Vinegar Valentines, the Victorian Hate Mail

The story as it is told

It is the second week of February, some time in the Victorian years, and the stationer's window is full of hearts. Lace, silk and ribbon, verses about undying love. But next to the lace there is another stack, cheaper and cruder: thin sheets of paper with a coarse picture and a short, nasty verse. A drunk. A nag. A man who loves the bottle more than any girl.

You buy one for a few pennies, you do not sign it, and you post it. Somewhere across town a neighbour opens the envelope and finds out what the street really thinks of them. Nobody put a name on it, so nobody can be blamed.

Listicles call them "vinegar valentines" and compare them to internet trolling, the nineteenth century's anonymous cruelty. They were so popular, the story says, that half of all valentines sent were insults.

What we can confirm

Nobody in the 1800s called them vinegar valentines. Becky Little, writing in Smithsonian, says they were called "mocking," "insulting" or "comic" valentines and that "vinegar" seems to be a modern description. Melissa Chim, writing in The Conversation in February 2026, says the term was coined by 21st-century collectors and dealers. Period newspapers bear this out: the 1885 pages below all say "comic valentines."

The cards were cheap by design. Annebella Pollen, writing for Brighton & Hove Museums, describes a leather-bound album from around 1870 that the museum received anonymously in 1940. Each item carries a serial number and a bulk price, which marks it as a stationery wholesaler's sample book. After the lace, silver and scented cards come forty-four mocking valentines at the back, priced well below the rest. They are single thin sheets of paper with a picture and a short verse. One shows a man holding a placard of a heart stuck with arrows, under the line "Pity a poor wounded heart," and tells the recipient "'Tis said you share your love with many. But I believe you have not any." Others mock a woman who reads novels instead of mending her clothes, and a man who loves the bottle more than any girl.

Little dates the practice to at least 1840. Pollen notes the cards could cost the victim money too: before stamps, the person receiving a letter paid for it on delivery. Anonymity was the point, and the verses often spoke for "everyone," so the target was told the whole community shared the sender's view.

By 1885 the trade had its own catalogue language. A feature reprinted in the Willimantic (Conn.) Journal on February 13, 1885, under the headline "Half a Million for Sweethearts," reported that a thousand new comic varieties had hit the market that season, sending "missions of anonymous satire and insult." The trade sorted them into lines: the "Changeable Comic," which showed two characters when folded; "Long Jokes"; the "Fault Finders"; and the "Hit-'em-Hards," which were "guaranteed to be 'very pointed, and to hit hard every time.'" Older lines like the "Useful Hints, or Refined Comics" came "without verses," because "the hints cannot be mistaken or fail to impress".

Small-town papers show how ordinary they were. On February 14, 1885, the Daily Morning Astorian in Oregon carried an ad for "Dude Valentines, Comic Valentines, Sentimental Valentines" at Carl Adler's Crystal Palace, sold alongside lace, plush and fringed ones. Three days earlier the Columbus (Neb.) Journal ran a one-line local item: "Horrible," followed by "The comic valentines at E. D. Fitzpatrick's". In Kentucky, the Semi-weekly South Kentuckian of February 10, 1885, noted that people were already mailing comic valentines and that "it is the style then for these to be re-mailed to somebody else and so the same hideous caricatures will be made to do service all the week."

Critics hated them. Little quotes the Newcastle Weekly Courant of 1857 complaining that shop windows were full "of vile, ugly, misshapen caricatures of men and women." Pollen cites the New York Times of February 15, 1866, blaming them for "a fearful tendency to the development of swearing in males of all ages." Some cases ended badly. Pollen recounts the "fatal valentine" of 1847, in which a New York woman overdosed on laudanum after a cruel card, and Little reports an 1885 Pall Mall Gazette account of a husband who shot his estranged wife in the neck after a mocking valentine he believed came from her.

Few survive, because almost nobody kept one. Pollen quotes the historian Frank Staff on their use by poorer buyers who had no way to keep souvenirs, and Flora Thompson's memoir of throwing a cruel valentine about her looks straight into the fire. The genre lasted into the picture-postcard years of the early 1900s, when suffragists became a favorite target, and faded after the First World War, according to Chim.

The facts

• "Vinegar" is a modern label; period names were "mocking," "insulting" or "comic" valentines; the practice dates to at least 1840. Smithsonian (Little, 2017); The Conversation (Chim, 2026)
• Brighton & Hove Museums album c. 1870, donated anonymously in 1940, a wholesaler's sample book with 44 mocking valentines at the back, priced lower. Pollen, Brighton & Hove Museums
• Newcastle Weekly Courant, 1857: shop windows full "of vile, ugly, misshapen caricatures." Smithsonian
• Willimantic Journal, Feb 13, 1885, p. 8: "a thousand new varieties" that season; trade lines "Changeable Comic," "Long Jokes," "Fault Finders," "Hit-'em-Hards," "Useful Hints, or Refined Comics." loc.gov
• Semi-weekly South Kentuckian (Hopkinsville), Feb 10, 1885, p. 3: comic valentines "re-mailed to somebody else" all week. loc.gov
• Daily Morning Astorian, Feb 14, 1885, p. 3: "Dude Valentines, Comic Valentines, Sentimental Valentines..." at Carl Adler's Crystal Palace. loc.gov
• Columbus Journal (Neb.), Feb 11, 1885, p. 3: "Horrible" / "The comic valentines at E. D. Fitzpatrick's". loc.gov

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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