Be My Valentine

It could be argued that Valentine’s Day cards are for the tongue tied. As early as 1420, King Henry hired English poet John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois, becoming the fount for the flood of commercially prepared romantic sentiments sent each year on February 14th.

Perhaps Henry could have done it himself; maybe he was just too busy, but Lydgate seemed to hit the right mark for the monarch who dispatched his missive, declaring:

It was an early Hallmark moment. Today, the Greeting Card Association estimates 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, most of them commercially prepared. But the Clark Institute has an opportunity for those who want to return to something more personal. It will host a Zoom “craft-along webinar” with tips for making and mailing artful valentines on February 4th and 11th.

This talks will be broadcast live at noon and will last about thirty minutes. Online registration is required by noon Wednesday, February 3rd. Registrants will receive an email with a private link to the virtual program before the events.

Visitors can also download free envelopes and stationery inspired by the Clark’s collections between February 1st and February 14th by visiting clarkart.edu.

Valentine missives have been popular since the Middle Ages, emerging from traditions that stretch much farther back into history and, as with many holiday customs, have a mixture of pagan and Christian elements. It is unknown exactly which of the three St. Valentines who lost their heads (presumably not to love) on February 14th provided the romantic connection but one myth that Roman priest, persisted in marrying Christian couples when it was forbidden by Emperor Claudius Gothicus, provides perhaps an apocryphal connection.

The Saint’s day celebration was apparently mixed liberally with the ancient Roman fertility ritual of Lupercalia, also held in mid-February but it was not until about thousand years later, in 1382, that Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, definitively connected it to romance. He linked the February feast to the mating of birds when he wrote Parlement of Foules in celebration of the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. The poem contained the lines, “For this was on seynt Volantynys day. Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese (choose) his make (mate).”

The holiday was off to the races. Only 33 years later, Charles, Duke of Orleans penned the oldest known valentine still in existence while imprisoned in the Tower of London. Confessing to being “sick of love,” he called his wife, his “very gentle Valentine.” By the middle of the 18th century, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes.

Handwritten and crafted Valentines continued to gain in popularity but it was the innovation of an English government postal worker named Rowland Hill who was responsible for spreading it to the masses when, in 1837 he published the very unromantic pamphlet, Post Office Reform; Its Importance and Practicability. Hill is credited with inventing the postage stamp. In the process, the cost of sending a one-sheet valentine from London to Edinburgh dropped from 1s 1½d—more than a day’s wage for the working class—to one penny.

Valentines were sent in such great numbers that postmen were given a special allowance for refreshments to help them through the extraordinary exertions of the two or three days leading up to February 14th. Just one year after the Uniform Penny Postage, 400,000 valentines were posted throughout England. By 1871, 1.2 million cards were processed by London’s General Post Office.

In America, Esther Howland (1828–1904), a never-married spinster, became known as the “Mother of the American Valentine.” An artist and businesswoman, she became the first commercial purveyor of valentines in the United States.

Inspiration came early when, as a 19-year-old, she received a handcrafted valentine from her father’s business associate. Esther decided she could do better. At this time elaborate Valentine greeting cards were imported from Europe and were too expensive for many Americans. Howland ordered the fancy laces, papers and decorations included in English Victorian cards and made a dozen samples for her brother to display on his next sales trip.

Hoping for $200 in orders, she was stunned to receive $5,000. She quickly employed friends to help construct her valentines in an assembly line. She later expanded the enterprise to employ women who did piece work in their homes. It is believed that when Howland opened her valentine business in her family home, it looked like the English workshop described in Charles Dickens’ All the Year Round:
“(They are) in a long room occupied by nymphs, each one having at her elbow a pot, not of color this time, but of glue. Strewn before each girl in apparent confusion, but really in regularly-assorted heaps, lie hearts and darts and doves and bows and arrows, and rose-buds and true lovers’ knots, and torches of Hymen, and every variety of emblem appertaining to love and matrimony… Some are paper, some are silk and velvet, some tinsel and gold-leaf.”

Howland’s early cards contained short four-line verses pasted inside, eventually becoming an industry standard.

Not everyone celebrates romance however. In 1856, a curmudgeonly editor at the New York Times penned this “valentine” to the public:

“Our beaux and belles are satisfied with a few miserable lines, neatly written upon fine paper, or else they purchase a printed Valentine with verses readymade, some of which are costly, and many of which are cheap and indecent.

The custom with us has no useful feature, and the sooner it is abolished the better.”

But there was no stopping it. By 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters as printing technology improved, offering inarticulate swains easy ways to express their emotions. In 2020, Valentine's Day shoppers set new spending records, adding $27.4 billion to the economy, according to the National Retail Federation.