Valentine 1880

This Valentine card was made by the English artist Kate Greenaway, who was active in the late nineteenth century. Her romanticized depictions of childhood, like this one, chimed perfectly with Victorian ideals. The boy’s gift of bird’s eggs is a symbolic token of love. Yet the image also subtly reinforces the social norms of the time. Both children are dressed in a self-consciously old-fashioned style, like characters in a historical drama. This may remind us of how art and literature in Victorian Britain often looked back to earlier periods, such as the eighteenth century, for a vision of ideal social relations. The girl's fashionable bonnet and dainty parasol suggests a family of some means, as the image conveys a world of middle-class propriety and privilege. To understand this work better, we could look at Victorian children’s literature and etiquette manuals. These sources help us understand the values that were being promoted through art in this period.