How Victorian ads shaped fiction

JACQUELYN SUNDBERG AND NATHALIE COOK

Durban — How familiar are you with the Victorian-era newspaper feature known as the Agony Column?

Anonymous personal advertisements made up the column in the mid- to late-19th century. Authors sometimes coded them using numbered ciphers and pseudonyms.

Although the column no longer exists as it did in the 19th century, our research has documented how private messages on this public forum have had an enduring impact on fiction, entertainment and popular culture.

Encryption gave authors the ability to share private messages in a public forum. Personal dramas unfolding there meant the Agony Column was widely popular.

In 1881, editor Alice Clay wrote: “Most of the advertisements … show a curious phase of life, interesting to an observer of human existence and human eccentricities. They are veiled in an air of mystery … but at the same time give a clue unmistakable to those for whom they were intended.”

Ads were dubbed “the agonies” by 1853 because they were full of longing, tragedy and misfortune shadowing the Victorian domestic everyday. They occupied prime real estate in the second column on the front page of The Times.

Messages featured voices of desperate parents, forlorn lovers and savvy detectives. Many were published anonymously or under pseudonyms, making it impossible for most readers to know who wrote them.

As interest grew, the private was increasingly made public. Readers not only followed the episodic narratives, but also worked to crack the most puzzling codes and ciphers.

Detectives and amateur enthusiasts alike followed the drama of the agonies. As Stephen Winkworth wrote in Room Two More Guns: the Intriguing History of the Personal Column of The Times, the Agony Column became “more a meeting-place than a marketplace and a forum where national quirks and characteristics can be expressed, where lovers can make their rendezvous and lost causes can be proclaimed”.

During the Victorian era, fascination with the Agony Column shaped both newspapers and novels.

Elements of sensational stories like the Constance Kent Road Hill House murder from front-page news began to appear in novels like Lady Audley’s Secret.

Original and modern reworkings of Sherlock Holmes contain a plethora of newspaper codes to crack. In the 2020 Netflix film adaptation of Enola Holmes, Holmes’s case-cracking younger sister, Enola, communicates with her missing mother via ciphers.

Far beyond Sherlock and spinoffs, many popular films have had their plots advanced by the personal columns in the newspaper, including Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).

We explore this cultural fascination in the exhibition News and Novel Sensations online through the McGill Library. Our research team scraped 650 000 sentences from the Agony Column of The Times between 1860 and 1879, and over 25 million words from 220 Victorian novels from 1800 to 1920.

Both datasets are available to explore and download on the project web page.

Visitors to the website can explore some of the encrypted stories of The Times in a few unexpected ways, and gain a first-hand glimpse of another era’s print media.

Ignatius Pollaky, the so-called real-life Sherlock Holmes, was known for advertising his own business in the Agony Column and for inserting mysterious notes and messages relating to his cases.

We created a game as part of the exhibit, which allows visitors to track coded clues in the agony columns by following fictionalised detective case notes.

Visitors can experience how the agonies were embedded in the emerging world of detective practice, and experience how the agonies made communicating private messages and plans possible in the newspaper. | The Conversation

Jacquelyn Sundberg is Outreach Librarian, McGill Library, and Nathalie Cooke is Professor, Department of English, McGill University, Canada.

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