Before the current commercialised Valentine’s Day, which dates from the 1950s, there was a peak in the nineteenth century. Ronald Hutton in Stations of the Sun notes that by 1825 the London Post Office handled 200,000 more letters on 14th February than any other day. In the 1840s the decorated Valentine’s card had arrived and by the 1860s could be found across the country. In the 1870s low cost coloured Valentine’s cards were available and in 1880 the Post Office handled one and half million of them, a peak.
The extract below is from Charles Dickens Household Words
For the sacks were great sheepskin bags of letters tumbling in from the receiving-houses. The mysterious visitors closely scrutinised the letters that were disgorged. The clerk counted the stamped letters like lightning, and a flash of red gleaming past showed the inquirers that one of their epistles was safe. In 1840 came the uniform penny, and for that year the number was 162,000,000, or an increase of 93,000,000, equal to 123 per cent. The Post-Office is, however, a thermometer of commerce: during the depressing year 1848, the number of letters increased no more than 9 per cent. But last year 37,500,000 epistles passed through the office, being an augmentation of 8,500,000 upon the preceding year, or 11 per cent. of progressive increase.
Household Words 30th March 1850
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