Given I’m a historian of love I thought it’s high time I do a thread about the history of #ValentinesDay, from lotteries to puzzle purses and printed cards /1

In 17th & early 18th century England, groups of men and women would meet on the evening of 13th February to draw their valentines out of a hat. They would then write poems about them, pin these to their clothes, and dance together /2

A very rare poem made for a valentine lottery in 1723 has survived in the Cornish archives. It reads ‘Since on this day Each Bird doth chuse his Mate / Soe I make Choice of you my Charming Kate / Till Easter Next my valentine to be / And Ever after that adored by me’ /3

Both men and women drew billets meaning ‘each has two Valentines: but the Man sticks faster to the Valentine that is fallen to him’. This ‘little sport’ often ended ‘in Love’, with the women receiving gifts such as money, stockings, garters and gloves /4

On Valentine’s Day itself, children would go knocking from door to door declaring “good morrow to you Valentine” or “morrow, morrow, Valentine” asking for money or food /5

Some believed that your valentine was the first person you saw on the morning of 14th February, who you should greet with a kiss, and tried to keep their eyes shut until they encountered the right person! /6

By the early C18th, lotteries had been recast as vulgar, and the middling sorts, gentry & aristocracy withdrew from them. The custom was superseded by the sending of puzzle purses, poems, acrostics, & true lovers knots, meaning you could CHOOSE your valentine /7

The true lovers knot here was sent from J. Thomas of Gloucestershire to his future wife Elizabeth in c. 1780 (V&A E.767-1985). The winding poem was ‘an Emblem of my Love with out an End, With Crossing winding turning in and out, and never ceasing turning round a bought’ /8

In the final decade of the 18th century Valentine’s Day was integrated into the consumer economy as printed cards could be bought for threepence apiece. The earliest surviving printed valentine was sold by the bookseller John Fairburn in 1797: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/L1NM_6mWRymAMKXcRDlXJA /9

As the celebration became increasingly commercialised and monetised, you could enter into a special Valentine’s Day state lottery to win tens of thousands of pounds in prize money /10

The commercialisation of the celebration led to a nostalgia for a mythical ‘days of old’, with a boom in homemade cards using deliberately archaic languages of love and celebrating the beauty of simple rural life /11

You can read more in my article in @CultSocHistory: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14780038.2019.1646075 and Ch. 4 of my book The Game of Love in Georgian England https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-game-of-love-in-georgian-england-9780198823070?cc=gb&lang=en& /FIN