These days, friendship, sex or even love is seemingly only a click away. With the internet, it’s never been easier or more convenient to meet those who share your interests, however bizarre or mundane, and even to find the man or woman of your dreams. From Facebook and MySpace to Match.com and Dating Direct, we, at least in the industrialised West, and increasingly elsewhere, are all advertisers now.

At one time, all ads were in the form of short, pithy paragraphs of text, the first of which – a statement of ecclesiastical rules governing the Easter festival – was printed in 1477 by William Caxton. However, ads like these only began to be used to find husbands and wives in the 1690s, around 50 years after the invention of the modern newspaper – the first reference is in the agony column of a periodical called The Athenian Mercury in 1692. By the early 18th century, however, matrimonial advertising was booming.

At first glance, the early advertisements do not seem so different from those that became common in the 20th century. Men looked for wives, women for husbands, and some even looked for unspecified “arrangements”. Such was the popularity of these columns that one young lady in 1777 could even complain that “the mode of advertising is become too general” – although that did not prevent her from placing her own ad, seeking “a man of fashion, honour, and sentiment, blended with good nature, and a noble spirit, such a one she would chuse for her guardian and protector”.

As they have done ever since, these advertisements catered for those slightly at odds with traditional forms of courtship and morality, sometimes women just beyond the customary age of marriage or those distanced from the usual connections of family.

Yet although there were thousands of devotees, the anonymity involved – not to mention the necessity of giving chapter and verse on income and prospects in each ad – lent a mercenary air to the whole enterprise and ensured that it was not quite the done thing in polite society.

At the end of the 19th century, however, the matrimonial ad gained a new prominence and respectability. With much of Britain’s population living in cities by the 1890s, social commentators were becoming concerned that traditional courtship was increasingly outdated. Modern workers, they feared, were spending all their time at the office or in distant suburban lodgings and were finding it hard to meet suitable partners, with the result that some were resorting to the social life of the street and all its illicit temptations. Some respectable journalists, philanthropists and thinkers therefore began to argue that the small ad might be a solution to the difficulties of marriage and the anonymity of modern life.

By the First World War, things had progressed a step further. One journalist, Alfred Barrett, realised that small ads need not serve only those who wanted to marry but also those who were simply looking for companionship. In 1915 he founded The Link, which sought to make this sort of “companionship” advertising stylish and lighthearted rather than earnest, solemn and intellectual. Inevitably, his lonely hearts ads attracted criticism from those worried they were a threat to conventional morality and in a landmark case Barrett’s paper was suppressed in 1921 for “corrupting public morals”.

Looking for a manly Hercules

Alfred Barrett naturally argued that his paper, whose masthead proclaimed it to be “helpful, clean, and straight”, was nothing but honest and safe. But R.A. Bennett, editor of the muck-raking newspaper Truth, and his moralising ilk clearly thought otherwise. He studiously went through The Link’s ten pages with a green pencil and marked what he thought were the most dangerous advertisements, underlining the key words and phrases for the benefit of the police.

The section devoted to women was, he wrote, “frank enough”, as it seemed to promise adventure with all sorts of “sporty” or “jolly” girls, such as the one from “Bohemian Girl, 24”, who was “interested in most things”, and wanted a “man pal”. Ads such as this, Bennett said, looked foolish, but were probably harmless, unlike a number of those placed by men that seemed to be of rather dubious morality and legality. There was, for example, one from “Iolaus…24”, who described himself as “intensely musical” and of a “peculiar temperament”. He had, he said, been “looking for many years for [a] tall, manly Hercules”. Another came from an “Oxonian…26”, also seeking a man pal, who was “brilliant, courteous, humorous, [a] poet, future novelist, in love with beauty despite cosmic insignificance, [and] masculine”.

These coded words, Bennett argued, “speak for themselves as plainly as such an advertisement could”. As he hardly needed to point out, these advertisers were breaking the law, since not only was sex between men illegal at this time, but so too were any attempts to arrange it. Indeed Bennett had felt prompted to send the paper to the police after hearing about a youth who had made, he said, “various acquaintances of which his mother strongly disapproves”.

The court case

Times recommends

• 12 party beauty tips
• Nutrition: is being big a genetic destiny?
• What it feels like: to pry into other people's lives