Valentine's Day cards in the way that we know
them today have been printed and sent since the late 18th century.
Flowers and hearts, love tokens being sent in a paper form.
Saint Valentine was a third Century Roman Saint who was martyred and
killed on the 14th of February. There was a big feast day for his
remembrance and his name over the centuries became synonymous with Valentine's Day.
Saint Valentine is also known as the patron saint of beekeepers and we have this very nice
little print of him from the 1930s by a Catholic artist called Ada Bethune who worked in New York.
Beginning in the 15th century there are lots of references to pagan love
festivals and fertility festivals that happen around about the time of Valentine's Day.
So back in each Rome they had Lupercalia; they're about health in a much wider way.
Because of this link to health you find hearts as a popular motif,
and also flowers which are about birth, rebirth and nature.
As you can see from this selection,
a lot of the visual language of Valentine's cards remains unchanged.
Rings, hearts and love poetry have always been a big feature of the cards.
Valentines very much varied in prices – you could get them for as cheap as a penny. Very
luxurious versions could cost up to three guineas which is about £250 in today's money.
People really wanted to have the new novelties. The best of everything if you had the money,
you may have gone wild for one of these extremely lavish luxurious cards.
This is the oldest example of a Valentine that I have found in the collection. It's
from circa 1780 and it was made by a man called John Thomas of Gloucestershire for
his fiance who was called Elizabeth, and here in the middle is written 'My Bett'
around all these scrolls of love poetry that he has written to her.
This is all hand painted and when you really zoom into the detail you can just see how incredibly
fine it is, all of this dot work and the range of colours that have been used. All the sort
of calligraphic writing is just a very long love poem, and the paper obviously has been
folded in the past – Valentine's cards in fact were not folded cards, they were a larger flat
sheet of paper or they were never designed to be folded – that's something that comes in later on.
This is one of my favourite cards I think in the collection,
it was made in about 1825 so it's quite early for the ones that we
have in the collection – it's known as a paper cage or a cobweb variety.
On the outside it's typical flower motifs again and butterflies which were very common on the
outside of these kind of paper cage examples and on the inside you can see a little mouse,
so there's a trapped mouse Inside the cage. Why a mouse you say for a Valentine's Day card?
Well what would you expect to find trapped in little cage? Perhaps a bird,
perhaps a mouse – some of them do have an example of a heart trapped inside,
so it's like 'you've stolen my heart and put it in a cage'.
Ao this spiralized cutting would have been done by a specific cutting machine to get
this spiral effect into the paper, but very very fragile and could quite easily go wrong.
The reason I'm not wearing gloves is we prefer these days just to have
clean hands instead of gloves because you need the dexterity of your fingers to feel
the fragility of the paper because otherwise it does tear very easily.
We have a large number of novelty cards in the collection which have
various different things stuck onto them in a collage way – some of them are very
surprising like this card made with feathers that were dyed and cut by Brazilian nuns.
Lots of them have artificial flowers or built up three-dimensional elements
like stones and false gemstones, and as the 19th century goes on we see a huge
amount of different types of paper craft with embossing and paper lace,
and then all kinds of little novelty things here – so this one has a mirror underneath
and it says 'a pleasing reflection' and when you lift it up there's a tiny mirror with this
painting set – they're going to do a portrait of their lover. And a passion flower here.
This one has a little envelope which says 'the dread of all young ladies'. When you open up
this envelope it says inside 'to be an old maid' – so this is a very old-fashioned joke,
but a lot of them do have these sort of spinster jokes about them in the 19th century.
Here we have this really fantastic owl who has real feathers for his tail – there's
lots of birds that are synonymous with love – love birds and doves
etc. I think one of my favorites is this pigeon which is imploring their lover to stop smoking, so
it says 'I wish you would leave off that habit of smoking' but it's the pigeon talking to a chimney.
As these would have been produced in quite large number,
they would have been relatively inexpensive to buy. But anything
that has extra embellishments would have been more expensive again.
So this is an example by Rimmel who would still be known to a lot of people today as a perfumer
and makeup company, but in the 19th century they were famous for their Valentines which
they also Incorporated perfume into, and that's why you can see on the inside there's this brown
stain in the top which I think is where the perfume eventually has spoiled the paper.
Moving on to mechanical cards, the best known manufacturer of these was called Dean and Co.
This one that we have in front of us, we do not know who the maker of it was,
but it works in this common way of having this concealed stick of paper which causes
something to move in another part of the card. So if I pull this stick down you can see that
in the looking glass above this sleeping woman, the image changes and then the little
line of verse is about her dreaming about who her future husband will be,
until we get to this little marital scene. But this one is particularly interesting
because on the reverse we discovered that there was a portion of a love letter, and I was going
through the different cards, there's another card that we have here that has another piece of the
letter on the back of it. It's been written from someone in Spain to someone in Britain
and it says 'oh I'll bolt when I can to my lover again and dance and sing in sunny merry Spain'.
These are two more examples of mechanical cards – this one is inscribed at the bottom 1865,
and you can see from where people have touched the paper that it has been sort
of quite well used in the past, but it still works quite nicely. And if
I just gently pull down on this stick, then a valentine pops out from behind
her little garland of flowers and her head moves to one side questioningly.
And then this one is a much meaner example. It's written on the back 'Brighton 1922' but I think
that's when the donor bought it – it's not when it was made. This one as you can see, is quite faded,
but it's quite a shock underneath – so you've got this sort of egg shape with a collar,
a bit like a Humpty Dumpty and it says 'Full dress' but then when you pull down
this one it has a Boar's Head and it says 'for a pig' – so a full dress for a pig,
and then this becomes the pig suit if you like. It's hand coloured again in the background,
there's a bit of watercolour, a bit of pencil, so quite a mixed materials one that obviously people
have loved and played with it quite a lot in the past, it is quite fragile but it still works.
Vinegar Valentines or comic Valentines started to be produced in much greater
number as the 19th century went on. You would have sent vinegar Valentines perhaps to your
colleagues and your friends, and you'd save your lovely hearts and roses for your loved ones.
Many of them are quite offensive by today's standards, but I've pulled
out a few different examples of these. As you can see, these are not cards again,
but they're still considered a Valentine – that's what they were marketed as – but they're
longer prints that could have been folded, as you can see they were folded in the middle.
These are from about 1880s and this one is chastising this woman for being a spinster, this
is again very common topic. There's also a lot that are very critical of male personality flaws,
so it says at the bottom 'We muzzle all puppies now to stop their row' so this man obviously talks
too much, loves the sound of his own voice, nobody wants to listen to him so he put a muzzle on him.
And this one says 'Beware of the snake in the grass' so this is another quite
common theme that would be lampooning men for being duplicitous and deceitful.
This one I'm really not sure about – it's been backed onto card now,
so I suspect the joke might have been in something that you folded up, but we cannot know.
And here is another version which is even cheaper,
so these would have been about a penny these smaller cards. It is a folded sheet of paper,
the paper is very very thin, but it's making a joke about having an ugly reflection basically
or like a hall of mirrors sort of thing, and there's these devilish creatures.
So whilst you can still find comic Valentines today I think people would be surprised at just
quite how mean they were in the late Victorian times and a good deal meaner than today.
Flowers have always been synonymous with love and romance, so obviously we find them right
through the history of the Valentine's Day card, and there's various different examples out here.
So the rose of course is considered the key flower,
or the one that's mostly linked to love and romance, but there are so many that are as well.
This is 'The Language of Flowers' which is a book that was very popular in the
18th and 19th century – the language of flowers or floriography. And this
is a passion flower which comes inside this envelope, and if we open it out, it tells
us all the different kinds of connotations that are associated with different flowers.
So Sweet William is the emblem of a pure and loving smile,
the dwarf sunflower is about adoration.
It's really in Victorian times that there is this huge craze for reading
into all of these hidden and secret meanings that might be behind each one.
So this pansy variety which is printed on this very shimmering silvery silk,
was sent to the iconic actress of her day Ellen Terry and it's inscribed on the back that it
was sent to her and that's unfortunately all that I know. I don't know who sent it,
but it has this ring of pansies here with little creatures – there's a beetle in there.
And the pansy was traditionally considered to be about thoughtfulness,
coming from the French 'penser' – 'to think'.
It was also considered to be a symbol of forbidden love or a secret love,
and I think this is also why it later had a connotation to mean a gay person – a
pansy – which was considered a slur and has since been reclaimed.
And in this example, this little dog whose head actually comes down a little bit,
and underneath it says 'I bows I wows to love you'.
Surrounding him are wreaths and of ivy which is to do with longevity or a sense of the everlasting.
This is a very fine example which includes real grass seeds which have
survived extraordinarily well, alongside paper varieties and all this embossing.
And so to show how flowers made their way into the design of all different types of paper Valentines,
this is another one which is a paper cage, slightly smaller this time and
inside there are two hearts tied together with ribbon and flowers on the outside.
The V&A is still collecting Valentines. Because we have such a large range of examples over hundreds
of years, now we just try and collect really really special examples, like this one which
is made of ceramics by Majolica Works, and it's a really great example of an artist's Valentine.
Quite uniquely crafted and more a work of art than simply just a card.
So I'm going to take it apart for you here now – it comes apart into three pieces,
like so, leaving behind its little heart in there which says desire on it.
So this is another really special example of an
artist's Valentine's card and this is made by the artist Janet Davis,
using very different materials again we've got this red velvet heart in the middle and
mosaic on the outside. And then if we open it up it's embossed again but into this copper, rather
than into paper – this love message about the circuitous nature of love and that love is a bit
like a maze. And in the back again there's more detail, even more detail as these three columns
and this inscription about the summer solstice and hearts intertwined around the top of this column.
The V&A has about 2,000 Valentine's cards in the collection.
At various times in history the Valentine has been declared dead or not in vogue anymore,
but then they always make a revival.
So whether it's a vinegar Valentine or true love card that you're selecting this year,
it will be fitting into this centuries-old tradition of
celebrating Valentine's Day and the language of love.