As you shuffle through the Valentine’s Day cards you received this year, you might want to thi
As you shuffle through the Valentine’s Day cards you received this year, you might want to think twice before tossing them out. Valentine’s Day cards have a history that goes back even farther than the first Hallmark greeting cards of the 1910s. Before and during the Victorian era, valentines were no small matter. They were often handmade with elegant designs and filled with poetry that professed the sender’s love.The book The Valentine and Its Origins outlines the significance of the holiday during the Victorian era. February 14th was the day that gave people free rein to express their love. England’s General Post Office considered Valentine’s Day to be the busiest day of the year, especially due to the popularity of the Penny Post, which charged only one penny to deliver letters.The meaning of the cards were also essential, as Debra Mancoff notes in her book Love’s Messenger: Tokens of Affection in the Victorian Age. The cards were not only small tokens of love, but were also significant notions of “honorable intentions” of courtship and marriage. Victorians modeled their actions after the romanticized courtship and marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who had a set of souvenir valentines made to honor their first anniversary in 1841. Victorian valentines continue to be admired today and are occasionally sold at auction. The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries house many auction catalogs and even the occasional exhibition catalog that feature Victorian Valentine’s Day cards, including hand-colored lithographs, chromolithographs, pierced paperlace cards, pop-up cards, and other examples. Cards once intended to privately proclaim lovers’ affections have found new lives in public collections, such as these examples by Joseph Addenbrooke and Thomas Wood from the Art Institute of Chicago’s own collections. What will be the fate of your valentines? -- source link