Modern Love
In the mid-1880s, Esther Howland ushered in the first mass-produced Valentine’s Day card, much to the relief of tongue-tied men everywhere.
A whopping 145 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each year, according to Hallmark, who knows a little something about the card business. For that, you can thank Esther Howland, a woman who never married but united innumerable lovers through her visionary work.
In the mid-1800s, Howland, a 20-year-old graduate of Mount Holyoke College living in Worcester, Mass., ushered in what is now a $26 billion holiday by introducing the first mass-produced commercial valentines in the U.S.
Exchanging valentines was popular in America by the early 1840s. In 1846, more than 30,000 valentines passed through the New York City post office on Feb. 14. In a letter to her cousin, Emily Dickinson commented on the widespread nature of the Victorian valentine craze:
“The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like, snowflakes. Ancient gentlemen, & spinsters, forgetting time, & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles – even this aged world of ours, has thrown away its staff – and spectacles, & now declares it will be young again.”
At the time, valentines were usually cheaply made tokens of love, with a few lines of rhyme on a slip of paper, often selected and printed, and sold by shopkeepers. That all changed, thanks to Howland, whose father owned a large bookstore in Worcester that stocked richly designed and lace-covered cards from England.
In 1849, Howland copied the British card style and created well-received prototypes. An astute businesswoman, Howland eventually opened a successful female-run Valentine’s business, combining the female world of the hearth and home with the world of commerce. She became known as the “Mother of the Valentine.”
Esther Howland’s work revolutionized Valentine’s Day.
Setting up headquarters in her family’s Worcester home, her New England Valentine Co. took off. Howland introduced layers of lace, wafers of colored paper placed beneath lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and a mechanical bouquet in which pulling a string moves flowers aside to reveal printed verses underneath. Her sales reached $75,000 a year, and she stayed in business for 30 years.
Howland apparently never found love herself, dying in 1904 unmarried. Newspapers across the country reported on her passing, labeling her, variously, as “the inventor of valentines” and, harshly, as a “New England spinster.” And yet, like true love, Howland’s legacy has endured. So-called Howland valentines are treasured by collectors. A Christie’s auction sold six for between $94 to $489. What’s more, a selection of her work resides alongside some of the greatest artwork in the world at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
