Victorian-Era Card Collection: Greeting Cards

• Post Date: 10/23/2024
• Author: Chris Gimbel, Registration Assistant, BA, ‘24, history
• Reading Time: 15 minute read

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• In-Depth tag

The original concept of the greeting card can be traced back to ancient China when “messages of goodwill” were exchanged to begin the New Year as well as to ancient Egypt when written greetings were sent via papyrus scrolls as opposed to enveloped paper. Barry Shank defines greeting cards in A Token of My Affection as “dialectical images that precisely convey characteristic impulses and tones,” meaning that this form of ephemera conveyed emotional experiences using visual and textual elements. These cards displayed “the longing for a shared language” of love and social affiliation, and it was hoped that consumers would reproduce and disseminate these feelings through conversation. In essence, the cards’ purpose was to reference positive emotions in the form of art and poetry. Their historical significance, according to Chase, was to bring the public essential experiences of friendship and joy. More broadly, Chase observes that the greeting card itself was an extension “of the need to communicate, a need that is basic [in all people].” Engrained in these works of ephemera were the detailed yet artificial representations of beauty and connection, and these basic comforts were instrumental to their marketing success.

Valentines Cards

The most common type of greeting card in Spurlock’s collection is the Valentine’s Day card. The Victorian Valentine is significant to ephemera scholars because it documents the variety of the marketing agendas for the time. The often-intimate nature of the message allows researchers to analyze the more genuine thoughts and opinions of 19th-century consumers. In terms of Spurlock’s collection, card designs can help reveal some of the popular messages that permeated prior American media.

According to Ruth Webb Lee, the act of passing out Valentines originated in the Roman festival of the goddess Juno Regina, occurring on February 14, in which boys randomly drew the names of the girls who would be their partners during the celebration; this tradition would later be introduced and remained in Anglo-Saxon sentimental culture. Additionally, the holiday Valentine’s Day was a synthesis of the execution date of Saint Valentinus (Valentine) and the Roman feast of Lupercalia, both of which occurred on or near February 14. The feast was Christianized to become a commemorative feast of Valentinus’s martyrdom, but the practice of trading Valentines remained.

Much of the history of Valentines can be gleaned from their designs and the messages which they convey. Nancy Rosin of the National Valentine Collectors' Association describes 16th-century devotionals, precursors of the Valentine, as religious mementos created in the hand-tatted lace style in convents in France, Germany, and Holland. The compositions of these early ephemera “incorporated decorative edges, framed cartouche paintings of saints and sacred hearts, and were often enhanced by swags and flowers, bouquets and hearts—all cut with a knife!” The first idea of “Valentines” referred to the people selected to be matches, but the word evolved to also mean gifts like jewelry, hosiery, and small love messages. The idea of the devotional formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, when convents were encouraged to make parchment or vellum cards with religious iconography such as saints or hearts. These “cut-work” pieces of parchment or vellum were used “to commemorate virtually all celebrations” and possessed the early design elements of Valentines. With new printing innovations that added elegant imagery, the Valentine became a romanticized and popular consumer commodity.

Differences in Production

While Germany was known for its output of colorful lithography, the English specialized at embossing, the process of pressing a raised pattern or image, as well as the production of lace paper. Both innovations helped to develop the English technique of greeting card manufacturing. English firms later sent Valentines in this style to the US, and this resulted in American firms selling Valentines of their own.

Among the great American innovators of the Valentine was Esther Howland. Using imported paper lace and floral decorations from England, she produced her own Valentines and later founded an assembly line business in her home of Worcester, Massachusetts, due to high demand. Howland is also credited with several innovations of the Valentine including the addition of brightly colored paper wafers which contrasted the white paper lace. Another novel design was a dark border underlayer to the Valentine—known as a shadow box—to add visual appeal.

George Whitney, another Worcester resident, became one of the largest producers of Valentines in the US by installing the machinery necessary for embossing paper and manufacturing paper lace domestically. The George C. Whitney Company also solidified its influence in the industry by purchasing Esther Howland’s business in 1881. In the final decades of the 19th century, Valentine’s cards were increasingly produced with contemporary Victorian aesthetics, becoming more extravagantly designed and brightly colored through the improved lithographic process. Valentines as well as other greeting card types were eventually mass-produced in many parts of the world, bringing success to many of their manufacturers. However, this investment in efficiency also meant the newer, factory-produced Valentines lacked personal details, raising concerns that the charm of Valentine’s Day had been tarnished by industrialization.

Love and Longing

Valentines gained appeal with their emphasis of strong emotions, and the feelings that senders wanted to promote could often be discerned in the visual material included in the messages. Images that were staples of the wholesome “sentimental Valentine” included “Christian symbols and depictions of innocent children or animals.” Some Valentines included interactive puzzles with the hope that the recipient would handle the card longer and reveal a sentimental image in the process.

Valentines during war, particularly the Civil War, conveyed feelings of longing during times of absence and privation. A blog post from The Huntington Library showcases a card design that featured “a flag-draped military tent that opened to reveal a lonely soldier writing to his beloved.” This observation, coupled with the tendency for Civil War Valentines of the Rosin Collection to “contain notes that speak vividly of events and living conditions experienced by soldiers,” highlighted the melancholic and gruesome undertones which accompanied these love messages. The devastation of the Civil War and the consequent unprecedented loss of life made Valentine’s Day a special, sentimental time. It was a moment for Americans “to seize the day and honor the love they had.”

Vinegar Valentines

The comic or “vinegar” Valentine purposefully deviated from traditional beauty standards and classy phrases of the sentimental types. The purpose of this card was to be “an anonymous medium for saying mean things,” a messaging style comparable to the mocking and sometimes harmful online comments of today. Lee describes these purposefully insulting greetings as “masterpiece[s] of the grotesque, with barbed verse and unflattering color, far from sentimental, expressing everything but love.”

By 1840, comic cards were produced on a large scale commercially with sales being almost evenly matched with sentimental cards. The reason for these cards’ popularity may have been how applicable they were to a variety of frustrating life events. Annebella Pollen, a lecturer in art and design history at the University of Brighton, explained that there was a comic card “for pretty much any social ailment.” Sendees included neighbors, friends, schoolteachers, bosses, and any other person who was considered socially unacceptable. As an added benefit, the sender’s reputation was likely not at risk since it was unlikely they would be identified.

Christmas Cards

Another staple of greeting card ephemera was the Victorian Christmas card. The custom of sending Christmas cards is rather recent, beginning in England during the 1840s. The Cole card—named after creator Sir Henry Cole—depicted “a happy family group” that each “[held] aloft a brimming glass of wine.” This imagery attracted negative attention from temperance groups, but this controversy also proved to be good advertising. American greeting card manufacturers, capitalizing on this interest, produced their own copies. Christmas cards also played into the emotions of their customers through warm imagery of the holiday season.

Among the most notable producers of American Christmas card visuals was Louis Prang. As a designer of business labels, Prang adopted the chromolithographic method to create, as Shank argues, cards that “emphasize[d] the natural over the cultural,” compensating for the “flatness” of printed business labels by “contributing a third dimension of artificially suggested naturalness to the commercial appeal.” Prang applied this commercial design to his Christmas cards, and this resulted in a thematic dichotomy where the card reflected the “powerful dialectical images that signified sentimental seasonal abundance and warmth” while the receiver navigated through harsh, capitalistic social structures that emphasized “competitive industrial production and acquisitive accumulation.”

Prang, like other greeting card business owners, understood that societal ideas and mannerisms could be promoted through the art on cards. This “aesthetic education” of the Christmas card, introduced to the wider public through cheap chromolithographic prints, instilled ideas of social obligation while simultaneously sparking debates such as how greeting cards promoted “mediocrity” in mass-culture as products of a mechanized society.

Regardless of consumer reactions to industrialized means of advertising, Christmas cards held a significant cultural sway over American social life because of the creatively intensive work ethic required for making holiday items during the holiday season. According to Chase, the technical perfection of a modern American Christmas card can be attributed to “a highly competitive industry” where card publishers “subject themselves to constant self-approval, remaining ever alert to new ideas and new techniques.” With a variety of colors and designs, the Christmas card became “as much a part of today's Christmas as the tree and Santa.” When these cards, ordinarily mantelpiece items, became conversation starters, their marketing and symbolic significance far outweighed any material cost.