What Did Valentines Day Cards Look Like 200 Years Ago?

In the late 19th century, few things telegraphed yearning like a card adorned with paper lace, gold foil and a couple exchanging a coy glance.

Today, such a card would evoke an eye roll.

The evolution of cards from the treacly confections of Victorian England to the quippy missives of today reflect both shifting design aesthetics and broader cultural customs around romance. As the borders of socially accepted relationships have shifted, so have the cards. Where once there was poetry, now there are drawings of pizzas.

“Greeting cards are a reflection of society,” said Carlos Llansó, executive director of the Greeting Card Association, a trade organization that represents roughly 4,000 independent card makers.

Valentine’s Day cards today are less formal, precious and prescribed, Mr. Llansó said, because our understanding of love has become more expansive.

Lottery and lace

Historians struggle to trace the exact origins of Valentine’s Day — some pinpoint the holiday to a curiously unromantic Pagan festival in Rome that involved goat slaughter and nudity — but they tend to agree that its association with romance was most likely established in England.

Early Valentine’s Day celebrations, dating as far back as the 17th century, were only loosely associated with love and often revolved around a lottery, said Sally Holloway, a cultural historian at the University of Warwick whose research focuses on love, marriage and courtship in 18th century England.

People would pull names out of a hat and select someone to be their Valentine from February through Easter.

“Your Valentine could be your neighbor, it could be a colleague, it could be a member of your family,” Dr. Holloway said. “You’d pin the name of the person who you’d been given as your Valentine to your clothes.” Matched pairs would exchange gifts, dance together and maybe write funny riddles or poems for each other.

A confluence of rapid social changes in the late 1700s and early 1800s, including the idealization of marrying for love rather than for economic advantage, Dr. Holloway said, helped to transform Valentine’s Day into a commercialized celebration of romantic love with a partner of your choosing.

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This period dovetailed with the advent of new printing technologies and mass production, as well as an expansion of postal services, making Valentine’s Day cards a popular component of courtship rituals.

They presented, in many ways, a rare opportunity to directly convey desire within the confines of an otherwise buttoned-up Victorian society, where bold romantic declarations could be both risky and risqué. At the time, the responsibility of pursuing a marriage partner fell to men, and women tended to avoid overtly signaling affection.

But on Valentine’s Day, those rules were flipped.

“For one day a year, the language of love became the preserve of women,” Dr. Holloway said. And because it was considered a daring and even racy act to send a Valentine’s Day card, women “couldn’t put their name to it,” Dr. Holloway said. It is why so many cards from that era contain only vague, brief greetings, sometimes with a question mark at the end, adding a whiff of mystique.

The custom arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s, and crafty, entrepreneurial women fueled its commercialization.

Esther Howland — often referred to as the “mother of the American valentine” — is said to have first received a Valentine’s Day card from someone in Britain in 1847 and was inspired to create her own version.

“It was her idea to essentially create an assembly line of women putting together these really complex Valentines,” said Jamie Kwan, an assistant curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The cards were handmade, and Howland “imported materials from the U.K. and Germany to incorporate into these cards.”

Estimates suggest she sold between $75,000 and $100,000 worth of cards a year, roughly the equivalent of $3 million today.

Embracing new ideas of love

Over time, innovation around the craftsmanship of cards slowed, and it was their imagery that began to reflect a rapidly changing culture.

In 1910, Hallmark entered the industry and quickly became one of the largest and most recognizable card makers. The brand’s earliest Valentine’s Day cards relied heavily on the Victorian symbols of love from the previous century: hearts, Cupids and lovebirds.

By the 1930s, Hallmark started printing cards with boundary-pushing images of couples embracing and, by 1945, dancing.

“It used to be that we used a lot more traditional forms of creative crafts, like engraving, calligraphy and lace,” said Jen Walker, a vice president of Hallmark’s creative studios. Eventually, consumers found those aesthetic details less enticing.

“We are a consumer led brand — so we followed the consumer and what their needs were,” she added.

But Hallmark cards did not display Black couples until 1970, and the company did not introduce Valentine’s Day cards for those in same-sex relationships until 2008.

‘There isn’t even a heart on it’

In the mid 2000s, Valentine’s Day cards went through another major shift.

In 2013, Emily McDowell, a writer, product consultant and business adviser, designed a Valentine’s Day card to better reflect some of the difficult-to-categorize situationships she had been in.

The card had no illustrations. It was plain and white with text on the front that read: “I know we’re not, like, together or anything but it felt weird to just not say anything so I got you this card. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t really mean anything. There isn’t even a heart on it. So basically it’s a card saying hi. Forget it.”

She put it up on Etsy, anticipating that only a handful of people would buy it.

Within days, she sold thousands, she said, and had to stop accepting new orders. The success prompted her to quit her job in advertising and start her namesake brand. The next year, she released another card that also instantly became a hit. It read: “There’s no one I’d rather lie in bed and look at my phone next to.”

Over the past 13 years, the company has sold millions of similarly witty cards. (Ms. McDowell left the company in 2022, and it was acquired by Hachette Publishing last year.) While Ms. McDowell’s early designs feel commonplace now, they were among the first in an industrywide move away from the stilted, saccharine Valentine’s Day cards of previous decades.

Many independent card designers today, Mr. Llansó explained, continue to tap into a consumer demand for plain-speaking, authentic cards. As a result, some of the more popular designs feature references to the state of the world. Others nod to cultural iconography, like Labubus or the enduring appeal of sweatpants. Not all of them are intended for romantic partners, and many can be used in other kinds of relationships.

Mitzi Sampson, the founder of the card company Mitzi Bitsy Spider, said her best-selling card was one that featured a grinning raccoon holding up a sign reading “you are TRASH to me.”

Ms. Sampson said she designed that card in 2023 for her sister “because she loves raccoons and because I love her.”

That, she added, is exactly what consumers want now. Not frills or grand proclamations, but an intimate knowledge of the receiver and “the simple recognition that says I know you, I see you, I choose you.”