Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the brink of extinction by the rise of dating apps.
This is a pity. ‘The personals’ were a voyeuristic delight. Even if you weren’t looking for love, you still read them. They could be tragic, comic, or both – like this one placed in an 1832 edition of the Dorset County Chronicle: ‘My wife has been dead 12 months ago, last Shroton Fair. I want a good steady woman for a wife. I do not want a second family. I want a woman to look after the pigs while I am out at work.’
His was a straightforward request, clearly stated. But quite often the ads were keyholes through which whole melodramas might be glimpsed. In 1788, the Hibernian Telegraph carried an ad placed by an elderly man who wished to marry ‘a healthy pregnant widow’ in order, he went on to explain, to disinherit a nephew who had behaved ‘in a manner unpardonable’.
But whatever an individual’s situation, the goal was the same: to find the right person. Today’s apps do this by means of filters via which you can choose age, height, income, etc. No doubt this is effective in its way.
Anyone, though, can fill in an online form and let the algorithm do its work. The harder task for the writer of a printed ad was to distil their hopes and dreams into just a few lines. Some of the most entertaining lonely hearts are those which, instead of merely claiming a ‘GSOH’, actually have a go at displaying one, as in: ‘Good looking, athletic, movie star millionaire seeks gullible stunner.’
Publications naturally attracted ads formed in their own image, so the ‘Eye Love’ column in Private Eye, for example, tended to specialise in the pithy: ‘Have penis – will travel.’ (That was the whole ad.) Another ended: ‘No vicious spinsters!’ There was a whole sub-genre of humorous personals that riffed on the idea that, if you needed to place an ad at all, you must be a hopeless loser: ‘Tell me I’m pretty, then watch me cling,’ warned one woman in the London Review of Books.
As Francesca Beauman points out in her history of the lonely heart, Shapely Ankle Preferr’d, publishers were well aware of how entertaining lonely hearts could be. She suggests that the man who, in 1786, advertised in the Times for a female companion to help him with ‘an incurable weakness in the knees occasioned by the kick of an Ostrich’ may have been made up by editors to keep the readership entertained. The fact that personal ads sold papers was also not lost on the lady who later asked in hers: ‘Why are we writing magazine copy for them?’
While many lonely hearts amused, others reflected the desperate times in which they were written. This 1915 ad still has the power to shock: ‘Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’
Discussing this ad in a letter to her fiancé, Vera Brittain speculated that the woman did ‘not want to face the dreariness of an unattached old-maidenhood’. But then, the ad was not meant for her. Suitable gentlemen might have discerned other motives at play, including a noble sense of Christian or patriotic duty, sympathy, or simple niceness.
Brittain wondered if the lady received any replies. My guess is she got a sackful.
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