Victorian Valentines: From Sentiment to Satire

Today, the rituals of St. Valentine’s Day, often marked by romantic meals a deux, dozens of red roses, and garish greeting cards, are heavily commercialised. Some might suppose that little of the nineteenth-century quaint ritual and whimsy remains visible in the modern-day marking of this date. In fact, it was the Victorians who initiated the mass production of valentines. Their promotion of increasingly innovative paper and lace fabrications were a visible and fashionable aspect of the period’s maturing commodity culture. Sending a valentine on the 14th February became a popular and widespread custom from the 1830s. Rather then being dismissed as innocent, pretty nonsense in the period, valentines played a role in the developing cultural life of the Victorian era. By the end of the century, anxieties were emerging that sincerity, authenticity and self-expression were being eroded through the mass production of valentines. As an increasingly commercial object, the valentine’s ability to convey emotion waned.