Seven words on the front page of the Herald, signed with names borrowed from Tennyson.
Transcribed from original newspaper scans. Published by AseeksB.
ELAINE WILL ADDRESS LANCELOT AS REquested.
| Newspaper | New York Herald, New York, New York |
|---|---|
| Date | November 29, 1874, image 1 of the scanned issue (no printed page number) |
| Written by | A woman, as Elaine |
| Addressed to | One man, as Lancelot |
| Where | By private arrangement |
In Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which was widely read at the time, Elaine dies of her unreturned love for Lancelot, whose heart belongs to Guinevere. Whoever chose these names chose a story with a warning in it. Borrowed names like these let two people correspond in public without being identified. For more on how fiction and the personal column fed each other, see Personal Ads in Literature.
Public domain in the United States: published before 1931.
Transcribed from the page image and checked against the original; spelling and punctuation are as printed, and words broken across lines are rejoined. The last word is broken across two lines in the original, with the capitals ending at the line break; the capitalization is kept as printed. Capital letters are also as printed: papers set the first line of each ad in capitals, so the capitals stop wherever that line ended, sometimes in the middle of a word.
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