimes even gathered questions into special “ladies’ issues,” although twice as many queries came from men. Modern should note that “Parliament did not adopt a marriage law until 1753,” and that when the Athenian Mercury was published, “a person's matrimonial status could appear uncertain” (11). Such confusion played a central role in many subsequent chapters’ dramas, making Norton's overview vital for readers.The (often cheeky) title for each chapter comes from one of the questions or answers in that chapter: “Kissing is a Luscious Diet” focuses on courtship and “Much Love and Moderate Conveniency” spotlights the search for a spouse. A section on parental consent presents advice to a self-described “miserable creature” whose parents refused to grant permission for her to marry. The Athenians advised her to “Read History (Nothing Amorous)” as a distraction (73). They offered similar advice, “study at first history . . . and then follow as your interests direct you,” to a young man whose parents withheld approval either to wed or to join the army and thus remove himself from the young woman he loved (72). Apparently, the Athenians believed that reading history opened new perspectives and tempered the passions of young people in love!Norton commences each chapter with a brief introduction that identifies the most significant themes in its questions and answers. She clusters together items that expressed similar concerns, such as property issues complicating marriage contracts or correspondents worried because they engaged in premarital sex. Norton occasionally inserts notes for navigation's sake. The index points to additional material, as both themes and examples often overlap: “readers,” Norton cautions, “should not expect neat divisions” (16). The lives of the men and women who submitted questions were too complicated for that, underscoring the richness of the advice on love and marriage that Norton makes available here.In a brief coda, Norton documents the fates of the three Athenians after Dunton ceased publication following his wife Elizabeth's death in 1697. Not all of them always followed the advice that they stridently and sometimes caustically delivered to their anonymous correspondents. Indeed Norton reveals a twist about one of them, something that readers might suspect . . . but will be more satisfying if not revealed here. Moreover, she demonstrates that a reprinted collection, The Athenian Oracle, “was read in the American colonies at least as late as the 1790s” and excerpts appeared in American newspapers well into the 19th century (191). What originated as a humble broadsheet had lasting transatlantic appeal. Norton aims to extend that appeal, selecting questions and answers about personal problems and sexual peccadilloes that offer a window into anxieties about personal relationships experienced by men and women in early modern Britain.