🌅 The History of “Vinegar Valentines”

SOURCE

Annebella Pollen (2014)

WHAT TO KNOW

• Receiving sweet sentiments through the mail has been a hallmark of Valentine’s Day since Britons became enamored with the loving gesture during the Victorian era, sending an estimated 1.5 million valentines cards each year in the 1870s. However, not all of those cards were sweet, up to half or more were actually cruel, insulting cards known as mock or mocking valentines. Later coined “vinegar valentines,” the cards were meant to shock, offend, and upset the recipient. Unsurprisingly, the sender often chose to remain anonymous.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Mock valentines were cheaply made and inexpensive to buy, and came in a broad range of “types” that typically included a caricature of the intended recipient above a few lines of text advertised as lampooning, spiteful, or heart-killing, among other descriptions. Each card was designed to highlight and critique a particular social ill, and the anonymous sender could speak on behalf of themselves or others. In this way, mock valentines used humor to exercise a certain level of social control, with the cards functioning as a unique kind of self-policing regarding moral standards within a community. Still, many cards simply espoused racism or bigotry, or viciously remarked on a person’s physical appearance.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Mock valentines have never truly gone away. The cards made their way to the U.S. in the mid-1800s and remained popular throughout the Golden Age of picture postcards in the early 1900s, receiving somewhat of a second revival 50 years later with the advent of comic postcards. Experts say the effects and influence of vinegar valentines can be seen in today’s internet trolls and chronically online cultural influencers, who wield the same spite and cruelty as that of mock valentine senders in the Victorian era but aren’t restricted to a single day in February.