Roses are red, and violets are blue, I definitely don’t love you
If you’re cynical about all the lovey-dovey sentiments on cards in the shops, here’s a look at the nastier side of Valentine’s Day
SOCIAL media-driven emotionally damaging nastiness is not new. The 19th century craze for sending elaborate lace paper Valentine cards to one’s lover had a darker side – hate mail.
I’m not sure who it was that invented the term “Vinegar Valentines”, but these were cards that went straight to the heart... with a dagger.
There was no internet or smartphones, of course, but by 1835 with the improvement in the postal service, the Post Office was recording an extra 60,000 mailings of Valentine’s Day cards on February 13th and by 1870, more than a million cards were being delivered each year.
Popularity increased following the introduction of Rowland Hill’s penny post in 1840, while ready-made envelopes made the process easier still.
Specialist printer De La Rue invented a machine to make them, which was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Valentines which previously had been folded quarto size were now printed smaller to fit into the new envelopes.
Mechanical Valentines were introduced at about the same time and other novelties kept the craze alive. In the latter, tiny figures could be made to move by pulling a cardboard tongue. A favourite was a church with a front door that opened to reveal a wedding ceremony in progress.
Sometimes a verse would ask the recipient of a card to lift a dainty paper leaf to reveal the face of the one best beloved by the sender.
On peeping beneath, the man or woman would see his or her own face reflected in a tiny mirror. Other cards like this bore small trinkets, a tiny bottle of perfume, beadwork, shell designs or small pieces of jewellery.
Lacy Valentines, which became popular in the 1820s, were made using the 18th century technique of pricking paper with a pin to produce pictures. Some had tiny lift-up flaps beneath which a personal message could be written.
As the custom grew, so cards became more elaborate. Velvet, lace, shells, skeleton leaves, spun glass, feathers, gold and silver wire, lithographed pictures called scraps, locks of hair and even a stuffed hummingbird were used to decorate cards, each carrying a suitably sentimental verse.
But while all this was charming and wholesome, there was a more unsavoury industry working in the background, producing distinctly unlovely cards with which to insult, scorn and ridicule a jilted suitor or their persecutor.
The Brighton & Hove Museum has boxes of Valentine lacey cards dating from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries, donated by the owners of several personal collections, among them a leatherbound album given to the museum in 1940.
Probably a sample book to promote a printer’s products to stationers who would buy them wholesale, it lists serial numbers and prices for bulk orders. Most of the cards are typical: lacy, silvered, embossed, scented, cushioned, and delicate, depicting cherubs, birds, garlands of flowers and other such romantic symbols.
But at the back of the book are 44 printed single sheet cards that are both comic and cruel.
Captions or rhymes criticise their subjects for their faults or shortcomings so various as to cover every conceivable human failing. A card for every cad and shrew. It seems likely that the craze for Vinegar Valentines started, unsurprisingly, in the United States. Annebella Pollen, a lecturer at the University of Brighton, who has written an academic paper on the subject and who was a researcher for the museum’s “On the Pull” project, reckons that by the 1870s, when the sample book was being offered to stationery suppliers, as many as 750,000 insulting Valentines were being sent each year.
Printed only on one side on thin coloured paper rather than a card, they cost just a penny.
They are scarce today for the simple fact that few of their recipients would care to keep them, probably were received, while the more traditional – and costly – would be cherished and treasured enough to be kept in a family album.
Ms Pollen cites a first-hand example in novelist Flora
Thompson’s semi-autobiographical trilogy of memoirs, Lark Rise to Candleford in which Flora, recalls receiving a particularly vicious card with a crudely-drawn printed caricature of a postmistress, her occupation at the time.
The Valentine included a cruel verse and personalised insulting inscription commenting on her perceived ugliness, which Flora records was promptly thrown into the fire and kept a secret.
Many of the cards were handed to the recipient in person, usually because their address was unknown.
One illustrated with the caricature of an overpowering, red-headed saleslady has the verse:
“As you wait upon the women
With disgust upon your face
The way you snap and bark at them One would think you owned the place.”
Others were specific, such as the physician named “Doctor SureDeath”, or the woman for whom
“’Tis all in vain your simpering looks/ You never can incline/With all your bustles, stays and curls/To find a Valentine”.
Those that arrived in the post would add injury to insult. In the days before the Penny Post, the recipient would have paid to receive the insulting card.
Like traditional cards, they were sent anonymously, so there seemed no limit to the vitriol.
Some were intended only to take the recipient down a peg or two, but others had more serious repercussions, one recorded suicide in 1847 being blamed on a card sent to a woman who took an overdose of laudanum when she learned that it had been sent by her lover who had led her to believe they had a future together.
Just as today’s social media platforms are under increasing pressure to reform, so public opinion turned against the cruel Valentines.
Some post offices refused to send those judged too crude or caustic on to their recipients.
Soon the Press was on the case which stirred condemnation for the anti-social behaviour with one writer claiming their “facetious vulgarity” had ruined a once sacred celebration of love and romance.
Indeed, reform followed and the practice largely ceased, but it could be argued that Vinegar Valentines were the precursor of Edwardian comic seaside postcards, by which time we had all become more broad-minded and tolerant.