In an era of perpetual outrage and with a general decline in civility, is the time ripe for the revival of the “vinegar valentine?”
Vinegar valentines were insult cards that enjoyed a surge in popularity for a little over a century, beginning in the 1840s. Their creation paralleled a rise in literacy and was abetted by the reasonable asking price of a penny (at their inception) or a nickel (at their twilight in the 1940s and ‘50s).
The tone of a vinegar valentine is invariably sardonic and usually mean-spirited, with garish caricatures and poison pen verse aimed, like so many barbs and brickbats, at targets in a seemingly inexhaustible gallery of types – the spinster, the floozy, the old maid, the dandy, the Romeo, the artiste. Needless to say, they generated a lot of bad feeling and often resulted in shouting matches and fisticuffs.
Compounding the hilarity, in the 1840s, recipients, rather than the senders, were the ones who paid the postage – so that the person on the receiving end actually paid for the privilege of being insulted by an anonymous “admirer.” This is how people entertained themselves before the immediate gratification of the internet.
It’s always refreshing to stumble across theses reminders that human nature never changes.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
More about vinegar valentines here:
