The Vicious Victorian Valentine
It seemed like a no-brainer to choose this month's poetry theme. Valentine poems, right? There was just one problem. I’ve read hundreds of newspaper poems from the 1840s to about 1905 on every imaginable topic; I’ve transcribed many for blog posts, but I have to draw the line at Valentine poems. They are unbearable! Unbearably boring and treacly.
More interesting was reading verses of valentine cards that were best sellers for 70 years. Beware. Surprising to our sensibilities today, roughly half the valentine cards sold were of an insulting, hurtful and cruel nature. This was news to me, and it is the focus of this month’s theme.
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This 1889 comic valentine from Appleton, Wisconsin shows the immense popularity of the cards.
Before 1840, Valentine’s Day was essentially non-existent in the United States. Of course people wrote love letters and made cards to send to each other, but they were not tied to a February 14th date. But around 1845 it suddenly popped onto the American scene.
“It went from being an often forgotten, easily neglected Old World saint’s day to an indigenized, not-to-be-missed American holiday,” a historian said.(1) Valentine’s Day fit with the new middle class enshrinement of romantic love and sentimentality, new printing methods, and an emergent consumer culture.
Originally ‘valentine’ meant a person, one who was a sweetheart or dear friend. The new American craze changed the meaning to include the card itself. Newspapers were almost exclusively the source of advertising, and marketing enlarged valentines from marriageable young men and women to any relationship. The public was urged to remember that valentines were appropriate for brothers, sisters, Mother, other relatives and friends. But the target audience was women and children, and by the 1850s illustrations overwhelmingly featured women and girls expectantly receiving these cards. By the 1860s mass-produced valentine cards were sent by the tens of millions.
People described the emerging fad as a rage, mania, epidemic, craze, fever, derangement and “social disease.” It started in New York and Philadelphia and began spreading. It appealed to all classes of society. An 1846 article from the New York Express, reported, “Everybody is yet pressed with the Valentine fever. The judge upon the bench may be seen during a momentary pause of business to draw forth from his pocket a curiously folded missive and catch a glimpse of its contents, hurrying it back when again called upon to exercise his official functions. The budding girl reads and giggles as she peruses her first “Valentine.”…... even the kitchen maid comes timidly to “young missus” to get her to decipher the chicken tracks which Betty suspects come from the stable boy.”
In 1847 the Baltimore Sun said that the overworked postal clerks sank in anticipation of the heavy mail load to come. They called for additional help. February 12, 1849 the Buffalo Courier said, “The “Valentine Fever” has attacked all ages and all sexes in Albany and is thought to be much more fatal than the “California Fever.”
Two days after Valentine’s Day that year Burke’s Cheap Valentine Depot (“Cupid’s Depot!”), normally known as Burke’s Bookstore, ran an ad in the Courier comparing “California Excitement versus Valentine Excitement!" The ad said, "Both of these maladies rage to a very great extent in this city. The first carries off our best citizens – the second the strongly forfeited Hearts of our young Ladies.” The ad also reported that Cupid himself proclaimed a week of Fun, Joviality, and Jollification from February 14th to the 20th, so rush on in to buy a Valentine.
By 1850, the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran ads from fourteen different local companies selling valentine cards.
An Ugly Side: The Vicious Valentine
This 1888 valentine illustration shows a female cat receiving a very unflattering caricature and her obvious dismay. This was a satiric or "comic" valentine.
There were two types of cards produced, sentimental and satiric. The satiric were labeled “comic,” but to most recipients they were anything but. An 1846 article described the reaction of a young woman, “The blooming belle “sighs with sentiment,” and blushes with love or anger, as the case may be, as she peruses the enigmatic sheet so full of satire or flattery.”
A historian said they were, “effectively commodifying pranksterism and practical joking,” often of a particularly cruel sort.(1) Most were caustic, biting, and mean, in a way that seems puzzling today. Other descriptors are insulting, lewd, racist and misogynistic. Ribaldry was not uncommon, featuring scenes of men peeping up women’s skirts, and phallic images like firemen with a firehose between their legs. The illustrations used grossly exaggerated caricatures, usually with heads about a third the size of the body. They lampooned every trade and profession - butchers, grocers, policemen, doctors, printers, teachers, boardinghouse keepers, pharmacists, mailmen, dentists, carpenters, bankers, clerical workers, liverymen, salesmen, bakers, even newspaper reporters.
Here’s an example that a pharmacist might receive; the illustration featuring the pharmacist’s head in the shape of a pill box:
Do you think I’d take your stuff
Oh no, the very thought’s enough
Your nasty mixtures, draughts and pills
Would make a healthy man feel ill.
Apothecary, I would run
A mile from your shop to shun.
The cards also ridiculed people who were overweight, or too thin, people who wore glasses or were lame or hard of hearing, people who were invalids or elderly, bachelors and spinsters, churchgoers, those who skipped church, those interested in health fads, those who ate anything, the lazy, the drunkard and the homeless. Were you too affectionate with your wife -- or not enough? Did you stutter or have poor hygiene, or did your neighbor think you put on airs? In 1907 Clarence Cullen, a popular author, wrote in a Washington D.C. newspaper that all of us are potential victims of the “comic” sender.
There isn’t a human being on earth who is not open to some sort of vulgarly exaggerated ….description by one of these gross comic valentines. Every one of us has some little kink, mental or physical, which happily is tolerated by our friends…
We’re fat. We’re lean. We’ve a snub nose or an unduly long one. We hold ourselves too straight or we slouch along with our shoulders too far forward. We are a bit bow-legged or perhaps somewhat knock-kneed. We dress carelessly or perhaps a bit too ornately. We are bald or too abundantly hirsute….We are teetotalers or we drink too much….Our voices are too strident or too soft. We play the horses or we militate against people who do. We are ridiculously careful of our diet or we are gluttons. We are doctors – therefore we slaughter our patients. We are lawyers – therefore we rob our clients. We are journalists – therefore we slander our friends. We are dentists – therefore we extract teeth with the daintiness of lumberjacks dynamiting tree stumps. We are typewriter girls – therefore we carry on sly flirtations with our employers…We are human beings, to sum it up, and therefore naturally prey to hyenas.
There is a comic valentine to fit every one of us.
Cullen speculated on the kinds of cards that could have been sent to the famous. Beethoven could have gotten one calling him a key thumper. Florence Nightingale could have received one labeling her a phony nurse, and Abraham Lincoln one that called him a clumsy rail splitter.
Was your boss a butcher, factory supervisor or railroad engineer? Were you angry with him? Did you hate your landlady? Did you think your neighbor was wimpy, a henpecked husband? Was your cousin a little too flirtatious with the boys? Maybe your friend was too obsessed with her dog. Did you secretly resent women? Did harassing a Black person or an Irish or Italian immigrant make you feel that you weren’t the lowest on the totem pole? There was a card to match. For obvious reasons, the cards were almost all sent anonymously.
An estimated half of all valentine cards sold were “comic.” In 1880 the South Bend (Indiana) Tribune sold the cards in their own store. They reported selling 1,700 “comic” valentines to 1,000 sentimental that year. An Atlanta stationer in 1890 said they expected to sell, "not less than 300 gross, or 43,200 comic valentines, while but a comparatively small number of sentimental valentines will find purchasers."
The harshness of the “comics” fell into categories. An 1881 manufacturer’s catalog by Stirn & Lyon began with “Refined Comics” for “people who could not take large doses of satire.” They were free from “coarseness and vulgarity.” Next were “Ordinary Comics,” which “hit the mark every time; if they do not mortally wound…they lop off moral excrescences and aid in the mending of a dilapidated character.” The final category was labeled “Hit-Em-Hard.” The catalog promised that they kicked straight at the weaknesses of humanity.(2)
The verse reads: "You're a "bad egg," the neighbors say, And worse you grow, from day to day; An addled egg, too, you must be, and badly cracked as one may see. Go! Stupid knave, without delay, And try to mend your wicked ways; Repent, while yet remains a hope, And thus avoid the hangman's rope."
The "valentines" inspired a fews stanzas of verse themselves. In 1890 a correspondent for the Sacramento Union-Register wrote this poem, titled "The Comic Valentine":
Again the day is nearing
That we are all greatly fearing --
The which, if 'twere blotted out
We never would repine.
When people of all classes,
Men and women, lads and lasses
Get even with each other with the comic valentine.
There are our horrid neighbors,
We'll remind them with our capers,
Who dared to send them such a screed
They never will divine,
The flirt, coquette and teacher,
Merchant, doctor, lawyer, preacher,
Typewriter girl and all
Will get a valentine.
So the stores will all be plundered,
Folks will buy them by the hundred,
And postmen for a day or two will happily reign,
May the gods of love defend us,
And may no one dare to send us
A horrid, vulgar, awful, fearful valentine.
Women As Special Victims
Women, however, were primary targets, especially those who did not conform to the prevailing views of True Womanhood. Womanly women stayed out of the public sphere. They didn’t speak in public or advocate for change. They stayed home and devoted themselves entirely to service to their family and noncontroversial church activities like the Ladies Aid Society. They were submissive and deferential to men. To transgress was to pay a steep price.
An Indiana paper in 1879 described the plethora of misogynistic cards that were sent in Millersburg that year. “The sour old maid was mercilessly treated. The top-lofty girl was ruthlessly held up to ridicule. The woman who talked too much was depicted with an enormous mouth. The vain coquette was reminded that her wiles were lost on her acquaintances. The gossip was severely punished.”
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A particularly harsh example of a "comic" valentine caricature of an old maid.
Publicly active women were portrayed as snakes, devils, tigers or hissing cats - “demonic, subhuman, bestial.” Women’s bodies were made the object of distortion and caricature, often with elongated corkscrew tongues. The well-worn trope of the sour, bitter old maid whom no man would ever want frequently came into play. Here is one of so many, many samples:
You ugly, cross and wrinkled shrew,
You advocate of women’s rights,
No man on earth would live with you
For fear of endless fights.
Another example:
Among the women who in history have brightest shown
Are those who have left the men’s affairs alone,
Who in their homes have found their proper places,
And sought not in crowds to show their faces;
We see you seek a different line –
You are too bold to be my valentine.
These cards were no laughing matter. As a historian said, “They were a form of extortion, especially when they were directed at women: behave modestly and decorously or suffer the consequences of social rejection, ridicule or even violence.”(3) They were meant to intimidate.
This is another example of the much-maligned old maid, also in the Atlanta Journal. Titled, "Still Waiting -- Anyone -- O Lord!" the verse is: "You are sitting there like a dried up old bone, As if in a coffin with that last ulster on, Still waiting and waiting by night and by day, While all wait for you to get out of the way. But ere you can look on that hoped lucky day, You are bound to dry up and at last blow away." An ulster was a man's long, loose overcoat.
A well-dressed woman was as worthy of attack as a poorly dressed one. Under the caricature of a woman with expensive price tags hanging from her clothes was this:
Conceited, foolish, empty, vain,
You pile the dry goods on your back,
And strut about the dirty streets,
To air your stupid, silly clack.
While you in silks and satine flaunt
Your husband struggles, day by day,
To get enough to wear and eat,
And your unceasing bills to pay.
And a still relatively new phenomenon, the woman office worker, might get a card like this:
Safe From the Kisses of the Boss
It is a common joke to say
Typewriter girls are very gay,
And that their bosses oft' them kiss,
That's not your case, I'm quite sure, miss;
Hard up indeed would be the man,
Who would your ugly features scan,
And still desire your lips to place
In lover's fashion on your face.
A Charles Howard illustration from 1905, depicting a woman office worker. Note the pants with only a remnant of a skirt behind her.
But imagine if you were recently widowed and received this:
Though you sigh out, "Amen," as demure as you can,
Your "amen"will very soon change to "a man,"
For folks can well see by the glance of that eye
That blinks through your grief as a man passes by,
That some loving brother quite soon will get hitched
To the second heart of a widow bewitched.
In addition to spinsters and women not keeping "in their place," the landlady or boardinghouse keeper was a best-seller. Below is a comic about the "comic" valentine, this one from 1901. It appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
It reads: Hammond Aigs - We'll all have to pay our board Saturday night or else get out. Liver N. Bacon - And why? Hammond Aigs - The landlady received fifteen comic valentines this morning and she has just fifteen boarders.
Trying To Explain
Why were they so popular? Why would anyone want to send hurtful missives through the mail? Why do people today want to send hurtful and hateful anonymous messages? We have a modern-day equivalent of sorts, and it’s not limited to one day a year. Cruel internet trolling causes even worse harm in that it is viewable by others and often causes public ridicule and humiliation. The “comic” card, no matter how devastating, was easily crumpled and thrown in the trash, and no one else need be the wiser.
A 1907 opinion piece in the Washington D.C. Evening Star had the simplest explanation. “Why? This is no very great riddle. The comic valentine continues to exist…because it is a potential, if vulgar, instrument in the hands of the cowardly and mean-minded for the infliction of momentary pain upon persons whom they do not like.” Simply, the individual was mean, and seeking revenge. The writer said that no one level-headed and of sound mind should feel more than momentary mortification over these “valentines” as they were really a reflection on the sender. “No human being ever…practiced this mode of revenge or retaliation without degrading himself and shriveling the remnant of his soul to the hardness of a leather liver.”
A more sociological explanation is that it is an inversion of the social order, or knocking the privileged down a peg or two. Getting back at one’s boss or a wealthy acquaintance could be a motive, one small weapon for those who feel powerless against those who hold power. The problem with this theory is that it fits only for a small group of the cards. The majority demonized weaker social groups – women, minorities, those who had a disability, those who did not belong.
Moral policing seems to be the most common explanation for the Victorian-era trolling. “...for all their purported comical intention, these printed missives critiqued behaviour that deviated from social norms, and could chide, shame and scapegoat,” wrote an English social historian. “Within the context of a permissive festival atmosphere, the cards functioned as a kind of moral policing; in their anonymous character they could speak on behalf of many; under the cover of humour, they exercised a collective social control.”(4)
But especially in the case of women and minorities, there was a dangerous, even violent threat to the “comics.” As Schmidt said, they were a form of extortion and intimidation, designed to keep people in their place.
Reactions
A valentine verse about the reaction to a "comic" valentine verse. This is from a 1916 Ottumwa, Iowa newspaper.
It isn't much of a stretch to imagine the reactions of the recipient to receiving a cruel anonymous card, and the pain of wondering who sent it. Which smiling neighbor or co-worker who greeted you each morning could have done this? Could it be a member of your church? A jealous cousin?
There were unintended consequences. In 1883, Dr. A.L. Burson of McClean County, Illinois became infuriated after receiving a “comic” valentine. Convinced it was sent by a professional rival, Dr. L.O. Jenkins, he went to his home and accused him of being the sender. “Without waiting or listening for a reply [he] drew his revolver and fired at Dr. Jenkins, the ball passing under the doctor’s arm.” Jenkins was unharmed, but as Burson prepared to shoot him again, Jenkins shot and killed the enraged man in self-defense. “Both men had many friends, and the sad taking of Dr. Burson is to be lamented, as he was a bright and promising young man,” the reporter said. “He leaves a wife and two children to mourn his loss. Both men had formerly been good friends.”
Addison M. Wier, a popular nationally-known humor writer better-known by his pen name, Sarge Plunkett, wrote in 1903 of seeing his neighbor, "a sweet little girl," eagerly opening a valentine, expecting something nice from a boy who recently moved away. "I am sure that it would be a heartless wretch who could have seen that girl's face as the ugly valentine was revealed who would not be against such things." She ran out of the room, and when he saw her again several hours later, her eyes were still red from crying. There were stories of suicide attempts by young women crushed by the verses and hideous caricatures.
Far less dramatic but touching was a lesson a group of young boys learned. In a 1908 reminiscence one author told an illuminating story from his childhood:
Yes, I remember those old days when the crude “comic valentine” was in vogue and we boys thought what a clever thing it would be to send a horrible-looking, big-nosed picture to a teacher to whom we did not like because she had “called us down.” We couldn't forget those sharp words that had cut us to the quick. What a splendid chance to “get even” with her!
There was much practicing at “back hand” and other modes of disguising our handwriting, and the caricature was finally purchased, addressed and mailed. We knew it would be received sometime before school opened. Three of us boys assembled outside the window, through which the teacher’s desk could be seen by peering cautiously between the leafless boughs. A little pile of letters lay on her desk. She came in, sat down, and read them one by one. Then came the envelope – the envelope – it was opened. She turned in a startled way to the handwriting, examined it, crumpled the paper in her hand and dropped her head on the desk; her slight shoulders shook with sobs.
This form of revenge had never been anticipated. We had expected a towering rage, a mighty tornado…that would shake us with amusement. We were not hardhearted urchins; shamefacedly we crept in one by one and stood awkwardly about her; we thought afterwards that Bob kissed her but we were too agitated to remember clearly.(5)
Another example of a reaction to a hateful "valentine," in this case a 1910 one that targeted the Chinese. The writer of the article in which this appeared suggested that recipients of comic valentines should lighten up and get a sense of humor. The "young hopeful of the family" also had fun delivering a card to the Italian fruit seller, only a derogatory term was used for "Italian." This was from a syndicated article that appeared in many newspapers and was clipped from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania paper.
Pushback
People pushed back on the “comics” almost as soon as they appeared. In 1848 the New York Tribune editorialized against them, as did one the most influential voices of the nineteenth century, editor Sarah Josepha Hale. The same year, in Godeys Ladys’ Book, the top-selling women’s magazine, she described them as vulgar, malicious and low class. The same sentiment was echoed in an 1850 commentary in the Baltimore Sun:
“There goes with this celebration an offering also of malice, hatred and uncharitableness. Evil passions will seek the veil and liberty of the day to gratify their desire for revenge, and the grotesque and uncouth figures, wretchedly daubed and underlined with doggrel, as vulgar and mean as the most debased could desire, flaunt in the windows of many places, and affront the pure feelings which lend honor to the day.”
The Buffalo Commercial made similar points, also in 1850:
“A large portion of the valentines bought and sold are miserable caricatures, with still more miserable mottos upon them, and are used to gratify malice rather than to promote sentiment. We think the sooner the practice, as presently observed, becomes obsolete, the better. The use of such Valentines as we see exhibited for sale shows a great lack of taste, or rather an exhibition of very bad taste, anything but creditable.”
Newspaper editors continued to sound this message for seventy and even eighty years. In 1902 a reporter wrote in the Philadelphia Times, “To have a desire to write an anonymous letter that will give pain reveals a cruel nature. The sending of comic valentines is only another form of the anonymous letter. If you wish to hold someone up to ridicule…you select a valentine that shows up some fault or weakness in the most ridiculous manner. You mortify, pain or anger the recipient in the cruelest possible sense…they have more than once wrought incalculable injury.”
They were seen as a sign of moral decay in America. In England, where they were popular as well, editors usually included a class element. This was something sent to young milliners and maid-servants by “knights and dames of the till and counter.”Annabella Pollen said, “The notion that coarse valentines belonged to coarse commoners is found time and again in the contemporary press.” But American writers also expressed the opinion that this was something that only people at the lower rungs of society would do. In short, it was low-class.
After the turn of the century, efforts were made to ban “comic” cards. In 1902 Chicago club women declared themselves in support of the efforts of the Ravenswood Women’s Club in calling for a ban. They described them as a nuisance, inane and repulsive. “The comic valentine, with its offensive caricatures and its often obscene and always vicious and ill-natured verses, is corrupting and suggestive of evil, and should not be in the hands of any child.”
Reformer Jane Addams of the Settlement House Movement and Hull House fame weighed in. While she said she personally didn’t take them seriously, she believed they were unquestionably coarse, “and no possible good could come from them.”
The Sacramento City Board of Trustees considered an ordinance in 1904 requested by the Women’s Council to prohibit sales of “comic” valentines. It set a $100 fine for anyone selling the cards, or imprisonment not to exceed thirty days. Board member John C. Ing, a pharmacist, said for the last fifteen years he’d received the cards with pictures of the skull and crossbones or a pill roller and found them amusing. In fact, he looked forward to them every year. He - as most in the press seemed to - attributed them to the “small boy,” who was harmless. The Law and Order League was instead asked to study the issue, but to look into what was lewd or obscene.
There were other defenders who, like Ing, insisted it was harmless stuff, the work of little boys, and genuinely funny, something they got a kick out of. There were also those who insisted that the recipient simply needed to develop a sense of humor. Lighten up! A 1912 opinion piece in the Indianapolis News even insisted that they did some good. It served the sanctimonious minister right, he who secretly drank at home behind closed curtains, the writer said. The old lady gossip, the grocer who cheated farmers when he bought their eggs and butter - wasn't it a good thing that they were forced to think about their ways and feel anonymous eyes upon them?
Yet in spite of protests and controversy, the satiric card remained immensely popular. As is the case with supply and demand, as long as there was a demand, printers continued to make them.
Political and Topical Comic Valentines
Of course there were “comic” valentines that were comical, or which made a point without being cruel. In 1867 a wire service article that ran in many newspapers around the country had some examples. One featured a caricature of a milkmaid:
‘Mong all the beauteous damsels I’ve seen –
In city, town, or on the village green,
There’s none so lovely
As the milkman’s daughter,
With bright-hooped bucket,
Filled with chalk and water.
Food purity was a serious issue, especially as America urbanized and more people were not producing their own food. In the late 1850s a “New York Milk Swill Scandal” exposed numerous unsanitary and deceptive practices. Cows in Brooklyn and elsewhere were kept in filthy stables and fed swill - the waste product of distilleries. Milk was watered down and fillers such as chalk, flour, even plaster of paris, were added to increase profit for dairy producers. The expose led to the creation of the New York City Department of Public Health in 1866, which was charged with regulating the dairy industry. (It would take twenty-five years of proposals and counter proposals to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.) So, the verse above was a timely commentary on a current issue.
There were newspapers which used their own illustrators to lampoon local politicians and other bigwigs. In 1892 the Philadelphia Times devoted an entire page to “Some of Our Favorite Valentines” featuring men such as Judge Samuel Pennypacker, Senator and Republican Party boss Michael Quay, and former City Treasurer John Bardsley. The year before Bardsley was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for embezzlement of between $13 million and $16 million dollars (in 2024 value) in city money.
The beauties dangle on his string,
A net result of skill and line,
His smiles make wrinkles in his neck,
This fish-enamored Valentine.
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Some of Judge Samuel Pennypackers' decisions included, in 1890, upholding an Act of 1794 that outlawed barbershops being open on Sundays. Pennypacker said unless the legislature repealed the law it had to be followed. In January 1892 he handed down a decision that, if upheld, would have a sweeping effect on the sale of wine and liquor in all the clubhouses of the city. The opinion was given in refusing to grant a new trial to a man convicted of selling liquor without a license at a club. At the trial the man’s attorney endeavored to show that it was a legitimate club and not a front for a speakeasy. Pennypacker would later serve as governor of Pennsylvania. His "valentine" says:
Tho' round each other's necks the club
and humbler, weak "speak-easy" twine,
The throat of man implores in vain
This thirst-defying Valentine.
These "Valentines" fall under a different category than the ones sent to private individuals. These were a legitimate form of political satire.
Finally, a Decline
What was the tipping point that finally ended such a widespread custom? It’s hard to say, but newspapers continued to devote column space to the message that they were hurtful and cruel.
“It has the bite of a rattlesnake, the sting of a hornet and can cause more sorrow than a death in the family or dinner without dessert,” a 1908 Knoxville Sentinel opinion piece stated. “It is anything but comic for it lays bare the shortcoming of the one to whom it is sent whether real or fancied…a misanthropic indeed it is and yet called comic. If you happen to be a landlord the Valentine immediately infers that you have ejected a tenant…If you are a motorman it implies you have run over some citizens…if you are a pillar of the church it comes out you are a hypocrite.”
Maybe there was less tolerance when "comic" valentines became the subject of lawsuits. In 1906 a Philadelphia judge handed down a six-page ruling after a month-long trial, deciding that a comic valentine can be a "malicious printed slander, exposing one to ridicule, contempt and degradation of character." In this case, Laura Mitchell received a card addressed in what she said was her sister-in-law's handwriting. Laura sued Anna Applegate, her sister-in-law, who lived just a few doors away. Anna also retained an attorney. The verse on the card read, "To stir up a row to you is such joy, That the whole of your time in such work you employ. If someone had courage to muzzle your jaws, the neighbors would hail with a good deal of applause."
The judge's decision allowed a libel trial to proceed. Unfortunately, I did not find any other reporting on whether the case took place.
In 1911, Mrs. Lena O'Conner of Pawling, New York received a comic valentine that she thought was sent by Mrs. Mary Lehan, her next-door neighbor and a music teacher and organist at a Catholic church in town. Mrs. O'Conner forwarded the card to Mrs. Lehan. When she received it, Mrs. Lehan immediately went to Mrs. O'Conner's house and asked for an explanation. The two spoke heatedly and Mrs. O'Conner allegedly slammed Mrs. Lehan's arm in the door, holding it in a vice, "while she continued to abuse her." Mrs. Lehan sued for $5,000 in damages. The valentine that so angered each woman pictured a cook and the words, "To the amateur cook: Cook, cook in name you will always be." Added in pencil was, "In the wash tub you should be; you look it." The trial ended in a hung jury.
Then suddenly, after World War I, the “comic” valentine seemed to die out. Articles ran from 1918 throughout the 1920s as to how they stopped being best sellers, that fewer were manufactured as a result, that it was a dying – and unmourned - custom. In 1919 the El Paso Times said that, "With the dawn of universal peace, the formation of a society of nations and the birth of general amnity, the opprobrious caricature and the libelous rhyme surely seem to be passing. Apparently the comic valentine is about to go the way of poison gas, submarines...and other uncivilized methods of warfare banned by the Hague tribunal."
As another newspaper writer said, "Let he who is without fault send the first comic valentine."
Today, what we "remember" (what we see reproduced) are the beautiful Victorian and Edwardian valentines. This one (below) ran in the Seymour (Indiana) Democrat on Valentine's Day 1900. There were probably many who clipped it out to be colored and pasted into the family scrapbook.
Schmidt.
Pollen.
Schmidt.
Pollen.
Chapel.
Commentary in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Telegraph bemoaned the judge's decision. Stern penalties existed for boys vandalizing gates at Halloween; laws outlawed firecrackers on the Fourth of July, swimming nude in public places like ponds and rivers was no longer allowed; "playing hooky" from school was against the law. What was next? Would regulation outlaw all the fun?
Sources:
Chapel, Joe Mitchell. “The Cruel “Comic Valentine,” Journal of Education, Vol. 97, No. 7 (13 Feb 1908), p. 188.
Helfand, William H. “Pharmaceutical and Medical “Valentines,” Pharmacy In History, Vol. 20 No. 3 (1978), pp. 101-110.
Pollen, Annabella. “The Valentine Has Fallen Upon Evil Days”: Mocking Victorian Valentines and the Ambivalent Laughter of the Carnivalesque,” Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2014), pp. 127-173.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “The Fashioning of a Modern Holiday: St. Valentine’s Day, 1840-1870,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter 1993), pp. 209-245.
Newspapers:
“Valentines For the Million,” Herald of the Times (Newport, Rhode Island), 28 Feb 1846, p. 2.
“St. Valentine’s Day,” The Baltimore Sun, 13 Feb 1847, p. 2.
“St. Valentine’s Day,” The Baltimore Sun, 13 Feb 1850, p. 2.
“Valentines Viciousness,” The Indianapolis News, 11 Feb 1879, p. 2.
“Millersburg,” The Boonville Enquirer, (Boonville, Indiana), 8 March 1879, p. 2.
“St. Valentine’s Day. Something About His Missives Which Make Folks Glad or Mad,” South Bend Tribune, 14 Feb 1880, p. 4.
“Valentine Violence. Dr. A.L. Burson Seeks the Life of a Brother Physician For Sending a Comic Valentine and is Fatally Wounded,” The Weekly Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois), 23 Feb 1883.
"Kupid's Komic Kaper," Atlanta Journal, 8 Feb 1890, p. 2.
“Some of Our Favorite Valentines,” Philadelphia Times, 14 Feb 1892, p. 9.
"Valentines Day. How Some People Yearly Pay Off Old Scores. Rude Missives That Rankle," The Missoulian (Missoula, Montana), 14 Feb 1894, p. 8.
Anonymous Letter: Philadelphia Times, 14 April 1899, p. 9.
“War on Comic Valentine. Chicago Women Approve Crusade of Ravenswood Club,” Chicago Tribune, 3 Feb 1902, p. 3.
“Ing and Rider Defend Comic Valentine,” Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, California), 11 Oct 1904, p. 3.
"Comic Valentine Put Under a Ban Philadelphia Judge Declares To Send Them Is Ground For Criminal Libel," The Washington Times (Washington D.C.), 4 Aug 1906, p. 4.
"Must Valentines Go?" Harrisburg Telegraph (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), 4 Aug 1908, p. 6.
Cullen, Clarence. “Comic” Valentines - They Are Merely Anonymous Letters In Another Form - Decidedly Coarse Humor,” Evening Star (Washington D.C.), 9 Feb. 1907, p. 22.
“Comic Valentines Cause More Sorrow Than Death In a Family or Dinner Without Dessert,” Knoxville Sentinel, 11 Feb 1908, p. 4.
"Valentine's Day From Various Viewpoints," The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), 12 Feb 1910, p. 26.
$5,000 Suit For Valentine. Comic Picture Divides Pawling, N.Y. and Leads to Alleged Assault," New York Times, 7 Jan 1911, p. 2.
"The Old Comic Valentine," The Indianapolis News, 10 Feb 1912, p. 6.
"Valentine Day Changed By Love - Comics, Poison Gas Are Giving Way To Loving Kindness," The El Paso Times, 15 Feb 1919, p. 12.
Copyright by Andrea Auclair © 2024
Wow, just goes to show that hate propaganda is nothing new
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately that's true! This still surprised me, though. I mean, it wasn't a FEW people; this was huge.
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