The world’s first agony aunts were, in fact, three uncles. A ramshackle, innovative bookseller and publisher, John Dunton, then aged thirty-two, decided in spring 1691 to launch a bold new venture: a competitively priced broadsheet called the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury (known, for short, as the Athenian Mercury). In what Dunton described as his ‘question project’, readers were invited to submit for consideration queries on any topic to an anonymous group of allegedly learned men, the Athenian Society, who met at Smith’s Coffee House to deliberate their responses before publishing them. The club consisted in its entirety of Dunton and his brothers-in-law Samuel Wesley and Richard Sault, although their associate Dr John Norris made occasional contributions too. 

Success was both immediate and enduring. The first request for queries, on 17 March 1691, provoked so many replies that Dunton was quickly compelled to turn his weekly periodical into a biweekly paper appearing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Each issue included between eight and twelve questions and answers. Dunton subsequently published bound collections of back issues with indexes, allowing readers to search for subjects of special interest to them.

Correspondents seem to have asked the Athenian Society about pretty much anything and everything, ranging from science and religion to technical aspects of warfare and the niceties of legal disputes, inheritance and employment (the editors understandably tried to avoid politics). But the questions to which Mary Beth Norton is especially