Widow, greatly interested in discipline

Stephen Moss reads between the lines of the small ads

I assume HG Cocks exists. His name seems almost too good to be true, for an author who to date has written histories of modern sexuality, Victorian sexuality and now personal columns. When it comes to sex, Cocks is everywhere.

Classified is a slender book, somewhat distended to make even this length. Size isn't everything, of course, but it reflects an uncertainty about the project; Cocks includes 20 pages of footnotes but then in the acknowledgments apologises for not making his effort "33% funnier". Is it history or humour? In the end, it isn't quite either, though many of the ads themselves - and the code you have to crack to understand them - are funny, and Cocks's analysis, though sometimes meandering, is suitably suggestive.

In a brief preface, Cocks traces matrimonial ads back to the 1690s. By the middle of the 18th century the market was booming, and he quotes a splendid example from 1750, from a "Gentleman . . . desirous of altering his condition by marrying a young lady (or Widow who has no child)". From the beginning, it seems, personal ads had a dubious reputation, and this gentleman feels impelled to distance himself from roguery: "Advertisements of this kind are often inserted by Gentlemen for their Diversion; I do therefore declare myself in earnest, and the real foundation of applying in this public Way is a Want of Acquaintance in London sufficient to introduce me in a private one."

Cocks skates over the first two centuries of personals, and doesn't really get turned on until the 1880s, when social networks such as the Wedding Ring Circle, designed to encourage middle-class marriage, started to appear. These, he says, were the late-Victorian equivalent of Facebook, with members swapping messages and photographs through a central clearing-house.

It led, a generation later, to direct person-to-person contact through small ads in a magazine called the Link, which its founder Alfred Barrett called "the only monthly practically devoted to love interests". It was started in 1915 - the social dislocation occasioned by war was surely significant - and was a vehicle for "sporty", "jolly" and "bohemian" young women to meet men, and for "artistic", "musical" and "unconventional" men to meet other men similarly inclined. It was the latter which in 1921 did for Barrett, who, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, was found guilty of corrupting public decency and sent to prison for two years.

Cocks is fascinated by Barrett, but he hasn't been able to dig up a great deal about him and resorts to guesswork, not least about his possible "sexual ambiguity". He has, though, discovered that Barrett lived in Balham, and that could be the key to the proliferation of small ads after the 1880s. With the rapid growth of the suburbs, the Balhamisation of Britain was in full swing by the end of the 19th century: as a result, social life was becoming both more anonymous and more autonomous; the old mating rituals of village and crowded, tightly knit city centre were breaking down; families were less likely to broker marriages.

Combating loneliness was the spur to the growth of magazines specialising in matrimonial and dating ads - and Barrett's main defence at his trial - but there was a seamier side to the personals. Barrett's case was not helped by an ad in the Link from a "Widow (London W), greatly interested in discipline", who, it transpired, kept a brothel. He said he had not known her occupation, and had assumed her interest in discipline reflected an unusual hobby.

The breaking of the Link does not seem to have dealt much of a blow to the rise of personal ads. Nor do the occasional murders of women who had met their killers through them. Cocks details the swelling market for erotica, sold through small ads in magazines such as Pick Me Up and London Life; another burst of matrimonial advertising in the 40s during what he calls the "marriage crisis"; and the spurt in ads placed by swingers and wife-swappers (never husband-swappers) in the 60s. The war with the moralists continued, but despite occasional setbacks the publishers were never quite tied down, and from the early 70s, when, as Cocks says, "the counterculture had gone mainstream", a truce was declared. The sporty girls and artistic men had won and were henceforth given free rein.

Cocks deals with the age of the internet in an epilogue, smartly entitled "This Chapter Will Shortly Be Out of Date". His conclusion is encouraging: the net is not, as early critics feared, being used by people mainly to have cybersex, but is facilitating "offline networking and social interactions". Internet dating differs from the small ads inasmuch as the messages are couched in revealing detail rather than coy code, but it doesn't feel that different from the Link or the lonely Gentleman of 1750, or even, perhaps, the marriage-seekers of the 1690s. We're still just looking for love and sex. Though not necessarily in that order.