Personal ads date to the 1690s. Fiction has been reading them for more than a century. Why the form keeps turning into literature, and three ads opera never got around to writing.
Every few years, the internet rediscovers the same joke: what would famous characters write in a dating profile? Barnes & Noble did it in 2014, with Gatsby, Miss Havisham, and Emma Bovary each making their case. Penguin gave the treatment to Raskolnikov and Dracula. For the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death in 2017, the BBC imagined her characters on dating apps, and the video reportedly drew 5.1 million Facebook views. Teachers assign the exercise to students. It never seems to wear out.
It is usually presented as a modern gag, literature meets the swipe. It is not. Fiction has been reading the personals for as long as there have been personals, and the reason the joke keeps working is older than any app: the personal ad is the most compressed form of characterization ever invented. In a few lines, a person has to say who they are, what they want, and who they want it from. Novelists spend chapters on less.
The ad usually cited as the first in English appeared on July 19, 1695, in John Houghton’s London weekly A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. A gentleman “about 30 years of age,” with what he called a very good estate, wanted to meet a young gentlewoman with a fortune of around 300 pounds, and promised a settlement to her satisfaction. That is the entire text, more or less, and it is already a portrait. An age, a boast, a price, a type of reader. You can hear the man clearing his throat.
Notice what the ad does that a modern profile rarely bothers with: it names its reader. Not “anyone,” but a young gentlewoman of a particular means. For most of the form’s history, the address was written into the ad itself, because print gave the writer no other way to choose who was listening.
By the Victorian era, the personal notices at the top of The Times of London had a nickname. The “agony column” was already in print by 1853, a front-page run of messages to estranged lovers, missing relatives, and friends who had to be reached without anyone else understanding. Many were in code. Readers followed them the way people now follow a stranger’s thread, trying to reconstruct the story from its fragments. Specialist papers followed: The Matrimonial News, founded in London in 1870, ran for a quarter of a century on nothing but ads from people looking for a spouse.
Writers noticed. Sherlock Holmes treats the agony columns as essential reading, and in “The Adventure of the Red Circle” (1911) a whole case turns on them. Turning the pages of the Daily Gazette, Holmes delivers the best description the form has ever had:
Among the groans he finds a sequence of messages signed only “G.” The first reads: “Be patient. Will find some sure means of communications. Meanwhile, this column. G.” A few issues later comes a signal, and finally a set of directions: “High red house with white stone facings. Third floor. Second window left. After dusk. G.” Read in order, the notices are a love story in four lines, a couple separated by danger and talking to each other in public, in front of every reader of the paper, none of whom can follow. Doyle used the device more than once. In “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a spy ring trades messages through the personal column of the Daily Telegraph. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes baits a murderer with a found notice for a wedding ring, placed in every paper in London.
In 1916, Earl Derr Biggers, later the creator of Charlie Chan, went further and built an entire novel on the form. The Agony Column opens at breakfast in the Carlton in London, in the summer of 1914. A young American man notices a young American woman reading the Daily Mail’s personal column, and since there is no one to introduce them, he places an ad in the same column, addressed to “the young woman who preferred grapefruit to strawberries.”
She answers in the column, and her reply is the most modern thing in the book. He may write to her once a day for seven days, to prove that he is an interesting person worth knowing. Then she will decide. The rest of the novel is his seven letters, each one an escalating attempt to be worth answering.
More than a century later, that is still the deal a good personal ad offers. The writer says who they are and who they hope is reading. The reader decides whether to answer. Nothing happens unless both sides choose it.
The form found an American capital in New York. The historian Pamela Epstein’s study of the commercialization of intimacy in 19th-century America follows the New York Herald’s front-page Personals, which ran from roughly 1867 to 1907. It began as a fairly open forum where strangers in a crowded city could reach one another. Over the decades it filled with fraudulent matrimonial agencies and thinly disguised sex work, critics took to calling it the Red Light Column, and the Herald eventually dropped it. A popular public board, overrun by the people it was never meant for, shut down rather than fixed. The internet’s version a century later had different causes, since Craigslist closed its personals in 2018 under the legal risk created by a new federal law, but the shape rhymes closely enough that it is worth reading the two side by side. We traced the modern version in What Happened to Craigslist Personals?
New York also gave the personal ad its most famous screen role. In Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), a bored suburban housewife reads the personals in a city tabloid the way other people read serial fiction, and one recurring ad, headed with the words that became the film’s title, sets a meeting in Battery Park. She goes to watch, and her life comes apart in the best way. The film works because everyone who has ever read the personals recognizes the impulse. Other people’s stated wants are among the most compelling things in print.
The strangest chapter belongs to a literary magazine. In 1998, the London Review of Books began running personal ads, started by its advertising director, David Rose. He imagined a quiet column matching lovers of Austen and Hardy. What he got instead, as he later told NPR, was something far sillier, and far better: dry, self-mocking, wildly specific ads from readers competing to be the most memorable voice in a very small space. They were good enough to be collected into books, first They Call Me Naughty Lola in 2006 and then Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland.
That is the tell. Dating profiles rarely get collected into books. People collected those ads because the constraints forced voice: a strict word count, a real audience, and a reason to be read by exactly the right person rather than everybody.
Put a character into a personal ad and something happens that fiction usually delays. The character has to state their desire plainly, on the first page, to a stranger. Gatsby cannot spend a whole novel not saying what he wants; the ad makes him say it. That compression is why the character-profile pieces are funny, and it is also why real personal ads, the good ones, read like the opening of a story. Opera understood this long before the internet. An aria is a character stopping the plot to announce, at full volume, exactly what they want.
Which raises an obvious gap. The internet has written dating profiles for half the characters in English literature. We couldn’t find a sustained series of personal ads for opera characters. So, in the spirit of the form:
In Tchaikovsky’s opera, which premiered in 1879, Tatiana writes Onegin exactly this kind of unsolicited declaration, in the famous Letter Scene. He answers with a lecture. Three acts later, he would give anything to have that letter back.
Bizet gave Carmen her Habanera as an entrance aria, and it is effectively her ad: the terms, stated up front, to anyone within earshot. Every man on stage hears them. One of them fails to believe her.
His assistant, Leporello, does keep the list, and in the Catalogue Aria he reads it out to one of the Don’s former conquests: 640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and in Spain, 1,003. It is the most honest dating profile in the repertoire, and the least romantic, because it counts everyone and addresses no one.
Look back over three centuries of these ads, real and invented, and one habit survives every change of medium. The best ones name who they are for. Houghton’s gentleman wanted a young gentlewoman of means. Biggers’s hero wrote to the woman who chose grapefruit. Tatiana wrote to one man. The address is part of the voice.
On AseeksB, the address also does real work: you choose who can see each post by gender and age range, and Supporters can set distance too, so an ad written for someone in particular can be shown only to the audience it was written for. Plenty of people still write their reader into the text anyway, because that is what the form sounds like when it is done well. If you want to try your hand at it, our guide to writing a personal ad that sounds like you starts with one true detail. The rest is the same challenge Biggers’s strawberry man faced: be worth answering.
Say who you are, what you want, and who it is for. Choose exactly who can see it, and let the right reader answer. Free on iOS and Android.
The Victorian nickname for the personal notices at the top of the front page of The Times of London, already in print by 1853. It carried messages to estranged lovers, missing relatives and friends, often in code. The phrase later came to mean an advice column, which is where the term agony aunt comes from.
Yes. In The Adventure of the Red Circle (1911), Holmes follows a sequence of coded messages in the Daily Gazette’s agony column. In The Bruce-Partington Plans, a spy ring communicates through the Daily Telegraph’s personal column, and in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes places a found notice for a wedding ring in every London paper.
The ad usually cited as the first in English appeared on July 19, 1695, in John Houghton’s London weekly A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. A gentleman of about 30 with a good estate sought a young gentlewoman with a fortune of around 300 pounds.
The Agony Column (1916) by Earl Derr Biggers. It opens with a young American in London placing an ad in the Daily Mail’s personal column to reach a woman he saw at breakfast. She replies in the column that he may write to her once a day for seven days, and the novel is made up of his letters.
AseeksB is a free, text-first personal ads app for iOS and Android. You write what you are looking for in your own words and choose who can see each post by gender and age range. An optional Supporter upgrade adds distance targeting and other extras.