The Agony & the ecstacy
In the 1930s when the Manchester Evening News introduced its first ‘agony’ column, the pages were presided over by Jane Dawson, a calm and unflappable bastion of ‘mature wisdom’. Except that Jane Dawson did not exist. The real ‘Voice of Experience’ was a petrified cub reporter called Dorothy who was, by her own admission, ‘quite incapable of managing even her own love affairs’. The column was a howling success.
Dorothy’s story was one of the inspirations for my new novel, We That Are Left: after the Great War one of my main characters, Jessica Melville, finds herself working as an agony aunt, a job for which she is perhaps even less qualified than Dorothy. Before I embarked on further research I had, foolishly perhaps, assumed that such a situation was the exception rather than the rule. I was sorely mistaken. While the bitterest blow was the discovery that Jackie magazine’s Cathy and Claire, whose advice I had devoured in my early adolescence, had never existed (a shock from which I am still recovering), the painful truth is that, ever since agony aunts were first dreamed up back in 1691, they have seldom been who they seem.
John Dunton, a printer and bookseller, had the idea for a ‘problem page’ when he was struggling with an adulterous love affair and unable to gain advice without revealing his identity: The Athenian Mercury ran for six years, with advice given by ‘The Athenian Society’, a learned-sounding name for a motley group of Dunton’s friends. The counsel they offered made Cathy and Claire look like a couple of maiden aunts: one old woman facing a lonely old age was directed to dash for the docks when the ships came in and score herself a sexstarved sailor.
Eighty years later, Eliza Haywood, editor of The Female Spectator, as befitted a writer of romantic fiction, let her imagination go further, responding to her bulging postbag in the guise of four imaginary agony aunts: young Euphrosine, the beautiful accomplished daughter of a wealthy merchant; the ‘harmoniously married’ Mira, witty town sophisticate; the wise Widow of Quality who had ‘not buried her vivacity in the tomb’; and the grande dame, the Female Spectator who ‘never was a beauty’ but had a lifetime of experience. Clearly a control freak, she not only adopted all four personas, she often wrote the original letters.
At least she was largely sympathetic to her readers’ difficulties. The Victorian agony aunts were an altogether more brutal lot – writing anonymously, without even the pretence of a warm persona, their advice was frequently more of a slap around the face than an arm around the shoulders. Fittingly many of the magazines were ‘fiction weeklies’, publishing stories of high moral tone in serial form. The agony pages were no different, dismissing distressed correspondents as ‘foolish and weak’ or ‘vain, heartless and vulgar-minded’.
A girl in 1919, unable to choose between her soldier sweetheart and another beau, was accused by Polly’s Paper of being ‘very wicked… I hope neither boy will get you in the end. If they do, I shall pity whichever it is.’
It was only with the advent of the 1960s that agony aunts reinvented themselves as real people with real opinions of their own. Frank and open, women like Claire Rayner, Irma Kurtz, Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn broke taboos and pioneered the idea of honest friendship and support. They were pioneering in other ways too: Proops was a government advisor on sex education policy and single motherhood, while Raeburn talked about sex on the radio as though she were discussing the weather.
Yet those days seem as remote as the 1923 days of ‘Betty of Brum’ who, unable to choose between three young men, was accused of being a ‘hateful little hussy’.
It seems we no longer want our agony aunts to be like us. Instead they fall mostly into two distinct categories: the professional doctors and psychologists favoured by the more serious magazines, including The Lady’s own Patricia Marie, a trained counsellor, and the new breed of ‘celebrity’ advisors (I use the term loosely) from Katie Price in OK! to Danny Dyer from EastEnders in Zoo.
Pamela Anderson and Ivana Trump have both hosted successful columns in America. Even Ozzy Osbourne: in his first column in Rolling Stone, he reassured a vertigo sufferer that ‘I thought I had vertigo… I went to the doctor, and he said, “Mr Osbourne, the problem – as far as I can tell – is simply that you’re very, very drunk.’
In a world where the term family doctor is a quaint anachronism, there is no doubt that the experts offer invaluable, if often carefully neutral, advice. And the agony column continues to thrive. Perhaps in the end, it is the agony and not the aunt that attracts us. Perhaps the lasting appeal of problem pages is less the support or solutions they offer than the comfort of knowing that other people’s problems are worse than our own.
Email Patricia Marie on patricia.marie@lady.co.uk or write to the usual Bedford Street address.
We That Are Left, by Clare Clark (Harvill Secker, £16.99).
Dorothy’s story was one of the inspirations for my new novel, We That Are Left: after the Great War one of my main characters, Jessica Melville, finds herself working as an agony aunt, a job for which she is perhaps even less qualified than Dorothy. Before I embarked on further research I had, foolishly perhaps, assumed that such a situation was the exception rather than the rule. I was sorely mistaken. While the bitterest blow was the discovery that Jackie magazine’s Cathy and Claire, whose advice I had devoured in my early adolescence, had never existed (a shock from which I am still recovering), the painful truth is that, ever since agony aunts were first dreamed up back in 1691, they have seldom been who they seem.
John Dunton, a printer and bookseller, had the idea for a ‘problem page’ when he was struggling with an adulterous love affair and unable to gain advice without revealing his identity: The Athenian Mercury ran for six years, with advice given by ‘The Athenian Society’, a learned-sounding name for a motley group of Dunton’s friends. The counsel they offered made Cathy and Claire look like a couple of maiden aunts: one old woman facing a lonely old age was directed to dash for the docks when the ships came in and score herself a sexstarved sailor.
Eighty years later, Eliza Haywood, editor of The Female Spectator, as befitted a writer of romantic fiction, let her imagination go further, responding to her bulging postbag in the guise of four imaginary agony aunts: young Euphrosine, the beautiful accomplished daughter of a wealthy merchant; the ‘harmoniously married’ Mira, witty town sophisticate; the wise Widow of Quality who had ‘not buried her vivacity in the tomb’; and the grande dame, the Female Spectator who ‘never was a beauty’ but had a lifetime of experience. Clearly a control freak, she not only adopted all four personas, she often wrote the original letters.
At least she was largely sympathetic to her readers’ difficulties. The Victorian agony aunts were an altogether more brutal lot – writing anonymously, without even the pretence of a warm persona, their advice was frequently more of a slap around the face than an arm around the shoulders. Fittingly many of the magazines were ‘fiction weeklies’, publishing stories of high moral tone in serial form. The agony pages were no different, dismissing distressed correspondents as ‘foolish and weak’ or ‘vain, heartless and vulgar-minded’.
A girl in 1919, unable to choose between her soldier sweetheart and another beau, was accused by Polly’s Paper of being ‘very wicked… I hope neither boy will get you in the end. If they do, I shall pity whichever it is.’
It was only with the advent of the 1960s that agony aunts reinvented themselves as real people with real opinions of their own. Frank and open, women like Claire Rayner, Irma Kurtz, Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn broke taboos and pioneered the idea of honest friendship and support. They were pioneering in other ways too: Proops was a government advisor on sex education policy and single motherhood, while Raeburn talked about sex on the radio as though she were discussing the weather.
Yet those days seem as remote as the 1923 days of ‘Betty of Brum’ who, unable to choose between three young men, was accused of being a ‘hateful little hussy’.
It seems we no longer want our agony aunts to be like us. Instead they fall mostly into two distinct categories: the professional doctors and psychologists favoured by the more serious magazines, including The Lady’s own Patricia Marie, a trained counsellor, and the new breed of ‘celebrity’ advisors (I use the term loosely) from Katie Price in OK! to Danny Dyer from EastEnders in Zoo.
Pamela Anderson and Ivana Trump have both hosted successful columns in America. Even Ozzy Osbourne: in his first column in Rolling Stone, he reassured a vertigo sufferer that ‘I thought I had vertigo… I went to the doctor, and he said, “Mr Osbourne, the problem – as far as I can tell – is simply that you’re very, very drunk.’
In a world where the term family doctor is a quaint anachronism, there is no doubt that the experts offer invaluable, if often carefully neutral, advice. And the agony column continues to thrive. Perhaps in the end, it is the agony and not the aunt that attracts us. Perhaps the lasting appeal of problem pages is less the support or solutions they offer than the comfort of knowing that other people’s problems are worse than our own.
Email Patricia Marie on patricia.marie@lady.co.uk or write to the usual Bedford Street address.
We That Are Left, by Clare Clark (Harvill Secker, £16.99).