As I may or may not have mentioned in my last blog post, one of the best–but also most perilous–things about doing research is that it’s so easy to get sidetracked. While looking for images for my book proposal, I spent a lot of time that I don’t really have to spare looking at Victorian/early twentieth century greeting cards on various archives (British Museum, Library of Congress, and New York Public Library). They’re fascinating.

The penny post was introduced in Britain in 1840, and that meant a lot of people could afford to send mail. According to the British Museum website, in 1843 an art shop owner printed a thousand greeting cards and sold them in his shop in London for a shilling apiece. The railroads encouraged sending greeting cards—Christmas and Valentines were especially popular–and posting them got even cheaper in 1870.

Have a look at some of these. I didn’t see many cute puppies and kittens like the ones you see on greeting cards nowadays, I guess the creepy dogs in the two cards, below, might have been meant to be cute:

And weird social commentaries with anthropomorphized animals.

And cars bedecked with flowers but no drivers seemed like popular settings in the era when the first cars rolled out:I’m not sure what this one is supposed to be about–the caption says “Happy may your Christmas be,” but to me it looks more like the boy with the whip is menacing the cowering boy in blue. And he’s definitely smooshing the kid’s hat:

If you click on the picture it will take you to the British Library url and you can see it enlarged.

Now I really have to get back to my research.