In Katharine Whitehorn’s recent memoir, Selective Memory, she relates the story of a colleague on a women’s magazine in the 1950s, lumbered with an astrology column. While subscribers to this magazine doubtless clustered in the works canteen to read their stars aloud, back at the office a cheerfully unqualified person flitted from desk to desk with a notebook, saying, “Ooh, you’re a Scorpio, aren’t you? What would you like to happen to you this week?”

Reading Tanith Carey’s compilation of agony-aunt advice from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, I was continually distracted by thoughts of that shockingly cynical astrology person playing fast and loose with the happiness of unsuspecting readers. “But who wrote this?” I kept writing in the margin, impatiently. In 1908, for example, a woman is advised (over disputes with her bad-tempered husband): “Make him regret his temper but do not humiliate him. Men seldom forgive that offence.” It sounds like the wisdom of female experience. Alternatively, it could just be written by a bloke.

Alarm bells ring whenever an “aunt” admits personal details such as, “I’ve had my hair bobbed myself!” Were the “aunts” usually a team of people pretending to be one person? Were they women? Above all, how many of these ­letters were likely to have been made up in the office? I wanted to know a lot more, too, about the publications Carey consulted. Also, does she realise that all the letters from Punch are spoofs? But it’s in the nature of a book like this to raise extraneous questions.

Most of these questions are, unfortunately, beyond the remit of Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe. Its main concern is to demonstrate the way changes in social and moral attitudes have been reflected, down the years, in agony-aunt advice. So, in a fascinating section on personal appearance, readers ask in the late-19th century how they can change their noses, taper their fingers to a fine point, grow taller, and so on. Over time, the advice changes from the astonishingly unscientific (and stupid), “Buy a nose-straightening machine! Squeeze your fingers into special tiny thimbles, available by post! Lie in bed a lot longer!”, to the supportive, namby-pamby sort of thing we would see today, viz: “Good heavens, you silly goose. Don’t think about these negative things. You are probably absolutely lovely the way you are.”

In 1899, The Girl’s Best Friend tells its readers that “a girl friend” has recently got rid of the wrinkles on her forehead by tying tape round her head (“fairly tightly”) every night before going to bed. Obviously, to contemporary readers some of the advice seems daft and even dangerous, but at least it is refreshingly unafraid of harshness. “I have very little patience with such as you, ‘Lottie’,” begins one 1919 reply in Polly’s Paper (which goes on to call Lottie “very wicked” for two-timing her soldier boyfriend). In 1855, The London Journal tells us that, “Lavina must be more retiring, think less of herself, and learn to spell better.” Without being given even a scrap of supporting evidence, you can’t help thinking she probably should.

Obviously the book is aimed at modern readers who will get a laugh from old-fashioned advice such as, “Two months is rather early days for kissing, isn’t it? You would do well to slow down and save your kisses until they are acceptable.” We are also bound to gasp with pleasurable horror as mothers are advised to tie toddlers down in their cots; girls are told that if men have attacked them they must have brought it on themselves; and a boy has to be dropped because he is “half-caste”. In 1935, a reader asks Lucky Star whether it’s true that, “if by repeatedly looking at a picture, my unborn baby will resemble it”, and she’s told, yes, that’s perfectly true, actually.

But then, every so often, there will be a piece of excellent good sense that speaks across the years. “Don’t have photographs taken together on your wedding trip,” says Cosy Corner in 1908. “You are bound to look ridiculous. You will think so yourself when you examine those photographs a few years later.”

Principally, Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe tells us a lot about the secret worries of ordinary people, at a time when it was harder to share those concerns with friends and family. It hardly needs saying that the enterprise is cracked from the start: an inadequately summarised personal problem (possibly invented) is ruled upon by an unaccountable pseudonymous writer (possibly misrepresenting his gender), mainly so that the prurient interest of others can be exploited for short-term commercial gain. It’s not ideal, is it? For me, though, the main interest of this book remains in how it testifies to the once great and glorious power of print — turning the fallible advice of journalists into a kind of holy writ.

Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe by Tanith Carey
Boxtree £9.99 pp240

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