The cute, suggestive, outrageous and morally unacceptable world of yesteryear’s romantic gestures.
Valentine’s Day, like everything else, is woefully commercial and corporate – and perhaps that’s always been the case. But once upon a time, the cards that people exchanged had a certain eccentricity to them. Sometimes, this took the form of mild (or not so mild) innuendo that could pass as innocent – references to boners, cocks and such could arguably have been wholesome little remarks rendered rude by our modern dirty minds – though it is more likely that artists and designers were simply having a little fun. Certainly, we have to admire just how many puns the creators could come up with to justify the wide variety of imagery on display.
There are those cards that celebrate – even encourage – the sort of behaviour that might raise eyebrows today. Drink driving, smoking, gun violence and suicide are all things that you probably won’t see being pushed as romantic images today. Neither will you see the outrageous levels of racism that seemed the norm once. it’s hard to imagine anyone ever finding a comedy lynching image as the sort of thing that would impress a potential love interest, but I fear that it probably seemed hilarious to the target audience.
And then there are the Valentine Vinegar cards, a particularly mean-spirited idea designed to insult the recipient in the crudest way possible. Popular in the Victorian era, these seem to have largely fallen out of favour today, something that we can all be grateful for.
These cards seem at once innocent and outrageous, with bad taste and wild offensiveness hidden behind cutesy cartoons of childish figures experiencing innocent first love. They reflect the time and place that they existed in, as do any greeting cards, and they should be seen in that light – both the cutesy and wholesome and the wildly offensive. These are very much of their time.
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