St Valentine’s Day
A grumpy nineteenth-century critic of the English Valentine’s Day said that it was “now almost everywhere a much degenerated festival, the only observance of any note consisting merely of the sending of jocular anonymous letters to parties whom one wishes to quiz, and this confined very much to the humbler classes.”
An eighteenth-century English Valentine custom was described thusly:
On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day the young folks in England and Scotland, by a very ancient custom, celebrate a little festival. An equal number of maids and bachelors get together: each writes their true or some feigned name upon separate billets, which they roll up, and draw by way of lots, the maids taking the men’s billets, and the men the maids’: so that each of the young men lights upon a girl that he calls his valentine, and each of the girls upon a young man whom she calls hers. By this means each has two valentines: but the man sticks faster to the valentine that has fallen to him than to the valentine to whom he is fallen. Fortune having thus divided the company into so many couples, the valentines give balls and treats to their mistresses, wear their billets several days upon their bosoms or sleeves, and this little sport often ends in love.
In the 1750s an English magazine article described this girlish fortune-telling practice:
Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before, I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle: and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk, and filled it with salt: and when I went to bed, ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it?—Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay a-bed and shut my eyes all the morning, till he came to our house: for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.
Since Chaucer’s day it has been imagined that February 14 was linked to the love life of birds. John Donne made this connection in a poem celebrating the wedding of England’s Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine (aka “the Winter King”) which took place on Valentine’s Day 1615.
Hail, Bishop Valentine! whose day this is:
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marryest every year
The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove:
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher:
Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon
As cloth the goldfinch or the halcyon–
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine!
I celebrate because it is the birthday of Jack Benny….
And so should we all. Of all the old-time radio comedians whose shows I listen to on satellite radio, Jack Benny is the funniest. The rest didn’t age so well.