‘’In mid-Victorian England the custom of sending daintily printed valentines, overflowing with hearts, cupids and poetical posies was generally understood to consist of an exchange of missives between special loving friends.

Yet beneath the sweet exterior and tender words of these lace-paper beauties lurked something far more sinister - the comic valentine !

These scurrilous printed sheets, entered into the humour of the common and middles classes, fun and mischief were their elements.

In reality they were masterpieces of the grotesque, venomous in humour, spiteful and rude, expressing anything but love.'’ [The Comic Valentine of mid-Victorian England]