The Penny Post

The penny post inspired some Victorian lovers to unethical enterprise. One couple corresponded by means of an ingenious cipher of ink-blots and variations in the writing on the envelope, which was unstamped. The young lady to whom it was addressed would examine the cover attentively, absorb the message and then hand it back to the postman, saying she did not wish to claim the letter by paying the postage due. (In a similar way couples cheat the Post Office today by arranging to pass telephone calls at certain times; the person being rung knows what the message means without picking up the receiver, and the person ringing does not spend any money on the call since he is never put through.) It was not long, too, before lovers began to devise codes in which the positioning of the stamp conveyed a private message even before the envelope was opened. Codes of this kind can be found set out in lovers' manuals to this day; but the Postmaster-General does his best to discourage the practice.

The Victorian Post Office was evidently not rigidly bound by regulations. There is a story that Theodore Hook wrote a letter containing a proposal of marriage, posted it and then changed his mind. Hurrying round to the post office he authenticated his writing and was handed back the fatal letter. Today any local postmaster would rather doom a couple to an unhappy marriage than disgorge a proposal once entrusted to his care.

Photography was only a nascent science, but the day when sweethearts would carry each other's likenesses and sigh over them as opportunity offered was not so far off. Meanwhile lithography was doing its best for love. The greeting-card industry showed great resource in meeting, and stimulating, the vogue for Valentines. It is possible to detect in the fashion for the 'bestuck and bleeding heart' the beginnings of an indolent modern tradition-that of paying someone else to furnish the elegancies of wooing. Of old, the lover had composed and decorated his own Valentine, laying it in person at his true love's door. Now he preferred to select a manufactured missive, impeccably phrased and adorned, and slip it into the post-box at negligible cost to himself. It was an easy habit to start, but difficult to stop. Commerce-and not only in the shape of the greeting-card manufacturer-could be relied upon to pander to this attitude; and it was so easy to excuse one's laziness with the plea that only the best was good enough for the lady. Women, as it turned out, were enchanted to receive these printed love tokens, which they seemed much to prefer to home-made confections (just as many of them were beginning to prefer elaborate boxes of florists' roses to nosegays picked in their suitors' gardens).

Hone's Everyday Book, published in the 1820's, says that 200,000 more letters than usual passed through the twopenny post offices in London on St Valentine's Day. Charles Lamb wrote: 'The weary and all for-spent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of embarrassments not his own. It is scarcely credible to what extent this ephemeral courtship is carried on in- this loving town, to the great enrichment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires.'1 Both then, and more especially when the penny post arrived, extra sorting staffs had to be taken on to handle St Valentine's Day traffic.

Valentines came in three main categories-sentimental, silly and nasty. The stationery trade took most pride in the former, using much ingenuity to produce complex and sometimes unnerving designs. Really ornate Valentines might have ribbons, paper lace, metal foil, hair, feathers or even fur, not to mention segments of mirror, spangles and perfume. One type would open out to several times its apparent size, or could be extended into a kind of Chinese lantern, which would then turn out to be a peepshow. It might have its message contained in the smallest of a series of envelopes one inside the other, or in the heart of a multifoliate rose. A young lady fortunate enough to receive half a dozen of these in one post could be left to play happily for hours.

In the silly and nasty categories were Valentines designed expressly to wound. They were directed to old maids, the potbellied, the cross-eyed and the one-legged, cordially wishing them disgrace, death and damnation. Collections of verses expressing these sentiments were published in book form (presumably to be copied out as required) and are as good an answer as any to those who say that popular taste does not change.
There was a special line of vocational Valentines, for use by launderers, sempstresses, poulterers and so forth. Two lines from a baker's greeting will furnish ample illustration:

Oh thy sweet flesh is soft as dough,
And I shall knead thee soon, I know.

It was vulgarity and venom as well as sentiment that helped to weigh down the all for-spent postman on the morning of February 14th. Perhaps this was responsible in some measure for the decline of the Valentine later in the century-a decline from which it did not properly recover until our own times, when the greeting-card trade determined to put St Valentine's Day back on the calendar, along with Mother's Day and other saints' days. In the field of courtship, the place of the Valentine is easy to overrate, and it has a literature probably wider than it deserves.