I was pleased to see that the Eighth Edition had changed the selections from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that had been in the Seventh Edition. The Eighth Edition of the Norton replaced the chapter on the taxonomy of animals with excerpts from Query XIV, the chapter on laws. Query XIV has become particularly interesting to scholars in the past thirty years because, in it, Jefferson justifies modern slavery in relation to slavery in ancient Greece and Rome. In this chapter, Jefferson also disparages as unworthy of criticism the poetry of the enslaved Phillis Wheatley. This new selection would allow me to discuss with my students the complicated relationship between race and aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

I expected to spend part of that Wednesday evening thinking about the contrast between a definition of race based on the legal institution of slavery and one based on an idea of innate intellectual capacity. Instead, I actually spent my night—and the following months—thinking about ancient Greek type. My thoughts changed directions when I came across a quotation in Notes from book seventeen of Homer’s Odyssey. To illustrate the effects of slavery, Jefferson quotes two lines from Homer, first in Greek and then in English from Alexander Pope’s 1725-1726 translation (fig. 1). I took Jefferson’s inclusion of the Greek text as an invitation to (literally) remove the dust from my Greek-English dictionary and practice the Greek I had learned in college.

Although I turned to the Greek simply out of guilt over having forgotten so much of what I had once learned, I found my way into a story that connected Jefferson’s belief in a racial hierarchy, the history of the publication of Notes, and the look and meaning of the Greek language among Anglo-American readers. Like many of our stories, this one turned on a simple irony. Jefferson quoted in Greek to substantiate a racial hierarchy by linking racial identity and classical learning; but the Greek in that quotation has been plagued by errors. Through this irony, the history of the errors in the Greek that appears in Notes reveals a belief in a racial identity that depends as much—if not more—on the image of classical learning as it does on knowledge of Greek itself.

If I were to translate these two lines more literally than Pope, it might read as follows:

For half of his virtue (Ἠμισυ γαζ τ’ ἀρετἠς) takes away (ἀποαίνῦ|αι) far-seeing Zeus (εὐρύθπα Ζεὺς)

Of a man (Ἀνερος), when him (ευτ’ ἄν μιν) the day of slavery (δᴕλιον ἥμαζ) seizes (κατὰ … ἕλησιν)

The problems in the Greek occurred to me slowly. The first word had a breath-mark error: Ἠμισυ should read as Ἡμισυ. Breath marks tell readers when to aspirate a vowel—the sound that separates half (Ἡμισυ) from Alf. The second word (γαζ)—the extremely common word that often translates as “for” or “because”—ended in the wrong letter: the line reads γαζ instead of γαρ. This mistake translates essentially as “foz” instead of “for.” Most glaringly, the fifth word was barely a word at all. A meaningless vertical line had replaced a t in the middle of the verb meaning to take away. The verb, therefore, reads as ἀποαίνῦ|αι instead of ἀποαίνυται, as if I were now writing for the American An|iquarian Society instead of the American Antiquarian Society. The problems continued from there.

To get a sense of the sum of these errors, we might compare my literal translation with an approximation of the same substitutions in letters in English. Here is the literal translation on its own:

For half of his virtue takes away far-seeing Zeus

Of a man, when him the day of slavery seizes

In contrast, here is what that literal translation might look like if I made the same kinds of mistakes that the Norton makes in its Greek:

Foz alf of his virtué ta|es away far-sthing Zeus

Of a man, when him the dhaz of slavery sezes

Now I was curious about these errors. I soon discovered that the Eighth Edition of the Norton Anthology was not alone. Every twentieth-century printing of this chapter of Notes that I have found—The Norton Anthology of American Literature Eighth Edition (2012), The Norton Anthology of American Literature Ninth Edition (2016) (fig. 2), the Norton Critical Edition (2010) (fig. 3), The Heath Anthology of American Literature Sixth Edition (2009) (fig. 4), the Blackwell Literatures of Colonial America (2001) (fig. 5), the Penguin edition of Notes (1999) (fig. 6), the Library of America’s edition of Jefferson’s Writings (1984) (fig. 7), and, at the root, the University of North Carolina’s edition of Notes (1955) (fig. 8)—contain at least some of these errors. The game, for this typographical Sherlock, was afoot.

The consistency of these errors and their evolution through the past sixty years left a trail of clues about how they originated and grew. I could understand the breath mark errors; breath marks are small superscripts that are easy to overlook. And, since there are only two options—aspirated or not aspirated—a flipped breath mark is usually only a very small obstacle in reading a line of Greek. I similarly forgave other forgotten diacritics—an accent here, a subscript there. I was more interested in two ρ’s (rhos) that had become ζ’s (zetas), an ο (omicron) that had become a θ (theta), a talon-like character I had never seen before, and, of course, the straight line for the tau. In figure 9, I have color-coded these parts of the passage: orange for breath mark errors; yellow for the rho-zeta substitution; pink for the straight line-tau substitution; blue for the omicron-theta substitution; and green for the talon (more on this one later). The only observation of these errors I have found is a footnote in the classicist Emily Townsend Vermuele’s address to the American Philosophical Society. She remarks that a “zeta is written for rho and theta for omicron” and implies that these are Jefferson’s errors.

Comparing these flawed versions of these two lines to the first, large-scale printed edition of Notes suggests how these different errors originated. The 1787 edition published in London by John Stockdale serves as the basis for most modern editions of Notes (fig. 10). In this edition, the font Stockdale has used gives rhos at the end of words a small flourish in their stems. This flourish, it seems, lead some modern editors to confuse the shape of the two rhos that end words and therefore to print two zetas in their place. In contrast to this straightforward swapping of letters, the straight line suggests a more gradual deformation from Jefferson’s manuscript to the present. In Jefferson’s hand and in many Greek fonts before the nineteenth century, tau often appeared in a long form—more like a cane than a cross. In the 1787 Stockdale edition, the tau in the middle of ἀποαίνυται is poorly inked, leaving a small break at the top of the character. This break is clear when you compare this tau with the tau in a footnote on a previous page (fig. 11). Seemingly unaware of the typographical rather than alphabetic nature of this gap, the UNC edition attempts to reproduce the shape of this broken character; the Norton Critical Edition and the Library of America both take this reproduction further by printing a straight line with a bow above it; in the Norton Anthology and the Heath, only a straight line remains.

The only copies I have found free of these errors are Jefferson’s original manuscript (fig. 12) and the 1784-1785 printing of Notes in Paris (fig. 13). Although free of the more glaring errors, Stockdale’s edition contains a breath-mark and accent error; the 1853 Richmond edition carries forward both of Stockdale’s errors (fig. 14); and the 1894 Putnam edition of Jefferson’s writings adds to these errors a phantom phi in Ἀνερος (fig. 15). Even more improbably, this set of errors is not limited only to Greek text. The transliteration of the Greek in the American printing of Notes in Philadelphia in 1794 (fig. 16) includes one breath-mark over a Roman letter (rather than transliterating that mark into an “h”) and adds an h where it shouldn’t be to the beginning of “aneros.” Both of these errors persist in later versions that transliterate the Greek, such as Penguin’s The Portable Thomas Jefferson (1975) (fig. 17).

The proliferation of these errors is ironic considering Jefferson’s own typographical principles, which emphasized usability and precision over ornamentation. Writing to a London bookseller on 2 October 1788, Jefferson explained that he prefers “books of a handy size” and “disclaim[s] … all typographical luxury.” Jefferson’s books were for use, not for show. For this reason, Jefferson, in a 12 January 1787 letter, tried to convince Phillippe-Denis Pierres—the Paris printer of his corrected Notes—to use the Greek characters from a relatively new font made in Scotland by Andrew and Robert Foulis in Alexander Wilson’s foundry. Between 1756 and 1758, the Foulis brothers printed four folio volumes of Homer that abandoned the complicated ligatures and abbreviations of older fonts (fig. 18). In leaving behind these luxuries, the Foulis’ Homer replaced the abbreviations that had been popular for common words and word-endings—such as the abbreviations for κατα and the – ος in Ἀνερος that had appeared as recently as Samuel Clarke’s 1740 edition of Homer (fig. 19). Admiring the volumes’ clarity, Jefferson had ordered copies of the Foulis brothers’ folios of the Odyssey and the Iliad in July 1786 from John Stockdale, the bookseller and publisher of Jefferson’s London Notes. The only such flourish that appears in the two lines of Greek in Notes is what I called the “talon-like character” (green in fig. 9). This loop was a common abbreviation for the “ou” diphtong—not an error at all!

We have no similar letters indicating Jefferson’s preference for the type Stockdale used in the 1787 London edition. Indeed, Stockdale did not even own his own set of type and press; instead Stockdale relied on nearby printers, including Luke Hansard on Great Turnstile on the East side of Lincoln’s-Inn Fields and Thomas Gillet in Salisbury Square (fig. 20). Hansard, whom an 1800 catalog of Stockdale’s books identifies as the printer of Jefferson’s History of Virginia, was eventually a partner with Henry Hughs in printing for the House of Commons. He owned a set of Greek type and had experience setting it for, among other books, the Port Royal Greek Grammar—the third edition was published in 1777 with editions in 1748 and 1759. Although I have not been able to discover definitively what types Hansard owned, the type in Stockdale’s Notes is most likely Caslon’s Long Primer Greek as seen in his 1785 specimen (fig. 21)—an identification, with the assistance and expertise of Hope Mayo at Houghton Library, based on the slight splaying of the pi and the roundness of the mu characters. Caslon makes sense especially since David Whitesell identifies Caslon as the font for the English in the Stockdale printing as well. But Caslon’s Long Primer Greek was not unique. It exemplified the trend toward simplified Greek fonts that was shared among major and minor foundries alike—including Caslon and Sons, William Martin, and Edmund Fry.

These eighteenth-century fonts were easier to read, as Jefferson wanted, and also easier for compositors and printers to use. In his Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing (1770), Philip Luckombe opined that, even if we allow the huge quantity of “Abbreviations and Contractions” as an imitation of written Greek, founders and letter-cutters probably only wanted to “promote their own business” in “confound[ing] themselves with an infinite number of Ligatures.” For Luckombe, whatever beauty existed in the mimicking of handwritten Greek was outweighed by the expense and laboriousness of using abbreviated and contracted fonts. As Luckombe shows in facing pages, a simple font of Greek sorts can fit “in a pair of common cases that contain no more than 154 Boxes”—much more manageable than the “750 Boxes” of ligatured, contracted, and abbreviated Greek fonts. Although in his Typographia (1825) T. C. Hansard depicts a slightly more expansive Greek than the 154 sorts in Luckombe’s example—for which I count a combined 249 sorts (figs. 22 and 23)—the trend was certainly downward from the 750 sorts of seventeenth-century fonts to the 300 or 500 sorts of the Oxford Augustin Greek at the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Greek that Luckombe and Hansard describe.

To appreciate how much simpler these new Greek fonts were, we can think of a standard, unaccented English keyboard as equivalent to a set of type with about ninety-two sorts: twenty-six letters with ten numbers and ten punctuation marks is equivalent to the lower case with forty-six sorts; doubling this number with the use of the shift key is equivalent to adding the upper case. In this example, a keyboard equivalent to a set of type with 750 sorts would have about fourteen additional “shift” keys with which you could choose doubled letters, abbreviations for whole words, abbreviations for common word endings, accents, and alternate characters for letters at the ending of words.

In these editions of Notes, therefore, we can see an ironic intersection between two different trajectories of the meaning of printed Greek. In the one, Greek fonts are becoming more easily legible to more readers. In the other, the printed Greek becomes visible only as an image—rather than legible as words—that depicts eighteenth-century classical learning. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, the Greek gives the text a feel of its historical distance with less interference, for instance, than retaining the English long S.

Given the typographical trouble this quotation has caused, we might wonder both why it shows up suddenly in the Eighth Edition of the Norton Anthology and also why Jefferson gives his quotation from Homer in both Greek and English. The printed Greek only entered the Norton Anthology of American Literature because it happened to be in the section of Query XIV in which Jefferson dismisses the aesthetic achievements of “Phyllis Whately” and Ignatius Sancho. But Greek and race seem to come with one another in Notes. Even if the editors decided to only include selections that displayed Greek in Notes, they would still have ended up with only selections that discuss race. Two of the three times that Greek appears in Notes are in this chapter and relate specifically to the issue of slavery. The quotation from Homer and a quotation from Plutarch three pages earlier both contrast enslaved Africans in the Americas with the “numerous instances of the most rigid integrity” among Greek and Roman slaves (fig. 11). For Jefferson, these quotations establish that, rather than primarily suffering from their enslaved condition, “the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” As Jefferson defines race, racial difference describes differing intellectual capabilities that do not result from slavery. In fact, rather than defining or creating racial inequalities, slavery, as Jefferson contrasts its modern and classical forms, actually helps reveal what he considers a natural racial hierarchy.

The one other place that Greek appears in Notes also concerns race. Rather than slavery, the future of indigenous people in North American is the concern of this instance of Greek. In Appendix 1, Charles Thomson—the secretary of the Continental Congress—responds to Jefferson’s description of the Native American tribes in Query XI, “Aborigines.” Thomson elaborates at length on Jefferson’s account of the Native American tribes that the English encountered when they first came to Virginia (fig. 24). Both Jefferson’s and Thomson’s accounts detail the relationship between different tribes and the individuals that the English encountered when they arrived in Virginia. In this narrative comment, Thomson includes a footnote to three lines from the Iliad describing Nestor, the king of Pylos, in both Greek and English. For Thomson, the quotation is meant to adorn his description of the leader Powhatan’s speech to John Smith about succession in his tribe. The footnote draws a parallel between Nestor as a wise elder who has seen two generations die during his rule and Powhatan’s own tenure as a ruler for a similarly long time. While this quotation lends epic authority to Powhatan, it also subtly inserts a hierarchy between the naïve nobility of the Native American leader and the enlightened knowledge of the European commentator who can marshal epic heroes in his discourse.

In Notes, then, we have three uses of Greek. In all three examples, a European author comments on categories of people that Europeans were enslaving or killing in North America and Africa. In the eighteenth century, Latin and Greek, as Caroline Winterer has elucidated, marked a gentleman’s education and “distinguished him from the masses.” In this sense, Jefferson and Thomson both seem to adorn their prose with Greek verse to contrast what they understand as the triumphant power of white, European masculinity against an imagined world of other, more effeminate races. Jefferson may also be digging more specifically at Phillis Wheatley. In her poems, Wheatley calls upon classical mythology but most likely did not, as Vincent Carretta mentions in his recent biography of the poet, know Greek herself. The difference between knowing classical mythology and reading it in the original language, for Jefferson, further marks the difference between the mental faculties of different races.

Given that these Greek quotations were meant to establish a racial hierarchy based on classical education, the use of Greek in Notes becomes ironic not only because of the centuries of errors in editions of Notes but also because Jefferson seems not to have noticed the first errors himself. In his own copy of Stockdale’s printing of Notes, Jefferson made periodic corrections in the margins. For instance, Jefferson inserted “too” where Stockdale had printed “to” on page 247; but, nine pages earlier, Jefferson left uncorrected the flawed quotation from Homer. If these choices to insert Greek into the text were meant to describe European masculinity as the pinnacle of civilization, they have not done a great job. Instead, these errors emphasize that an ideology of a racial hierarchy based upon a European tradition of knowledge may actually rely more on the form of that knowledge than the knowledge itself. As the content of this quotation erodes, that racial hierarchy emerges as a tautology signified by the form of the Greek but unsubstantiated by its emptied content. The image of Greek, rather than a shared knowledge of the Greek language and classical literature, has been enough to communicate Jefferson’s definition of race for hundreds of years.  

Apart from the legacy of typographical errors, we might still wonder about the appropriateness of Jefferson’s quotation from Homer and Pope for his purposes in Query XIV. Drawing on Longinus and Plato, Pope—or, more accurately, the scholars Elijah Fenton and William Broome who assisted Pope with the actual translation of Greek—suggest in the notes to their translation that Homer’s “very remarkable sentence” about slavery’s emasculating effects is “commonly found to be true.” Jefferson, too, plays on the conventionality of this epic wisdom when he contrasts what he considers the intellectual and moral achievements of Roman and Greek slaves against their African counterparts. Even so, despite Jefferson using Homer to solidify and adorn his argument about slavery, Homer, at least lexically, seems to have been relatively uninterested in slavery. As W. B. Stanford comments in his twentieth-century edition of the Odyssey, “references to slavery and slaves” occur significantly less frequently in Homer “than in later Greek.” Indeed, Stanford counts only seven instances of variations of δούλιον—the word in Jefferson’s quotation for slave—in all of Homer’s writing.

In drawing from Homer, then, we might accuse Jefferson of an (historical) presentism. Jefferson invokes Homer not on Homer’s own terms but as part of an undifferentiated classical world upon which a modern, European concept of a racial hierarchy depended. In other words, classical learning, for Jefferson, Thomson, and their peers, served to define blackness while subtly enacting (with ironic effect) their own whiteness. Appreciating this history can help us understand not only Jefferson’s own definition of race but also, for instance, the nuances in the debates 120 years later between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois about whether African Americans should bother studying Greek and Latin in the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction. At issue is not who can or cannot learn Greek. Rather what seems to matter is who can claim racial kinship through Greek and what meaning resides in the form of classical learning. That, as the checkered history of the Greek in Notes suggests, is the (racial) difference that Greek makes.

Acknowledgments

I could not have put together all of the pieces in this history on my own. Leah Price was a terrific guide through the detective process of British book history. Ann Blair gave some very helpful citations about the lack of Greek fonts in the U.S. in the eighteenth century. And Hope Mayo at Houghton Library provided crucial technical wisdom on the identification of the Greek font in Notes. At Common-place, Hunt Howell and Anna Mae Duane offered indispensable feedback on drafts of the essay. Jackie Penny assisted me in tracking down the many images I have here.

Further Reading

A good starting place to appreciate the sheer number of editions of Notes on the State of Virginia is Coolie Verner, A Further Checklist of This Separate Editions of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1950) and Coolie Verner and P. J. Conkwright, “The Printing of Jefferson’s Notes, 1793-94,” Studies in Bibliography 5 (1952): 201–3. More recently, several authors have investigated Jefferson’s punctilious attention to the printing of his books and the books that he purchased: Gordon S. Barker, “Unraveling the Strange History of Jefferson’s ‘Observations Sur La Virginie’,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 112:2 (2004): 134–77; Alice H. Lerch, “Who Was the Printer of Jefferson’s Notes?” in Bookmen’s Holiday: Notes and Studies Written and Gathered in Tribute to Harry Miller Lydenberg, ed. Deoch Fulton (New York, 1943): 44–56; Eric Stockdale, “John Stockdale of Piccadilly: Publisher to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” in Author/Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, eds. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford, 1983): 63–87; David R. Whitesell, “Thomas Jefferson and the Book Arts,” Printing History 24:2 (2005): 3–24. In 2014, John O’Brien and Brad Pasanek at the University of Virginia also put together a useful online edition of Notes that pairs a transcription of the text with page images from Jefferson’s copy of Stockdale’s 1787 printing and the French 1784-1785 edition. This edition is available here. It uses the digitized copy of Jefferson’s copy of Notes from UVA, available here. The manuscript of Notes is available from the Massachusetts Historical Society. The quotation in Greek appears on page 86 of the manuscript.

If you are interested in Jefferson’s knowledge of and interest in the classics, a good starting place is a collection of essays edited by Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas Cole: Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America (Charlottesville, Va., 2011). As I mention above, Emily Townsend Vermeule identifies one of Jefferson’s errors explicitly in “Jefferson and Homer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137:4 (December 1993): 689–703. The meaning of the classics for the educated elite in the eighteenth century is carefully explained in both Caroline Winterer’s The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002) and Carolyn D. Williams’s Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London, 1993).

I gathered information on Phillis Wheatley’s education from Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens, Ga., 2011). Carretta speculates on Wheatley’s lack of knowledge of Greek on page 40. On Jefferson’s (lack of) criticism of Wheatley, see William Huntting Howell, Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (Philadelphia, 2015): 46-81. For a sense of debates about race and the classics, I am indebted to Sarah Wagner-McCoy, “Virgilian Chesnutt: Eclogues of Slavery and Georgics of Reconstruction in the Conjure Tales,” ELH 80:1 (March 15, 2013): 199–220. The footnote from W. B. Stanford is on page 291 of volume two of The Odyssey of Homer, ed. W. B. Stanford (London, 1948). The footnote by Alexander Pope’s scholarly counterparts is from page 163 of volume four of Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (London, 1726).

To figure out who did the printing for Stockdale and what type they used, I consulted both primary accounts of eighteenth-century printers and twentieth-century histories of the changes in Greek fonts. A crucial clue in figuring out Stockdale’s printer was the list titled “Books Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly,” which is bound in the back of Houghton Library’s copy of Hester Lynch Piozzi, Retrospection: or A Review of the Most Striking and Important Events, Characters, Situations, and Their Consequences, which the Last Eighteen Hundred Years Have Presented to the View of Mankind (London, 1801). With the Hansards in mind, indispensable primary accounts were Luke Hansard, The Auto-Biography of Luke Hansard: Printer to the House, 1752-1828, ed. Robin Myers, Printing Historical Society Publication, no. 15 (London, 1991); T. C. Hansard, Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing; with Practical Directions for Conducting Every Department in an Office: With a Description of Stereotype and Lithography. Illustrated by Engravings, Biographical Notices, and Portraits (London, 1825); Philip Luckombe and William Caslon, A Concise History of the Origin and Progress of Printing; with Practical Instructions to the Trade in General (London, 1770); Edward Rowe Mores, A Dissertation upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies (1778). With a Catalogue and Specimen of the Typefoundry of John James (1782), eds. Henry Carter and Christopher Ricks (London, 1961). I supplemented these with biography and general history of printing at the end of the eighteenth century: Ellic Howe, The London Compositor: Documents Relating to Wages, Working Conditions and Customs of the London Printing Trade, 1785-1900 (London, 1947); D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, eds. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst, Mass., 2002); Talbot Baines Reed and A. F. Johnson, A History of the Old English Letter Foundries: With Notes, Historical and Bibliographical, on the Rise and Progress of English Typography (London, 1952); J. C. Trewin and Evelyn Mansfield King, Printer to the House: The Story of Hansard (London, 1952).

In identifying and tracing Greek fonts, the single most invaluable resource is the incredibly careful catalog and description by J. H. Bowman: Greek Printing Types in Britain: From the Late Eighteenth Century to the Early Twentieth Century (Thessaloniki, 1998), which is based on a 1988 dissertation of the same title at the University of Reading. The essays by John A. Lane and Bowman in the volume edited by Michael S. Macrakis also provided some useful information about the changes in Greek fonts as well: Greek Letters: From Tablets to Pixels (New Castle, Del., 1996). An older volume produced by the Printed Books Department at the British Museum also provided some useful examples of Greek fonts: Greek Printing Types, 1465-1927: Facsimiles from an Exhibition of Books Illustrating the Development of Greek Printing Shown in the British Museum, 1927 (London, 1927). I also consulted Klimis Mastoridis, “Cutting and Casting Greek Types in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century,” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 81 (2006): 306–41; Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984).

If you, dear reader, are still here, I imagine you are of hearty enough stock to be interested in seeing what Greek fonts looked like before their simplification at the end of the eighteenth century. If so, I direct you to: William H. Ingram, “The Ligatures of Early Printed Greek,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 7:4 (Winter 1966): 371-396; William Wallace, “An Index of Greek Ligatures and Contractions,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 43 (1923): 183–93.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

David Weimer is the librarian for cartographic collections and learning at the Harvard Map Collection. His article on Harriet Beecher Stowe, political economy, and religion appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and his exhibition, Where Disaster Strikes: Modern Space and the Visualization of Destruction, is on view at the Harvard Map Collection until April 2017 and at its Website. He received his PhD in English from Harvard University in 2016.

While this florid observation directs our attention to the high emotional stakes of Valentine’s Day, it also points to the challenge of depicting sentiment, something that is felt rather than seen. Indeed, Gleason’s, a heavily illustrated periodical, which prided itself on capably communicating through text accompanied by plenty of images, highlights the difficulty in conveying emotion through purely visual media. Nineteenth-century valentines themselves, through their complex assembly, relied on more than just texts and pictures to impart meaning. Tactility, achieved through the inclusion of sensuous textures and interactive features, such as flaps that lift to reveal hidden messages, are vital components of the nineteenth-century valentine (figs. 3-7). By having to hold, touch, and interact with the valentine, recipients were made to feel materials in order to feel sentiment.

[This video has been made private by owner.]

3. Video clip showing the layers of a Valentine card, ca. 1875, sent to Walter E. Marsh of Keene, New Hampshire. The embossed envelope is postmarked February 14 from Winchendon, Massachusetts. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Physical experience is crucial to understanding these valentines. As a gifted object, the valentine becomes a conduit for human emotion, thereby giving the idea of “touching” dual significance in the valentine’s simultaneous tactility and sentimentality. By engaging theories related to materiality and signification, the Western intellectual history of touch, and the medium of paper itself, this essay will look critically at the affective power held by valentines and how they were experienced or understood during the mid- to late nineteenth century. This investigation pays particular attention to the valentine as an object and to the haptic aspects of receiving one.

Valentines, in general, resist close, singular visual analysis. As I detail below, visually and textually, they often appear to be interchangeable and arbitrarily constructed. However, their material complexity nonetheless demands serious consideration. Valentines, as a category of simultaneously similar yet unique objects, challenge inherited methodologies of interpretation in art history and material culture studies. Most investigations of a singular valentine via close looking and careful interpretation come up short; a sustained study of the iconography of one card yields little beyond frustration. However, and at the same time, to investigate valentines as a homogenous group grossly overshadows the different affective properties any given valentine might offer, at least momentarily. Paying closer attention to the material heft, textural diversity, and interactive dimensions of valentines enables us to consider their capacity for material signification, their non-linguistic, non-visual methods of communication.

The Big Business of American Valentines

The American market for commercial valentines began when stationers and bookshops started importing cards from England and continental Europe in the early nineteenth century. Germany was known for its tremendous output of colorful lithography, while English papermakers excelled at embossing (the process of pressing a raised pattern or image into paper), and later at the production of lace paper—all technological innovations in the nineteenth century. Historians and collectors widely credit Joseph Addenbrooke, a paper embosser for a large English firm, as the inventor of lace paper when he began filing down the raised areas of embossed paper to create a delicate, perforated effect. Addenbrooke’s technique was adopted by firms throughout England and was exported in great numbers to the United States and elsewhere.

English firms, such as those of Joseph Mansell, Jonathan King (Jr. & Sr.), and Dobbs & Co., combined colorful scraps and embossed and lace paper and sent these valentines to shops and independent dealers for sale in the U.S.—but at a very high cost. Beginning in the 1840s, American firms began assembling their own valentines. One of the most notable valentine companies, and the one most associated with the multi-layered, ornate sentimental valentine, is that of Esther Howland’s New England Valentine Company, based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Howland’s ascendancy to “Mother of the American Valentine” is described in as much lore as Valentine’s Day itself (fig. 8). Most accounts say Howland, the daughter of a bookstore owner, received an English valentine from a family friend and was so taken with the object that she endeavored to create her own. With lace paper, scraps, and other materials imported by her father, Howland constructed a number of sample cards, which she then gave to her brother to show potential clients on an upcoming sales trip (fig. 9). Upon his return, Howland’s brother brought orders amounting to $5,000, making the valentines much more successful than Howland anticipated. After hiring several women to assist her in meeting the demands of the initial orders, Howland’s company was born.

Stationer George C. Whitney also anchored his business in Worcester, Massachusetts, and eventually absorbed Howland’s company in 1881. During the 1880s, curiosity about the Whitney Manufacturing Company’s valentine-making process resulted in numerous articles. These reports opened the factory doors to readers, describing the use of German scrap and English embossed paper, while remarking on the “taste and skill” of the “young girls” employed to assemble the cards. Readers also learned about the sale and distribution of valentines: the salesmen who visited town after town, presenting samples and taking orders from stationers and other shop owners, and about Whitney’s newly opened seasonal shops, which allowed customers to buy valentines directly from the source. Despite their revelatory tone, these articles preserved and perpetuated the allure of valentine production. Even as these articles highlighted the handmade assembly behind the valentine, they also drew positive attention to the many rational and efficient production processes used by popular stationers. Far from sullying the romance of the cards, exposure to the factory’s processes was itself mysterious and fascinating to nineteenth-century readers.

The Making of a Valentine

Nineteenth-century sentimental valentines are recognizable by their overwhelming assemblage of delicate paper lace and small chromolithographed pictures called “scrap.” Many of the components employed—flowers, hearts, lovebirds, Cupid, and affectionate phrases—wouldn’t look out of place on a valentine today. Some, however, are more period-specific, such as Christian symbols and depictions of innocent children or animals, staples of nineteenth-century popular imagery. Makers relied on this generalized sentimental iconography to craft attractive cards that would have been immediately legible as valentines. While there were certainly valentines that emphasized text (as in the presentation of a lengthy poem or “comical” taunting prose), these collaged valentines instead relied on images, textures, and interactive features to convey sentiment. In this way, the sentimental valentine appealed to the recipient through the senses, especially touch, on a more immediate level.

That a valentine should invite or even require significant handling by its recipient has been an integral component of the genre since its early days. During the eighteenth century, many valentines took the form of a folded rebus or puzzle, with numbered verses to be reassembled by the recipient. By the mid-nineteenth century, a valentine could demand physical interaction in a multitude of ways. Some might reveal images when the recipient pulled on a lever or a string. In the “cobweb” or “beehive” valentine, for example, an intricately cut spiral pattern can be pulled out and extended to reveal a sentimental image beneath (fig. 10). More complex than simply lifting a flap to reveal a picture, the webbing of the cut paper forced the viewer to move around to view the image and to peer through the spaces in the paper, similar to other valentines that partially occlude images with perforated paper lace.

Before about 1840, valentines were commonly made by the giver or were quite expensive when crafted by others, but by the mid-nineteenth century, commercially produced valentines became the norm. These valentines were crafted by hand, but not by the sender. In companies like Howland and Whitney’s, groups of workers, usually young women, assembled valentines with the aforementioned “scrap,” resulting in collages of standard imagery (fig. 11). The anonymity of the maker was an asset in the valentine business: it enabled for the evocation of sentiment, as if the giver had produced the item himself. At most, a valentine might include the company’s stamp (a “W” for Whitney, for example) but never the name of any specific makers. By diffusing and mystifying the labor expended in its creation, the valentine became an object with no authorship until the giver personalized it by simply signing the card. Very little space, if any, was left for other significant additions on behalf of the purchaser. Despite their seemingly handmade charm, designers and factories produced an overwhelming number of valentines, making Valentine’s Day a profitable industry built on feminized labor. Ultimately, there was a tension between the erasure of this labor and its popularity in the media, which continually credited the valentine’s beauty to the “nimble fingers of expert young ladies.”

The basic look and form of a sentimental valentine was relatively standardized, with thousands of valentines adopting virtually the same compositions but with different pieces of scrap or paper lace. The assembly-line process used in the production of valentines makes them especially difficult to interpret individually, as they are the product of several different hands, each contributing a piece to the whole by means of alienated labor. While the women employed by Howland and Whitney were praised for their “artistic eyes” and aptitude for assembling items in a pleasing manner, the seemingly nonsensical, almost happenstance arrangement of images and phrases simply reiterates the broader valentine vocabulary of sentimentality, prettiness, and delicacy. Many of these valentines demonstrate a haphazard application of layers and a disregard for the visual precision of the finished product. For example, in one valentine from 1855, a layer of paper lace cuts off the head of an unfortunate dove (figs. 12, 13), a clear indication that the makers were quickly heaping on the necessary materials and perhaps disregarding some of the included imagery.

Even the text used on valentines reads as generic and regurgitated—and in many cases it was. Booklets consisting of romantic verses suitable for copying, or “valentine writers,” as they were called, were popular throughout the long nineteenth century. Even though publishers emphasized the newness of each annual edition, the same poems appear again and again, and even the most novel could be reproduced on numerous valentines in one season. Many pieces of mass-produced scrap, too, combined word and image, with pictures of flower banners displaying the same phrases such as, “truly thine!” and “yours forever!” Repeatedly, poetry and pictures that alluded to the uniqueness and perpetuity of a romantic bond were mass-reproduced and deployed on these cards, which simultaneously supported their importance while cheapening the sentiments.

These elaborate cards typically employ a collaged, homemade style, despite their mass production. One such valentine features several layers of mass-produced, perforated papers that are imitations of needlework roses and crocheted doilies. These materials blur the lines between fabric, paper, and textiles as well as between the handmade and the industrial (fig. 14). Even the most technologically advanced variations of valentines sought to retain some reference to the handmade. Valentines, which were usually not painstakingly or thoughtfully crafted by one person to give to another, maintain these qualities in an effort to evoke the handmade and all of its discursive associations (though as historian Leigh Schmidt has argued, the popularity of crafting one’s own valentine grew exponentially alongside the increasing popularity of manufactured valentines). The tactile evidence of the labor expended in handicraft helped import feelings of authentic and deep sentiment as if the giver had spent a considerable amount of time creating the object. By incorporating allusions to the handmade, the valentine makers redeemed the mass-produced material they used during production, and touch was a way to reactivate that material, to bring it back to the personal and away from the commercial.

Hampered by the practical considerations of fitting the card into an envelope that could be sent through the post, valentines necessitated some degree of flatness that would enable them to retain their status as objects-in-motion. Despite this, makers sought to create these valentines as three-dimensional objects, and in effect, intended for them to surpass their mere two-dimensional “paperness.” Through their work of trimming scrap, folding paper, and pasting details, these hired hands maximized the material dimension of an otherwise flat, pictorial medium. Layer after layer, the valentines became something more physical than visual (fig. 15). Most collaged valentines created by American producers adhere to standard book production sizes, with many measuring roughly seven inches by five inches (“twelvemo”), comprising about a quarter inch of layered paper and objects. Most feature ornate pieces of perforated, faux lace layered over colorful, patterned paper. Along with the scrap images, the makers often applied pieces of satin or velvet ribbon along with other fabric details, such as fabric flowers (figs. 16, 17). The printed scraps, which initially engage the viewer visually, add an important element of tactility as well, as they are heavily embossed.

The tactile experience of a valentine began almost immediately, as most valentines were contained in an embossed envelope upon delivery (fig. 18) or were encased in an elegant box (fig. 19). Running fingertips over the textured surface of raised floral filigree, for example, would have been an apt precursor to the tactility of the valentine itself.

Many of these valentines employed flaps or folds to enable the recipient to lift a layer to reveal additional text or images. For example, one valentine features folded, paper lace flaps that effectively act as an attached envelope (fig. 20). Once opened, they reveal an ornate, gilt layer of embossed paper with a chromolithographed image of an anonymous young girl (fig. 21). It is highly unlikely that the tiny, mass-produced portrait has any particular significance. Instead, the physicality of the card itself is more meaningful. The act of opening the card is more emotionally potent than whatever is actually depicted inside.

Paper springs, found on most of the densely layered valentines of this era, added three-dimensionality and often encouraged the recipient to lift off the top layer of paper lace. After years in an archive, these springs have become flattened, limiting the valentine’s mobility and its interactive qualities. Yet when they were first produced, these springs between the layers would have allowed the valentines to “pop” as the recipient freed the valentine from its envelope. One card, preserved in a box, features still-functioning springs that provide depth between its many layers (figs. 20, 22).

In addition to a busy visual composition, valentines provided a variety of textures for the recipient’s fingertips to explore. This overt sensuality, however, was not only limited to touching and seeing. Some valentines included perfumed elements, such as a fragrant sachet or scented ink. Some included chocolates or other sweets, appealing to the sense of taste, or included scrap pictures of delectable treats. While technology did not yet allow for music to be included in the valentine (although some very expensive valentines could arrive attached to a music box), references to music are constantly included with scrap depicting musical instruments or singing birds. The valentine was an object intended to captivate and sensually overwhelm the recipient. It engaged every bodily sense, enabling the recipient to gather sentiment through their fingertips, eyes, nose, or taste buds. The recipient would recognize the valentine not merely as something to be looked at, but rather as an object to be touched and sensually experienced.

Touchy, Feely: Or, How Valentines Mean

In a February 1858 issue, Harper’s Weekly devoted several pages to historical and contemporary celebrations of Valentine’s Day. While the accompanying illustrations, like those in Gleason’s, also do not attempt to render the feeling of receiving a valentine, they do point to the importance of touching and holding them. Two images in particular, “The Purchaser of the Sentimental Valentine” and “The Recipient of the Sentimental Valentine,” demonstrate the close physical connection between the giver, the card, and the receiver—a connection that relied upon the hands and bodily interactions. “The Purchaser” features a dandy gentleman in a crowded shop, hunched over a pile of valentines, running his fingers across potential selections (fig. 23). His close bodily engagement, leaning in and feeling each card’s textures and weight, reinforces the importance of touch and interaction with the valentine.

Paper lace, velvet ribbons, and satin fringe all provide textures that appeal to the recipient’s sense of touch; they also evoke connections to the material culture of domestic environments. In “The Recipient,” a young woman clutches a valentine (fig. 24). The card is trimmed in lace, a pattern almost indistinguishable from the lace that graces the curtains behind her and that frame her décolletage. Even the vase of flowers on the table beside her recalls the many examples of floral scrap found on valentines, and perhaps even the floral scents that were sometimes added to the cards. The various components used in the sentimental valentine are material referents to the home and the body, allusions to the domestic happiness and romantic encounters that a well-received valentine could engender. “The Purchaser” and “The Recipient” each reinforce the importance of physically experiencing the valentine, a process more viscerally involved than merely looking at or reading the card.

With its almost iconographically inscrutable visual components, it is really the materiality of the valentine that imports sentiment from the giver to the receiver. The ubiquitous McLuhanism “the medium is the message” applies here, with the glossy, colorful, raised pieces of scrap comingling with the perforated sheets of paper lace to signify sentimentality, regardless of the particular images depicted. While the “language of flowers” was popular in Victorian America and may have played some role early on in the construction of valentines, the cards’ ubiquity and rapid mass production likely obviated the task of composing and encoding specific messages through pictures. Hearts, butterflies, lovebirds, flowers—all of these motifs are discursive shorthand for “sentimental valentine” and are not intended to be deeply symbolic. Even the messages included in the valentines read as generic, empty, and interchangeable. The valentine’s visual and textual components take a back seat to the significance of its material heft and diversity. In other words, in the experience of receiving a valentine, the images and text are supplemental to the material and the haptic experience.

Several scholars have recognized that the methods used for interpreting images or texts are inadequate for material culture, and sentimental valentines, as objects that communicate best through material and tactile interactions, have yet to be examined in a way that takes this kind of communication into consideration. Offering a corrective to text- and image-centric methods of interpretation, anthropologist Lambros Malafouris has explored the “material sign” in contrast to a linguistic sign, which he argues does not symbolize a concept but is, instead, a tangible manifestation of that concept. He writes, “The material sign … brings forth the concept as a concrete exemplar.” Malafouris emphasizes that material signs are activated through our interaction with them, stating that they “operate on the principle of participation rather than that of symbolic equivalency. … In the case of material signs, we do not read meaningful symbols; we meaningfully engage meaningless symbols.”

Thinking of the valentine as a material sign, or a collection of material signs, opens useful avenues of interpretation. The recipient engages meaningfully with the material in her hands, material that may not offer much by way of direct representations of specific messages, but which nonetheless proffers rich physical metaphors for affection, desire, or admiration—the specifics of which vary from recipient to recipient. While it is tempting to read the valentine like a text, with each image or word clearly representing a specific concept or idea (i.e., white daisies = innocence), the valentine’s material signification is more complex and not reducible to code. Rather than simply conveying any particular sentiment, the many and varied material components of the valentine, in essence, aid in the creation of meaning, enabling the recipient to glean something personal (to her) from that material. This meaning-making occurs when the recipient engages physically with the valentine. In other words, since no single message was carefully encoded by way of iconography, the general signaling of “sentiment” or “feeling” opened a space for the recipient to elaborate specific personal meanings on her own.

A recent interdisciplinary study of touch conducted by a team of psychologists and physical therapists has noted the variability and subjectivity of touch: “Response to touch is highly individualized. The same tactile input may be barely noticed by one, perceived as pleasurable by another, and noxious and intolerable to someone else. For example, a wool sweater feels cozy and warm to some and scratchy and itchy to others.” Similarly, the tactile experience of the valentine becomes unique to the receiver, granting each one an individualized inroad into the material presented. Put simply, the recipient is able to “make sense” of the valentine through her own personal senses.

Psychologist Martin Grunwald has outlined how touch has been culturally constructed as a powerful sense often linked to the “real” and to sensuality. Historically, philosophers have associated touch with sexuality, which might explain the importance of tactility in these romantic tokens. Thomas Aquinas asserted that touch is the defining sense of sentient beings, that it makes humans sensitive and that all other senses are derived from the sense of touch. Aristotle believed touch to be the most reliable sense, especially in situations where the other senses may be deceived. The Bible, too, frequently cites touch as the most effective way to prove something is real (recall the story of “doubting Thomas” invited to probe Christ’s wounds with his fingers). As Grunwald notes, this elevation of touch in the Bible likely engendered the medieval cult of relics, which encouraged touching the remains or clothing of saints in order to commune with the divine. While the hagiography of St. Valentine is exceedingly convoluted, this figure, like most saints, was seen as a mediator between intangible divinity and material humanity, a function similar to the valentine card. These historical examples of touch’s significance in philosophy and Christianity might explain why a close, haptic interaction with valentines was so critical; it attested to the veracity of any expressed sentiment for those who participated in the tradition. Touch and tangibility were believed to offer the most proof that something was real. Touch, like the valentine itself, is closely related to the sensual and emotional, as well as the trustworthy, true, and concrete.

The importance of touch, and of the feeling hand, is supported by the proliferation of scrap featuring these subjects. One late nineteenth-century scrapbooker demonstrated the popularity of this motif by gathering trade cards and individual pieces of scrap that feature hands touching a variety of materials (figs. 25, 26). Disembodied hands grasp the velvet stems of daisies and the prickly thorns of roses, urging the viewer to imagine touch as they look. They hold pens that wrote messages, reminding the receiver to consider the hand on the other end of any written text. One card (not pictured) features scrap with two clasped hands (one male, one female) and is captioned “Faithfully yours,” reminding the receiver of the skin-to-skin sensations to which a successful valentine might lead. In essence, the valentine provided a tactile link from one hand to another—an idea that is of course complicated further by considering the many “delicate hands” of the female makers that enabled this exchange.

Valentine components materially refer to familiar textures of the home, referencing domestic comfort. Paper lace in particular lent itself to the imitation of textiles and upholstery fabrics, Gothic ornamentation and architecture, perforated screens and other decorative objects. Through his investigation of the needlepoint motto, a popular domestic craft, historian Kenneth Ames asserts that perforation, such as that seen in the paper lace of valentines, was ubiquitous during the Victorian era. Dwelling particularly on the perforated cardboard that served as the base for these needlepoint mottoes, Ames illuminates mechanical and visual connections between other forms of perforated paper in the mid-nineteenth century, most notably the perforated edges for stamps, pierced metal sheets for colanders or lanterns, and the pierced patterns on the backs of chairs and benches. Perforated surfaces were a central motif in Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, and likewise appeared in architectural details like the pergola, meant as a transitional feature that mediated between inside and outside and acted as a penetrable barrier. Perforated paper lace is undoubtedly a critical component of the sentimental valentine, and appears in nearly every iteration, in some form or other. The paper lace reveals while simultaneously concealing an image or brief text. As described above, touching and interacting with the valentine would often enable the recipient to lift the lace and view the hidden layer unobstructed. Still, the paper lace invited a particular kind of looking as well, one that was especially active. By at once looking at the paper lace on the surface and then visually penetrating it, looking through it to view pieces of the material beneath, the viewer’s gaze moves between the layers. This visual movement, combined with the card’s visibly varied textures, enables a kind of visual tactility, an almost synesthetic way of experiencing the valentine. Not only does the valentine demand literal touch, but it encourages touching through a particular kind of looking.

Forget Me Not: The Ephemera(lity) of Valentine’s Day

In nineteenth-century newspapers, the ephemerality of valentines was juxtaposed with the perceived fading celebrations of Valentine’s Day. A slew of newspaper articles cited the demise of the sentimental, collaged valentine, evoking the valentine’s complex composition only to lament that this innocent tradition had become a thing of the past, an ephemeral fad only celebrated by children. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, valentines were no longer confined to exchanges between lovers; friends and family members began exchanging the missives as well, which, to some, seemed to dilute the purpose of the holiday. Others bemoaned the popularity of the “comic” or “vinegar” valentine and its vulgar, teasing contents. With the tradition of exchanging sentimental valentines reportedly always in jeopardy, headlines like “Valentine’s Day: The Former Day of Days Now Almost Forgotten” have a particularly ironic resonance with the countless pieces of valentine scrap that read, “Forget me not” and “Remember me.”

By the late 1890s, the multi-layered valentines described in this essay fell out of fashion; they were quickly replaced by flatter, single-layer cards and by three-dimensional “pop-up” valentines. Building upon the sentimental valentine’s physical heft and interactive qualities, the pop-up valentines arrived as a flattened pile of embossed chromolithographs but folded out to become multi-tiered paper monuments. These freestanding objects were printed on heavy cardboard stock and remained popular well into the twentieth century (figs. 27, 28). Simultaneous with the rise of pop-up valentines, a flatter version of the sentimental valentine hit the market. These mass-produced, single-layer chromolithographs, akin to bi-fold greeting cards today, became the dominant form for the valentine. Though they consist of a single chromolithograph, printers alluded to the multi-layered valentine popular in prior years through embossed textures, scalloped edges, paper lace backgrounds and scrap-like details—printed representations of these once-tangible components. Though the production of valentines later became simplified and more streamlined, the style and iconography of these ubiquitous tokens of affection—hearts, flowers, and angelic cherubs—are integral to a visual and material legacy that remains today.

By considering the material complexities of the valentine as a paper object and vehicle for emotion, we must ultimately consider the limitations and possibilities of paper as a medium, one that is often seen as disposable and ephemeral. French theorist Jacques Derrida has described the “unstable hierarchy” that exists with paper—that even fine paper can be disposed of as refuse or litter. Paper is somehow simultaneously more official and less official, more stable and less stable, more permanent and less permanent than other media. Valentines resonate with this idea of paper, simultaneously delicate but hefty, romantically binding but ephemeral, treasured but disposable. After all of my insistence that valentines are material conduits for sentiment, cherished physical proof of affection, these paper objects were susceptible to the same dangers as other papers. While many of the valentines illustrated in this essay were selected and purchased by collectors and are currently safely tucked into boxes and binders in archives, countless others—because of their susceptibility to the continually made and remade emotional relationships between people and their things—landed at the bottom of a trash bin.

But perhaps the nineteenth-century valentine represents emotion even more than I’ve argued here. For I’ve only told one side of the story, that of strong feelings of affection, anticipation, and admiration forever preserved in paper lace and printed hearts. But to discuss valentines as ephemera is to also consider the ephemerality of emotion: heavy, all-encompassing and insistent in that moment, but then so often fleeting, flattened, discarded, or destroyed.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jennifer Jane Marshall and my colleagues at the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota for their encouragement and feedback throughout various stages of this project; Jeanne Solensky at the Winterthur Libraries and Nan Wolverton at the American Antiquarian Society for their help and resources; Suzanne Karr Schmidt and the Prints & Drawings Department at the Art Institute of Chicago for introducing me to these materials and enabling my continued study of them; and Ellery Foutch and Sarah Anne Carter for their support.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive texts on the history and production of valentines were written by passionate collectors. These resources offer a thorough introduction to the many varieties of valentines produced in the U.S. and abroad: Ruth Webb Lee’s A History of Valentines (1952), Frank Staff’s The Valentine and Its Origins (1969), and the Ephemera Society of America’s special issue of The Ephemera Journal: A Valentine Source-Book (1990). For a more in-depth discussion of the economic and cultural significance of valentines, including more information about Esther Howland, George C. Whitney, and other valentine producers, see Consumer Rites: the Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995) by Leigh Schmidt, A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (2004) by Barry Shank, and Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (2010) by Elizabeth White Nelson.

The literature on materiality and sensory engagement is vast. For more about objects as cognitive extensions of the human body, or material signification specifically, see How Things Shape the Mind (2013) by Lambros Malafouris. For more on touch and haptic experience, see Human Haptic Perception: Basics and Applications (2008) by Martin Grunwald  and The Handbook of Touch: Neuroscience, Behavioral, and Health Perspectives (2011) edited by Matthew Hertenstein and Sandra Weiss.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

Christina Michelon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her dissertation examines the role of printed material in the nineteenth-century American home.

The Salisburys were one of nineteenth-century Worcester’s leading families. Stephen Salisbury I (1747-1829) had moved to Worcester from Boston in the 1760s to establish a branch of his family’s mercantile business. Stephen II (1798-1884) built on his father’s success as a merchant by investing in the manufacturing and transportation industries that developed in eastern and central Massachusetts in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Stephen Salisbury III was born into privilege, enjoying an education at the best schools as well as extensive social and kinship ties in Worcester and Boston. Like many nineteenth-century elites, Stephens II and III were extremely concerned with preserving the legacy of their family’s contributions to Worcester, and both were active members of the American Antiquarian Society. When Stephen III died in 1905 without heirs, he willed a substantial part of the family fortune to the Antiquarian Society. The Society also inherited the Salisbury family papers, which contain account books and letters kept by the three Stephen Salisburys and their wives, as well as the diaries of Stephen III from his teenage years through adulthood.

Young Salisbury’s early account books provide many clues to the questions that drive my project. Stephen Salisbury II taught Stephen III to keep accounts of the money he received from his father and of how he spent that money. On occasion, the adult Salisbury’s hand is visible in the books, correcting a mistake or helping young Stephen calculate his total expenses for a given period. Clearly the father intended to use his son’s consumer activities as a vehicle to teach him accepted nineteenth-century book-keeping practices, knowledge that would be essential in any field of business. However, he also wanted to teach his son how to spend money and how to determine what goods were and were not appropriate to purchase. The goods Stephen recorded in his early account books reveal the values his purchases helped inculcate. The teenager purchased tickets to concerts, museums, and a “World’s Fair Panorama,” indicating his participation in the cultured, “educational” entertainments popular among well-to-do New Englanders. The account books also make clear that his father expected Stephen to be responsible for maintaining his appearance: the young man routinely recorded what he paid for hair cuts, as well as cologne, hair oil, soap, creams, and lip salve. Salisbury’s purchases clearly evoke the image of a young man concerned with meeting the expectations of Worcester’s privileged class.

And then there were the valentines. In January and February of 1849 and 1850 Salisbury recorded purchasing valentines on several occasions. He did not record the precise number of valentines he purchased, but he only spent small sums, between ten and twelve cents, at any one time. In purchasing valentines to exchange with his female acquaintances, Stephen III was participating in an increasingly popular American ritual. In the early nineteenth century, young lovers had exchanged hand-made cards on Valentine’s Day; however, a veritable craze for valentines developed throughout the United States in the 1840s and 1850s as printers, stationers, and booksellers began to aggressively market commercially made cards. Salisbury might have purchased these commercially produced valentines or he might have purchased a “valentine writer,” a chapbook of appropriate verses to copy into homemade or blank cards. My initial response to seeing “Valentines” in Salisbury’s account books was twofold. One part of me thought, “Ah, an example of young Salisbury participating in the culture of sentiment that increasingly characterized the nineteenth-century upper and middle classes.” Another (perhaps less scholarly) part thought, “How sweet!” and I again experienced that sensation of dissonance as I tried to imagine the august man in the portrait as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy buying valentines to send to his female friends.

After these brief initial reactions I gave no more thought to the valentines for several weeks, during which time I finished reading Stephen III’s account books and moved on to his diaries. In 1848 Salisbury received his first diary as a gift from one of his maternal uncles. The twelve-year-old began recording the weather and some of his activities on a daily basis for about three weeks, after which his enthusiasm for keeping a diary began to wane. For one week longer he dutifully recorded “Nothing happened” and then he abandoned the project entirely, returning to it only on December 19, when he recorded the death of his “best Canary Bird.” After more than a year-long hiatus, Stephen again began to keep a diary in February 1850, and his entries immediately refocused my attention on the valentines. On February 2, 8, and 9, Salisbury reported that he had written valentines, summarizing his efforts on February 13 by recording “Have written 13 valentines.” His attention then turned from sending valentines to receiving them. Salisbury’s diary entries for the next three days read like a stock market ticker tape accounting for every increase in the number of valentines he received:

February 14 “Its Valentines Day have already received one Valentine but the Girls will probably not put theirs in till tomorrow Have written 13 already 1 more”

February 15 “Have recd 4 Valentines more”

February 16 “Have received a Valentine this morning which makes 7 already Have recd 2 more One more Have now got 10”

 

This last entry, in particular, resembles a shop keeper’s day book, with Stephen returning to the diary on at least three separate occasions to record a transaction, in this case, the receipt of an item which he valued. Each valentine he received was important because it revealed that another person had valued him enough to purchase (or perhaps make) a valentine and then pay the postage required to send it to him. Salisbury had not finished accounting for his valentines, for on the blank pages at the back of the diary he entered a “Memorandum” in which he recorded the names of the young ladies to whom he had sent valentines and the names of those from whom he received valentines. He ended by writing, “I have received 10 Valentines. Very Well.” Salisbury obviously was pleased with how well he had done in the “receipts” category, even if he was three valentines in the red.

Numbers mattered to Stephen Salisbury III. Learning to keep accounts had taught him that numbers were a way of expressing value. The “Saga of the Valentines” (as I referred to it in my notes) raises the possibility that Stephen had learned to value social relationships in similar ways. After all, it was the number of valentines he received that Salisbury emphasized. Nor was Salisbury alone in using numbers to symbolize the value of affective relationships. Bits and pieces of evidence from the papers of other members of the Salisbury family and their extended kin network offer an intriguing glimpse into the ways that nineteenth-century Americans accounted for friendships and other social ties. Like other upper-class nineteenth-century women, Stephen’s stepmother, Mary Grosvenor Bangs Salisbury (1800-1864), kept a social account book where she recorded the names of those people with whom she exchanged calls. On these pages she also listed the names of those who had called on her and her husband on New Year’s Day in 1860. She was not content merely to list their names, however, for she totaled up the number of people who had visited: 45. Stephen’s aunt, Catharine Flint (1802-1869), kept records of her social calls that resemble ledger books. She organized her social call book alphabetically, writing the names of her acquaintances on the left pages in ink, and then writing the dates she had called on them on the right pages in pencil, so she could update the book by erasing the dates of old visits and replacing them with new ones.

Building and maintaining social capital was very important to these mid-nineteenth-century Americans. From sending and receiving valentines to exchanging social visits, the elite New Englanders with whom the Salisburys associated were building social networks and participating in an economy of social reciprocity. Social relationships were valuable for many reasons, from the emotional to the practical. However, this value was difficult to express. The language of numbers and accounting helped Stephen Salisbury III express the pleasure and sense of value he received from valentines. Just as numbers in account books and diaries helped Salisbury express value, so too did his portrait hanging on the wall of the American Antiquarian Society. After all, Salisbury’s portrait presents a man of wealth, status, and benevolence; it is a measure of Salisbury’s economic and social value. Perhaps I was wrong to sense any dissonance between the middle-aged man in the portrait and the boy who purchased candy and toys. They both understood the value of social capital, whether expressed through portraits or valentines.

Further reading

For further reading on consumerism in early America, see John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York, 1993); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, 2008); and Elizabeth A. Perkins, “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 486-510. Elizabeth White Nelson, Market Sentiments: Middle Class Market Culture in 19^th-Century America (Washington, D.C., 2004) analyzes the relationship between the growth of sentimental culture and the market economy. For histories of Valentine’s Day celebrations and cards, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995) and Barry Shank, A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (New York, 2004).

This article originally appeared in issue 11.4 (July, 2011).