In the turbulent mid-1960s, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a personal cry for “Help!,” the title song for both movie and sound-track album. The Beatles, suddenly famous, describe a life “changed in oh so many ways.” Their way of dealing with lost self-confidence and a need for affirmation was to sing rhyming stanzas to an upbeat tempo. If they had written a line like “Help me if you can” during the 1930s, an advice column called “Can I Help you?” in London's Sunday Dispatch might have echoed reassuringly. For eight years, hundreds of people dealt with their social insecurity by writing letters to its author, Viola Tree (1884-1938).

In the spring of 1937, Tree brought the Woolf s a manuscript that quoted or referred to several letters from her column and bore the same title. Virginia, although she continued to read certain submissions, had been less involved with everyday work at the Hogarth Press (Willis 369-70). She pitched in, however, after their manager's sudden death left them short-handed (Marder 224). Along with Leonard, therefore, she had a hands-on relationship with Can I Help You? until its publication in the fall of 1937. During this time of escalating totalitarian sentiment on the continent and her nephew Julian Bell's death in Spain in July of 1937, however, Virginia Woolf was contemplating help and advice on a larger scale. She was drafting her own Can I Help You? book of letters and replies, published in 1938 as Three Guineas.

A number of Woolf scholars have treated overlapping topics related to social behavior. Closest to my topic, however, is an insightful 2008 article by David Dwan who discusses manners, especially in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in the context of philosophical skepticism. In the face of meaningless flux and incoherent identities, he says, social rituals are useful—so long as they are recognized as fiction and do not harden into dogma (Dwan 261, 263). Viola Tree's Can I Help You? offers a parallel context for Woolf's challenges to conventional values and rules of etiquette, one that also affirms manners as an evolving art form helpful, at best, in fostering harmonious human relationships in lives well lived.