Nineteenth-century sentimental valentines are recognizable by their overwhelming assemblage of delicate paper lace and small chromolithographed pictures called “scrap.” Many of the components employed—flowers, hearts, lovebirds, Cupid, and affectionate phrases—wouldn’t look out of place on a valentine today. Some, however, are more period-specific, such as Christian symbols and depictions of innocent children or animals, staples of nineteenth-century popular imagery. Makers relied on this generalized sentimental iconography to craft attractive cards that would have been immediately legible as valentines. While there were certainly valentines that emphasized text (as in the presentation of a lengthy poem or “comical” taunting prose), these collaged valentines instead relied on images, textures, and interactive features to convey sentiment. In this way, the sentimental valentine appealed to the recipient through the senses, especially touch, on a more immediate level.
That a valentine should invite or even require significant handling by its recipient has been an integral component of the genre since its early days. During the eighteenth century, many valentines took the form of a folded rebus or puzzle, with numbered verses to be reassembled by the recipient. By the mid-nineteenth century, a valentine could demand physical interaction in a multitude of ways. Some might reveal images when the recipient pulled on a lever or a string. In the “cobweb” or “beehive” valentine, for example, an intricately cut spiral pattern can be pulled out and extended to reveal a sentimental image beneath. More complex than simply lifting a flap to reveal a picture, the webbing of the cut paper forced the viewer to move around to view the image and to peer through the spaces in the paper, similar to other valentines that partially occlude images with perforated paper lace.
Before about 1840, valentines were commonly made by the giver or were quite expensive when crafted by others, but by the mid-nineteenth century, commercially produced valentines became the norm. These valentines were crafted by hand, but not by the sender. In companies like Howland and Whitney’s, groups of workers, usually young women, assembled valentines with the aforementioned “scrap,” resulting in collages of standard imagery. The anonymity of the maker was an asset in the valentine business: it enabled for the evocation of sentiment, as if the giver had produced the item himself. At most, a valentine might include the company’s stamp (a “W” for Whitney, for example) but never the name of any specific makers. By diffusing and mystifying the labor expended in its creation, the valentine became an object with no authorship until the giver personalized it by simply signing the card. Very little space, if any, was left for other significant additions on behalf of the purchaser. Despite their seemingly handmade charm, designers and factories produced an overwhelming number of valentines, making Valentine’s Day a profitable industry built on feminized labor. Ultimately, there was a tension between the erasure of this labor and its popularity in the media, which continually credited the valentine’s beauty to the “nimble fingers of expert young ladies.”
