Ahh, Valentine’s Day: the perfect moment to tell your sweetheart how much you love them with a thoughtful card.

But what about people in your life you don’t like so much? Why is there no Hallmark card telling them to get lost?

The Victorians had just the thing: a cruel and mocking version of the traditional Valentine’s Day card. Later coined “vinegar valentines” by 21st-century art collectors and dealers, such cards were usually referred to as mock or mocking valentines during the Victorian era.

Such cards were meant to shock, offend and upset their recipients. Not surprisingly, as with real Valentine’s Day cards, senders often chose to remain anonymous.

Vinegar valentines are what we historians like to call ephemera, that is, materials that are usually not meant to last a long time.

It’s hard to imagine a recipient of a vinegar valentine wanting to keep it lovingly in a frame, and many have been lost to time. But luckily, some vinegar valentines have survived and have been preserved in the collections of many historical institutions, such as Brighton and Hove Museums and the New York Public Library.

One jab at obnoxious sales ladies reads:

“As you wait upon the women

With disgust upon your face

The way you snap and bark at them

One would think you owned the place”

There is even a card for the pretentious poet who pretends to make a living with his art:

“Behold this pale little poet

With a finger at forehead to show it

But the way he gets scads

Is by writing soap ads........

© The Conversation