Vinegar Valentines
Adding insult to injury, recipients of sour valentines had to pay the postage themselves, writes Tina White.
Valentines Day has come and gone, but the memories remain. For people around the world it will have brought romantic dates, engagement rings, re-enacted marriage vows or sentimental cards full of sweet compliments.
This traditional festival of love started, of course, with the legendary St Valentine, a kindly priest who joined streams of couples in marriage in his lifetime, but was martyred while still young by Emperor Claudius II on February 14, 269 AD.
The custom of sending Valentine cards on that date reached its zenith in the Victorian age, but sometimes, people opening that pink or red envelope got a nasty shock.
Instead of good wishes, they were likely to find an exaggerated caricature of themselves, and a nasty verse to go with it. The sender? Anonymous.
These cards were soon dubbed ‘‘vinegar valentines’’ for their sour content. But how did they come about, and why?
The anti-valentines first appeared around the 1840s, and were soon circulating widely in both Britain and America. They were commercially printed, and the recipient had to pay the penny postage themselves on delivery.
Officially, the cards were supposed to be a joke, but the sentiments inside were often so mean and damaging that some sensitive souls tortured themselves wondering who the sender could be, or even, in a few cases, committed suicide over it.
The unsigned card was obviously from someone who knew the recipient well. If it was for a man, it might read (as one of the milder ones did): ‘‘Tis a lemon that I hand you, and bid you now skidoo; because I love another – there is no chance for you!’’
Another card had a caricature of a shrieking female pianist/singer. The first two lines read: ‘‘When a pig’s getting slaughtered, the noise that it makes/Is sweeter by far than your trills and your shakes ...’’ followed by another four lines in the same insulting vein.
In the United States, some vinegar valentines continued to circulate into the 1940s, when the verses got ruder, and the illustrations cruder. During this era, one card to a man was headed Great Lover, with a cartoon of a man puckering up to a donkey. ‘‘Hey Lover Boy, the place for you/ is home upon the shelf/ Cause the only one who’d kiss you/Is a jackass like yourself.’’
The female equivalent showed an overweight woman doing a handstand, with the heading ShowOff: ‘‘You claim you’re good at anything, so come on show some proof/ And let me see how good you are at jumping off the roof.’’
These unsettling kinds of cards often skated close to being a matter for police investigation. But how to find the sender?
In New Zealand, vinegar valentines appeared briefly in the 1870s and 1880s.
The Wanganui Chronicle of February 16, 1874, in an editorial headed Indelicate and Insulting Valentines, told readers: ‘‘It is with pain and disgust that we learn the practice of sending these valentines was resumed on Saturday last. Some of them we hear bore such indecent and insulting addresses as to lead the Postmaster to refrain from delivering them, while others had such an offensive odour as to render the office uninhabitable. Some course must be adopted to remedy the evil,which seems to be a growing one.’’ And on February 22, 1882, the Wairarapa Daily Times was decrying ‘‘vulgar valentines’’. However, the custom of vinegar valentines seemed to fade away faster in this country than in Britain and America, along with, for a while, even the celebration of Valentines Day itself. On February 20, 1931, the Auckland Star declared: ‘‘The sending of valentines is unhappily almost a forgotten art . . . in one’s youth there were issued valentines of grotesque and almost insulting nature . . . the festival of love possibly almost disappeared because the day was so often used to keep alive old enmities ...’’
But times were changing. The Otago Daily Times columnist C.M.P. wrote on February 14, 1938: ‘‘Today I made a pleasant discovery. Valentines Day is not dead!’’
Recounting how he’d found valentines on sale in a shop, he added: ‘‘I had thought these existed now only in collections, or old trunks belonging to somebody’s grandmother, but no ...’’ Today the vinegar valentine is long gone.
In an astonishing coda to the legend, the face of a man thought to be the real St Valentine was recreated in February 2018 by a team of archaeologists from the University of Padua.
The Daily Mail reported that 3D scanning and facial reconstruction on a skull long stored at Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria di Cosmedin revealed the features of someone who could fit the patron saint’s profile.
If he’s the right Valentine, he’d probably be pleased to know his name continues to spread joy, rather than ‘‘vinegar’’.