“Messages of Love Flying Fast Today” (Geneva Daily Times headline)
On Feb. 14, 1899, the Geneva Daily Times reporter gushed about “a day in which the children especially delight and youthful swains and maidens exchange their missives of love and adoration. No doubt many a heart today is palpitating and beating fast with joy over the receipt of them while the recipient fondly ponders over the honeyed words at the same time wondering from whom the message came.” While applauding the correct use of “whom,” the reader is left to ponder the possible difference between a palpitating heart and one beating fast.
Sending cards was encouraged by the “store windows ... resplendent for the past few weeks with their display of valentines and many gorgeous creations have been shown.” The reporter was pleased to report a decline in those expressing “hate and contempt,” or the “so-called comic valentines.” Not all comic valentines were insulting. To distinguish them, the modern term is “vinegar valentines,” a genre that became popular in Victorian England and crossed the Atlantic.
In 1847, publishers printed as many vinegar valentines as they did sentimental ones. By 1896, according to a report in The New York Journal, America was said to publish the largest number of insulting valentines, and they were distributed to every English-speaking country in the world. They were either printed on cheap, easily foldable paper and sent in envelopes, or as illustrated postcards. At a cost of a 2-cent stamp, the postcard was the more popular. The typical format was a caricature with a stinging verse, sometimes aimed at a store that did not serve its customers well, as in a 1910 card that showed an overbearing female clerk intimidating a tiny old woman, with the admonition: “SALESLADY, 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.” Some were aimed at professionals, such as the caricature of “Dr. Sure-Death,” who overcharged his customers.
Often, they were aimed at deriding individuals, both male and female, whose manners or mannerisms were displeasing or non-conformist. An 1896 caricature of a Mannish Maid depicted a smartly dressed woman wearing trousers, a corseted waistcoat, and a tailored jacket. Doggerel drove home the insult: “They say you think a miss was made,/When you were made a maid/That is, that you were made amiss,/When you a miss were made.” The cautionary concluding couplet is: “A maid who fails all maid to be/Is almost sure to be Old Maid.” No doubt, the so-called “mannish maid” could care less about missing out on a traditional marriage.
Not surprisingly, suffragettes came under attack, beginning with postcards printed in 1840 and through the 1910s, until women were granted the vote in 1919. These valentines emphasized that a suffragette could never win a man’s heart because she lacked feminine qualities; for example, she was too “preachy.” Some cards designed for women allowed the sender to declare she was not a suffragist and besides that, she knew how to cook.
The sentiments could go beyond insults to threats: “The Chattering Idiot” (1896) features a caricature of a man with a large head, curly mustache, buck teeth, and open mouth, seated in a chair, leaning forward, as if talking to someone not in the frame. The verse warns him: “Though in intellect you’re feebler than an average canary,/Of your idiotic gabble you’re not the least bit chary:/You bore us with your stupid thoughts and imbecile opinions,/Till we long to see you banished to Lucifer’s dominions./We use this means to warn you, that unless we get a rest,/We’ll resort to savage measures for suppressing you, you pest.”
The Times reporter noted that vinegar valentines were “falling into disuse more and more and will probably someday be entirely relegated to the oblivion to which they belong.” Perhaps that was true in Geneva, but traditional and vinegar valentines boomed in sales for some time. In 1905, the Chicago post office delayed delivery of thousands of vinegar valentines that were “unfit” to send because of their rudeness. Although in some parts of the country, vinegar valentines continued to sell into the 1970s, their popularity dwindled at the same time that sending sentimental valentines declined.
In the place of postcards with anonymous insults and threats once a year, Americans now receive or view an unprecedented number of them daily on social media, and each can be proliferated with a mere send and click.
Linda Robertson is a retired faculty member from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she started the Media and Society Program. She has made several documentaries about the history of abolition in upstate New York, including Geneva.
GENEVA IN 1899: 'Messages of love'
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02.03.2024
“Messages of Love Flying Fast Today” (Geneva Daily Times headline)
On Feb. 14, 1899, the Geneva Daily Times reporter gushed about “a day in which the children especially delight and youthful swains and maidens exchange their missives of love and adoration. No doubt many a heart today is palpitating and beating fast with joy over the receipt of them while the recipient fondly ponders over the honeyed words at the same time wondering from whom the message came.” While applauding the correct use of “whom,” the reader is left to ponder the possible difference between a palpitating heart and one beating fast.
Sending cards was encouraged by the “store windows ... resplendent for the past few weeks with their display of valentines and many gorgeous creations have been shown.” The reporter was pleased to report a decline in those expressing “hate and contempt,” or the “so-called comic valentines.” Not all comic valentines were insulting. To distinguish them, the modern term is “vinegar valentines,” a genre that became popular in Victorian England and crossed the Atlantic.
In 1847, publishers printed as many vinegar valentines as they did........
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