If you haven't had the good fortune of running across Pam Epstein's little corner of the Interweb, I highly recommend popping your nose in and peaking around.  She has amassed an impressive collection of personal ads culled from mid-nineteenth century newspapers, and her ruminations on their meanings and origins are always an interesting read.

These ads offer us a narrow window through which we can steal a brief glimpse into the lives of men and women who, for whatever reason, took their search for love and companionship to the relatively new venue of the newspaper personal ads.  These are people who laughed, cried, loved, lost, fought, bled, and who, let's not forget, have long been cold in their graves.  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, gentle reader, for theirs was a fate that awaits us all.

Pam was kind enough to answer some of the questions I lobbed her way about her copious collection of funny, strange, poignant, and sometimes just plain bizarre (uh, below, for example) personal ads from the nineteenth century.  

I love your Victorian-era personal ads. They're often compelling little puzzles, and I love how you let us in as you try to figure them out. Yet it seems that you have your eyes on the forest, and you're just showing us some of your favorite, more interesting trees.

I gather that we're just seeing glimpses of your primary sources for a larger dissertation. What's the big picture?

What a great way of putting it; yes, indeed, I am just showing you my favorite (or more accurately, my most interesting) trees. The ads I feature here are, for the most part, actually only applicable to two chapters out of my dissertation.

My project itself is titled "Selling Love: The Commercialization of Intimacy in America, 1860-1910." As you can see from the title, the idea behind it is exploring the ways that an expanding consumer and commercially-oriented culture affected love and marriage. So in the chapter where I discuss the matrimonial ads, I talk about the way that people were starting to integrate the market economy in their personal lives - for example, by advertising for a spouse.

The chapter in which I talk about the "correspondence" and "missed connection" ads is a little different. That's more the reverse - I talk about how newspapers used these little ads in much the same way that I do: as entertainment. The personals column became very popular reading, and several newspapers really capitalized on that (literally "selling love").

The other two chapters are about matrimonial agencies (which worked much like eHarmony does today), and about an obscenity case against one of the newspapers that printed personals columns.

And overall, a sort of overreaching theme in the entire dissertation is the importance of money in these relationships - conscious or not - and how it shaped decisions by the newspapers and by the people using these kinds of ads.

Do you have any sense of where the idea for personal ads originally germinated? Today it seems entirely reasonable for a newspaper to have a page devoted to personal ads and for craigslist to have flourishing "missed connection" and "casual encounters" sections, but this must have been a fairly novel and scandalous idea in 1860.

Before I get to the real question, I want to address the second thing you said, which is that it's "entirely reasonable" to have personals and missed connections. I don't think it's quite that easy. Nothing new in history is entirely reasonable until we're in the midst of it. How many people do you know who said they would never, ever, ever use online dating and now do, or who thought it was only for losers and now have best friends who found their SOs online? I sure do. I don't think you're wrong that these things are reasonable, because they are, but it's important to understand that they are reasonable because we've adjusted to them, not because they are inherently "to be expected" in this day and age. Does that make sense?

Totally. I remember in middle school seeing posters at the movie theater for a movie called "Single White Female." I was only 12, but I knew if was a reference to personal ads. It's something that has become a part of our cultural landscape.

I'd forgotten about "SWF," that's true. And there's also of course one of my favorite movies, "Desperately Seeking Susan." But - I'm a historian, we're not allowed to take anything for granted. =)

Anyway, to answer your actual question, unfortunately no one knows the actual origin. I believe the first personal anyone's found is from 1780 or thereabouts in England - but where he got the idea is anyone's guess. That being said, you do see an increase in them starting in the 1850s and really big time in the 1860s, and I do think you can draw some definite conclusions about why that happened. First, in the 1830s you have the development of the "penny press" in New York, which were the first newspapers to gain most of their revenue from advertising rather than from subscriptions and/or high purchase price. So you see a new venue to provide a space for such ads.

More importantly, though, the ads themselves develop because of population growth in urban areas. Cities grew enormously in the 19th century. So suddenly you have a lot of people for the first time being surrounded by more strangers than people they knew. You live in a small town, everyone knows everyone else, you meet other young people at the one school in the village, or at church socials, or you're introduced through your aunt's best friend's cousin to her daughter. In big cities it was MUCH harder to meet people because you really lack those ties. And you also have these very strict rules of etiquette preventing (middle-class) men and women to meet without formal introductions. Women didn't work, or if they did they worked in sex-segregated industries, so it's not like today where plenty of people I know met their SOs at their jobs.

And since people are getting more used to the idea of a "consumer culture" rather than a "producer" one (i.e., farmers and individual artisans), they're used to seeing advertising in their everyday lives. Find a servant, find a place to live, why not find a spouse?

The correspondence ads are a little different - where those come from is a little less easy to explain. I think they're a function of how difficult it was to communicate with people secretly (letters would be seen; no phones, email, etc). But why people thought to take out ads - I don't know.

Now, this kind of thing was NOT widely accepted, and it WAS shocking, and most Americans weren't using personal ads. But to the extent that they did, I think these are some of the reasons.

So, you had an op-ed in the New York Times over Valentine's Day weekend. That must have been pretty awesome, eh? How'd that come about?

So, yeah, the op-ed was really wonderful and exciting. What actually happened is that I submitted on op-ed back in July about the Mark Sanford affair, in which I compared his emails to the personals. I'd written a blog post about that here,  and it occurred to me afterward that the Times might be interested in something along those lines. They really liked it, but didn't have space, so suggested I get back in touch around Valentine's Day. So I did, and they actually accepted it! And then they even paid me for it, which was kind of incredible. It wasn't much, but still pretty cool. I took a picture of the check before I cashed it!

That's awesome. When I was eight I had my picture in the local paper for a story about the opening of a new minigolf course in our town, so I totally know what that feels like. :)

Do you have any sense of how well Victorian era personal ads worked? Have you collected any success stories of people finding love through the newspaper?

Unfortunately, no. I do have a few examples of people who responded to personals, and some anecdotal evidence that people married through them - journalists who wrote about the ads and talked about couples they'd heard of. I also have found some marriage announcements in local newspapers. But this is the sort of thing that's almost impossible to find out unless you get really lucky and run across personal letters.

I personally believe that they must have met with success, however. There are ads of this type for decades, and you don't see a trend like this last that long if it's not working. I even found an etiquette manual that includes a sample answer to a matrimonial advertisement. So as far as individuals go, it's really hard to say. But did it work? It must have done.

This might be the impossible question, but do you have a favorite ad?

Not impossible at all - I do have a favorite ad. It is here.

Though these two run a close second/third.

Be sure to check out Pam's regularly updated OS Blog, as well as her website advertisingforlove.com. Thanks, Pam!