When not answering questions from readers, the Advisor loves to sit with a good book. Lately we’ve been engaged with a history of the advice column called “Aunt Agony Advises.” Written by Robin Kent and published only the U.K., the title is long out of print.
Kent dates the first English-language advice column to March 1691, the invention of a bookseller named John Dunton (depicted at left) in his newly launched newspaper, the Athenian Gazette (later Mercury). Notably, “less than half the questions were from readers racked by personal difficulties with love, family, loyalty or sex,” Kent writes. “The majority delved into such topics as the mysteries of the Creation, the morality of slave-trading, the probability of perpetual motion, what causes a rainbow, the reasons for dizziness and why one hour’s sermon seems longer than two hour’s conversation.”
(As those questions have all been answered over the centuries, today’s readers instead ask the Advisor about electronics, cars, cigars and liquor.)
The famed intellect Samuel Johnson hated Dunton’s low-brow efforts, alleging that the editors made up most of the letters. That accusation is still tossed around today, and our response when it arises is the same Dunton gave to Johnson: There’s no need, because we receive hundreds of letters. In the early 18th century, The British Apollo tackled the issue head-on:
Q: Hark ye, you Apollo, don’t you make questions and answers?
A: Not at present, really Sir; but should soon take that method if other people’s questions were of no more consequence than yours.
Kent believes that Dunton likely did receive many more letters than he published, if only because “the prospect of skilled legal or medical advice for 2d (1d for postage and 1d to buy the paper) must have been an almost irresistible bargain when a doctor’s fee was already a guinea.” Dunton said he heard from a variety of people, from aristocrats and clergymen to prisoners.
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