After we bring to mind Valentine’s Day, overweight Cupids, hearts and roses most often are evoked, no longer business processes like mass manufacturing and the department of work. But the latter had been crucial to the vacation’s historical past.
As a historian researching subject material tradition and feelings, I’m acutely aware of the vital position the trade of manufactured greeting playing cards performed within the Nineteenth-century model of Valentine’s Day.
In the beginning of that century, Britons produced maximum in their valentines by way of hand. By way of the 1850s, then again, manufactured playing cards had changed the ones up to now made by way of people at house. By way of the 1860s, greater than 1 million playing cards had been in flow in London by myself.
The British journalist and playwright Andrew Halliday used to be thinking about those playing cards, particularly one fashionable card that featured a girl and gentleman strolling arm-in-arm up a pathway towards a church.
Halliday recalled observing in fascination as “the windows of small booksellers and stationers” full of “highly-coloured” valentines, and considering “how and where” they “originated.” “Who draws the pictures?” he puzzled. “Who writes the poetry?”
In 1864 he determined to determine.
Manufactured intimacy
Lately Halliday is maximum steadily remembered for his writing on London beggars in a groundbreaking 1864 social survey, “London Labour and the London Poor.” Alternatively, right through the 1860s he used to be an ordinary contributor to Charles Dickens’ fashionable magazine “All the Year Round,” during which he entertained readers with essays addressing quite a lot of sides of extraordinary British day by day lifestyles, together with circle of relatives family members, go back and forth, public services and products and fashionable entertainments.
In a single essay for that magazine – “Cupid’s Manufactory,” which used to be later reprinted in 1866 within the assortment “Everyday Papers” – Halliday led his readers on a guided excursion of certainly one of London’s principal card producers.
Within the premises of “Cupid and Co.,” they adopted a “valentine step by step” from a “plain sheet of paper” to “that neat white box in which it is packed, with others of its kind, to be sent out to the trade.”
Traveling ‘Cupid’s Manufactory’
“Cupid and Co.” used to be possibly the company of Joseph Mansell, a lace-paper and desk bound corporate that manufactured huge numbers of valentines between the 1840s and 1860s – and in addition simply came about to occupy the similar cope with as “Mr. Cupid’s” in London’s Crimson Lion Sq..
The processes Halliday described, then again, had been commonplace to many British card producers within the 1860s, and exemplified many business practices first presented all over the past due 18th century, together with the subdivision of duties and the employment of ladies and kid laborers.
Halliday moved in the course of the rooms of “Cupid’s Manufactory,” describing the number of processes in which quite a lot of types of playing cards had been made for a spread of various folks and value issues.
He famous how the cardboard with the woman and gentleman at the trail to the church started as a easy stamped card, in black and white – just like one preserved these days within the collections of the London Museum – priced at one penny.
Those coloured playing cards, Halliday famous, could be bought for “sixpence to half-a-crown.” A portion of those, then again, had been then despatched directly to any other room, the place any other workforce of younger girls glued on feathers, lace-paper, bits of silk or velvet, and even gold leaf, growing much more ornate playing cards now and again bought for five shillings and above.
All informed, Halliday witnessed “about sixty hands” – most commonly younger ladies, but in addition “men and boys,” who labored 10 hours an afternoon in each and every season of the 12 months, making playing cards for Valentine’s Day.
But, it used to be at the best flooring of the industry that Halliday encountered the individuals who arguably fascinated him probably the most: the six artists who designed all of the playing cards, and the poets who supplied their textual content – maximum of whom in fact labored offsite.
Right here had been the lads answerable for production the true sentiments the playing cards conveyed – and within the mid-Nineteenth century those encompassed a a ways wider vary of feelings than the playing cards produced by way of Hallmark and others within the twenty first century.
A spectrum of ‘manufactured emotions’
Many Victorians mailed playing cards no longer simplest to these with whom they had been in love, but in addition to these they disliked or wanted to mock or abuse. A complete subgenre of playing cards existed to belittle the individuals of positive trades, like tailors or draper’s assistants, or individuals who dressed out of style.
A Valentine’s Day card produced someday between 1860 and 1880.
© The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA
Playing cards had been in particular designed for discouraging suitors and for poking amusing of the previous or the unattractive. Whilst a few of these playing cards most likely had been exchanged as jokes between buddies, the consensus amongst students is that many had been completely meant to be despatched as merciless insults.
Moreover, in contrast to within the provide day, within the Nineteenth century those that gained a Valentine had been anticipated to ship one in go back, which intended there have been additionally playing cards to deter long term attentions, counsel endurance, categorical thank you, proclaim mutual admiration, or verify love’s effusions.
Halliday famous the poet hired by way of “Cupid’s” had just lately completed the textual content for a mean-spirited comedian valentine that includes a gentleman admiring himself in a reflect:
Having a look at thyself inside the glass,You seem misplaced in admiration;You lie to your self, and suppose, alas!You’re a surprise of advent.
This similar creator, then again, had previous finished the other more or less textual content for the cardboard Halliday had up to now highlighted, that includes the “lady and gentleman churchward-bound”:
“The path before me gladly would I trace,With one who’s dearest to my constant heart,To yonder church, the holy sacred place,Where I my vows of Love would fain impart;And in sweet wedlock’s bonds unite with thee,Oh, then, how blest my life would ever be!”
Those had been very other texts by way of the exact same guy. And Halliday confident his readers “Cupid’s laureate” had authored many others in each and every conceivable taste and sentiment, throughout the year, for “twopence a line.”
Halliday confirmed how a stranger used to be production expressions of feelings for using different strangers who paid cash for them. In reality, he confident his readers that within the lead as much as Valentine’s Day “Cupid’s” used to be “turning out two hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of valentines a week,” and that his industry used to be “yearly on the increase.”
Halliday discovered this dynamic – the method of mass generating playing cards for benefit to assist folks categorical their original feelings – each interesting and unusual. It used to be a convention he idea appeared adore it needs to be “beneath the dignity of the age.”
And but it thrived a number of the earnest Victorians, and it prospers nonetheless. Certainly, it stays a core characteristic of the trendy vacation of Valentine’s Day.
This 12 months, like in such a lot of others, I can stand at a show of greeting playing cards, with many different strangers, as all of us attempt to in finding that one card designed by way of any individual else, heavily produced for benefit, that can put across our honest non-public emotions for our buddies and family members.
