ABSTRACT
One of the questions that strikes most people when they see a copy of the Athenian Mercury for the first time is: were any of the questions in the text real? Some contemporaries in the 1690s were no less skeptical than today, and raised doubts at the time as to whether the periodical was truly representing readers’ letters in print. This chapter directly addresses this most problematic aspect of the Athenian Mercury when using the text as a historical source. It presents the hypothesis that at least some letters were authentic, although it is usually difficult to say precisely which ones. There is unfortunately no thrilling cache of original letters to the Athenian Society against which to compare the printed text. Separating out fact from fiction becomes an increasingly difficult task in printed sources from the late-seventeenth century, particularly given the emergence of hybridized literary forms, and the popularity of pseudo-autobiographical narratives at the time.1 It matters, however, that the Athenian Mercury was not just a prototype epistolary novel, written in solitude by an unidentified Grub Street hack in a garret, but a randomly mutating social document, pored over and compiled collaboratively in coffee houses. The hypothesis presented here is that the periodical was composed by many authors, and developed week-on-week, shaped by the exercise of editorial control and actual inquiries from readers. There can be no doubt that one of Dunton’s greatest achievements was to devise a new literary genre, the question-andanswer periodical, which comprised some of the earliest examples of firstperson narrative. But the Athenian Mercury was more than this: it was a deeply-woven text, that interacted with, and was influenced by, the social circumstances of its own particular community of readers.
