But what about people in your life you don\u2019t like so much? Why is there no Hallmark card telling them to get lost?<\/p>\n
The Victorians had just the thing: a cruel and mocking version of the traditional Valentine\u2019s Day card. Later coined \u201cvinegar valentines\u201d by 21st-century art collectors and dealers, such cards were usually referred to as mock or mocking valentines during the Victorian era.<\/p>\n
Such cards were meant to shock, offend and upset their recipients. Not surprisingly, as with real Valentine\u2019s Day cards, senders often chose to remain anonymous.<\/p>\n
Vinegar valentines are what we historians like to call ephemera, that is, materials that are usually not meant to last a long time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to imagine a recipient of a vinegar valentine wanting to keep it lovingly in a frame, and many have been lost to time. But luckily, some vinegar valentines have survived and have been preserved in the collections of many historical institutions, such as Brighton and Hove Museums and the New York Public Library.<\/p>\n
One jab at obnoxious sales ladies reads:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAs you wait upon the women<\/p>\n
With disgust upon your face<\/p>\n
The way you snap and bark at them<\/p>\n
One would think you owned the place\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
There is even a card for the pretentious poet who pretends to make a living with his art:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cBehold this pale little poet<\/p>\n
With a finger at forehead to show it<\/p>\n
But the way he gets scads<\/p>\n
Is by writing soap ads<\/p>\n
But he wants nobody to know it!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The anonymous nature of the vinegar valentine meant that anyone could be an unwitting recipient. Some cards could poke gentle fun, but others could have quite dangerous results.<\/p>\n
In 1885, a resident in the U.K. city of Birmingham, William Chance, was charged with the attempted murder of his estranged wife after he received a vinegar valentine from her. He shot her in the neck, and she was sent to the hospital.<\/p>\n
\u2018Pompous, vain and conceited\u2019<\/h2>\n
But who could be disliked so much that they would receive a vinegar valentine?<\/p>\n
The poor, old and ugly were convenient targets. Unmarried men and women might also receive a vicious rejection from potential partners.<\/p>\n
A Feb. 9, 1877, article from the Newcastle Courant notes that \u201cit is the pompous, the vain and conceited, the pretentious and ostentatious who are generally selected as butts for valentine wit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sending such a valentine was a way for ordinary people to enforce social norms disguised as a joke. It was also a way to feel powerful over an already vulnerable person, even if the sender was vulnerable themselves.<\/p>\n
Vinegar valentine sheet titled \u2018You are on the Road to Destruction.\u2019 Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption> Vinegar valentines emerged as a sour offshoot of the cultural ascendancy of Valentine\u2019s Day itself. While rooted in an ancient Roman fertility ceremony, the day was turned into a celebration of love by the Victorians.<\/p>\n
The first Valentine\u2019s Day cards in the early 1800s were often made by hand. With the rise of industrialization, by the 1840s and 1850s most cards were produced in factories. These regular Valentine\u2019s Day cards were often decorated with lace and romantic images.<\/p>\n
An industry of insults<\/h2>\n
By the mid-1800s, both Britain and the United States entered into what one historian calls \u201cValentine\u2019s mania.\u201d<\/p>\n
The earliest vinegar valentines were sheets of paper folded like a letter. And to add insult to injury, before the availability of prepaid postage, the recipient had to pay to receive their letter.<\/p>\n
Many printers offered vinegar valentines alongside the more traditionally positive and ornate cards. Even the firm Raphael Tuck & Sons, \u201cPublishers to Their Majesties the King and Queen of England,\u201d joined the vinegar valentine craze.<\/p>\n
Vinegar valentines made their way across the pond to the United States in the mid-1800s. Some American printers made their own vinegar valentines; others, such as A.S Jordan, imported them from Britain.<\/p>\n
During the American Civil War, these cards became a medium to express anger and frustration. If you supported the Union, you could send the following message to an unlucky secessionist from the South:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou are the man who chuckles when the news<\/p>\n
Comes o\u2019er the wires and tells of sad disaster,<\/p>\n
Pirates on sea succeeding-burning ships and crews,<\/p>\n
Rebels on land marauding, thicker, aye, and faster<\/p>\n
You are the two faced villain, though not very bold,<\/p>\n
Who would barter your country for might or for gold.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Votes and valentines<\/h2>\n
As vinegar valentines continued to be produced throughout the early 1900s, a new target became very popular \u2013 the suffragette.<\/p>\n
Women fighting for the right to vote were seen by their detractors as unfeminine, and vinegar valentines were a cheap and convenient medium to enforce gender roles. In such cards, suffragettes were usually depicted as ugly spinsters or abusive, lazy wives. One card warns, \u201cA vote from me you will not get, I don\u2019t want a preaching suffragette.\u201d Similarly, another card says:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou may think it fun poor Cupid to snub,<\/p>\n
With the hand of a Suffragette.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s cunning and smart, aye, there\u2019s the rub,<\/p>\n
Revenge is the trap he will set.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A valentine for one drunk on love? Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption> There were even cards made for anti-suffragist women looking to secure a husband. One card plaintively proclaims, \u201cIn these wild days of suffragette drays, I\u2019m sure you\u2019d ne\u2019er overlook a girl who can\u2019t be militant, but simply loves to cook.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were also pro-suffrage Valentine\u2019s Day cards. One card defiantly asks, \u201cAnd you think you can keep women silent politically? It can\u2019t be did!\u201d<\/p>\n
Cupid as a troll<\/h2>\n
Vinegar valentines continued to be popular through the Golden Age of picture postcards in the early 1900s. They declined in popularity after World War I. This may be due to a decline in card giving overall, or a cultural shift away from \u201clowbrow\u201d humor. But they never fully went away.<\/p>\n
The spirit of the vinegar valentine saw a second revival in the 1950s with the rise of the comic postcard.<\/p>\n
And the effects of vinegar valentines can still be seen, and felt, today. Anonymous internet trolls keep up the sniping spirit so prevalent in the Victorian era. Today\u2019s vinegar valentines are extremely online. They are just as spiteful, but the difference is they are emphatically not restricted to one particular day in February.<\/p>\n
Melissa Chim, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Excelsior University<\/em><\/p>\n
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n<\/figurlazyload><\/figurlazyload><\/div>\n#Victorianera #vinegar #valentines #show #trolling #existed #long #social #media #internet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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