Bad advice

Author Tanith Carey looks back to a less sentimental age

ANYONE WHO WRITES to an agony aunt these days can usually expect wise words of comfort and clear impartial advice.

Yet the sympathetic agony aunt is really a modern phenomenon.

Before society got touchy-feely, if you wrote to a problem page you were just as likely to get a withering put-down and a verbal bucket of cold water.

My book Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe harks back to the days when these grands dames saw it as their job, not to soothe a suffering correspondent, but to uphold the nation’s moral standards.

From advice on the immorality of reading a crime novel or riding a bike to Sunday school, etiquette and how to make a boy into a man, it’s an icy-cold counterblast for all of us more used to the politically correct advice of today.

To a young girl accosted on her way to work by a cad, 1859: ‘Mary Jane is a young shop girl and is often accosted on her way to and from her employment by a young man, in a Spanish cloak, with moustachios and a long beard, who hints that he is a nobleman in disguise, and tries to make love to her clandestinely. “Mary Jane” should tell her mother, and take her advice. Noblemen in disguise are seldom met but in novels; and a cloak more often conceals a rent than a star.’ The Weekly Magazine

To a correspondent who wants some advice on how to lose weight, 1893: ‘Intellectual studies are being advised by modern doctors; and these say that to visit museums is as good an anti-fat exercise as to climb the Alps.’ Journal Des Modes

To “FP” who wants to know what to wear while riding a bicycle, 1897. ‘No, I do not approve of plaid and coloured-stripe stockings for bicycling. I think them vulgar in the extreme. They should be of the same colour of the shoes, black white or brown.’ Home Companion

To a young woman wishing to join a male friend on a canoeing trip, 1895: ‘It surprises us to find that a girl sufficiently educated to write and spell well should be so deplorably ignorant of the common rules of society to think that she may go out alone with a young man in his canoe.’ Girls’ Own Paper

To a fiancée who who has not heard from her sweetheart for some time, 1862. ‘You write about a 14 years courtship and complain that for a long time the dawdling swain has not replied to your letters. The sensible course for you would be consider him dead, or married, or if neither, not worth having.’ The London Journal

To a man concerned about whether cycling is a sin, 1885: ‘If it is the only means of reaching the church on Sunday it may be excusable. On the other hand, if walking or riding in the usual way is discarded for the sake of the exercise or exhilaration bicycle riding affords, it is clearly wrong.’ Home Companion

To a school girl claiming she’s fallen in love, 1933: ‘Fiddlesticks and nonsense!….At your age, you ought to be thinking about your ‘House’, winning the Hockey match, or the conjugation of the verb to be.’

To a mother who wants to knows: “Do you believe that petting a child is bad for it? 1929: ‘Yes, decidedly I do. A child gets very much attached to Mother (or Nurse) who feeds and baths it. It should be the mother’s aim to prevent the child getting too attached to her and fondling the child has the opposite effect. The child who gets all this fondling is always looking for it in everybody and is miserable without it. The adult who is always recounting his ills and looking for sympathy is the outcome of too much coddling in childhood. That is why psychologists say too much mother-love is harmful.’ Modern Woman.

To “Betty Blue Eyes” who fears her fiancé will find her a fraud, 1924. ‘Well, you are a silly girl to suppose your sweetheart is as blind as all that. Of course he knows your teeth are false already.’ Every Girl’s Paper

To a woman who boasts she has managed to manipulate her husband into doing the washing up in 1929: ‘ I have difficult replying civilly because (you) , who is so proud of her conduct, ought to be ashamed of it You are an imposter of the worst kind. In my opinion there are plenty of criminals who are serving sentences who are not half so wicked.’ The Family Friend

To a boy whose father forbids him to smoke at home, 1959: ‘I’d have a talk with your mother… Your mother might bring him round!’

ENDS

Tanith Carey started her career in national newspapers at the Daily Mirror in the days when Marje Proops was still the paper’s legendary agony aunt. She went on become the paper’s Woman’s Editor, Features Editor and NY correspondent but has never lost her fascination with the women who long reigned over the problem pages. Tanith now writes books as well as features and opinion features for wide range of national newspapers and magazines, ranging from the Guardian to Grazia and the Huffington Post.