ABSTRACT
One of the most surprising aspects of the Athenian Mercury to a twentyfirst century reader is perhaps that sex and personal relationships were discussed in such a forthright way. In many respects, the 1690s appear with hindsight to have been a brief window of opportunity for men and women to read and publicly debate subjects that were to become taboo a century later. Dunton’s periodical shows the remarkable range and flexibility of the questioning process amongst middling and lower sorts at this time, and the openness of contemporary debate about personal behaviour beyond the social elite. Subsequent generations came to regard their ancestors as dangerously risque in this respect. Their censure was encapsulated by the remark of one Victorian reader who studied Dunton’s works; ‘In good sooth, many of these old queries are of a most startling nature, and such as it would be hard to find any one bold enough to ask in the present age, even anonymously’.1 It was not until Marie Stopes campaigned for more openness about family planning in the early twentieth century that ordinary people again had a figurehead to whom they could write in anonymity about their most intimate concerns.2 Dr Stopes, like John Dunton two centuries earlier, realized the hunger for more information about sex and reproduction among the reading public. It took many decades, and many generations of fear and silence, before the inhibitions expressed by Dunton’s Victorian critic could again be challenged.
