06.28.07 5:00 AM CDT
• The Advisor
• Chip Rowe
As Robin Kent explains in her book, “Aunt Agony Advises,” the advice column quickly moved in the late 17th
century from addressing “abstruse and learned topics” to more personal matters. Writing in 1692 in the Lacedaemonian Mercury, newly appointed columnist Tom Browne said he appreciated reading John Dunton’s advice in the rival Athenian Mercury because it helped him fall asleep when he ran out of opium. This slander led to a battle of insults and threats that continued for months until Browne abandoned his post. That same year (1693), the first women’s magazine appeared. The typical mix of topics in the Ladies Mercury’s advice column, Kent writes, included “a letter from a deflowered virgin contemplating marriage with someone other than her seducer, another from a virgin wife whose husband was backward in his attentions, and a third from a husband whose spouse had been unfaithful to him.”
Dunton continued to offer advice well into the next century, even after his answers became rambling and incoherent, leading to speculation that he had gone mad—an accusation also leveled at the Advisor. (Some trace Dunton’s decline to a whipping he received in 1708 for cursing Queen Anne.) The next guru to step to the plate was none other than Daniel Defoe (depicted below), in 1705. Responding to letters in the pages of his magazine The Review, Defoe preached a strict middle-class morality, opposing pre-marital sex, abortion, sex after menopause and divorce. “His great shortcoming as a counselor was a very simple one—he felt superior to his readers,” Kent writes. Defoe’s purpose, as he explained it, was “to enlighten the stupid understandings of the meaner and more thoughtless of the freeholders and electors.”
Advice columns became less common in London after 1712, when a tax on newspapers made it imprudent to waste pages on personal affairs. Finally, in 1734, a magazine called The Weekly Oracle revived the genre. It was quickly overwhelmed with letters, and the editor had to ask readers to stop sending “trifling or indecent” questions. Four centuries later, the Advisor also discourages the trifling variety but can’t get enough of the indecent.
century from addressing “abstruse and learned topics” to more personal matters. Writing in 1692 in the Lacedaemonian Mercury, newly appointed columnist Tom Browne said he appreciated reading John Dunton’s advice in the rival Athenian Mercury because it helped him fall asleep when he ran out of opium. This slander led to a battle of insults and threats that continued for months until Browne abandoned his post. That same year (1693), the first women’s magazine appeared. The typical mix of topics in the Ladies Mercury’s advice column, Kent writes, included “a letter from a deflowered virgin contemplating marriage with someone other than her seducer, another from a virgin wife whose husband was backward in his attentions, and a third from a husband whose spouse had been unfaithful to him.”Dunton continued to offer advice well into the next century, even after his answers became rambling and incoherent, leading to speculation that he had gone mad—an accusation also leveled at the Advisor. (Some trace Dunton’s decline to a whipping he received in 1708 for cursing Queen Anne.) The next guru to step to the plate was none other than Daniel Defoe (depicted below), in 1705. Responding to letters in the pages of his magazine The Review, Defoe preached a strict middle-class morality, opposing pre-marital sex, abortion, sex after menopause and divorce. “His great shortcoming as a counselor was a very simple one—he felt superior to his readers,” Kent writes. Defoe’s purpose, as he explained it, was “to enlighten the stupid understandings of the meaner and more thoughtless of the freeholders and electors.”
Advice columns became less common in London after 1712, when a tax on newspapers made it imprudent to waste pages on personal affairs. Finally, in 1734, a magazine called The Weekly Oracle revived the genre. It was quickly overwhelmed with letters, and the editor had to ask readers to stop sending “trifling or indecent” questions. Four centuries later, the Advisor also discourages the trifling variety but can’t get enough of the indecent.
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Comments on this entry:
"newly appointed columnist Tom Browne said he appreciated reading John Dunton’s advice in the rival Athenian Mercury because it helped him fall asleep when he ran out of opium. This slander led to a battle of insults and threats that continued for months until Browne abandoned his post"
OMG, that is excatly what transpires when you become the agony aunt to the drama addicted girlfriend who can't get her life together.
Then when they don't take your advice it becomes slander and recrimination. (been on both sides so i know! ;P) lol
"Advice giving is the opium of the caretaker."
-Super Amanda