Penny Dreadfuls: Valentines for the disliked

On Valentine's Day, we can expect chocolates and roses, candlelight dinners, and maybe even marriage proposals. At the very least, we get some sweet cards.

But it wasn't always that way. In the 19th century, loathing replaced loving for those unlucky enough to receive the aptly named "penny dreadfuls," also known as vinegar valentines, that featured unflattering caricatures and vitriolic verse.

Consider the greeting "Too Long Between Baths," which took a woman to task for lack of personal hygiene:

A bath with you, it's whispered, is an annual affair / And indeed, your odor indicates the cleanups are rare / Your tub, pray, visit oftener, my highly scented maid / Of soap and water, do not be so very much afraid.

"The penny dreadful was sent to people you didn't like on Valentine's Day," says Marcia Richards of Glassboro, a valentine collector and historian.

Her collection includes more than 3,000 penny dreadfuls - a term coined because the cards cost a penny and had dreadful drawings and sayings - with the oldest from 1820 and the biggest two feet tall.

The easygoing, soft-spoken Richards, who has been married 45 years to Ralph, began searching for the offbeat valentines after seeing them featured in 1990 on a television show about collectors.

"I love things that are unusual and different," says Richards, 67, a mother of two and grandmother of four. She found her first one at an antiques shop in Tuckerton, N.J., and was hooked.

She built her collection by visiting antiques collectible shows, and eBay and email eventually became invaluable resources.

She has become so well-known for her collection a dealer called out at a collectible show: "Here comes that Dreadful Marcia." Ever since, she signs her emails that way.

The sending of valentines became popular in the 19th century in Great Britain and the United States, according to Cameron C. Nickels, author of Civil War Humor and a retired professor of American studies and American literature at James Madison University in Virginia.

At the same time, retailers discovered they could profit greatly from them.

"Merchants tried to enlarge St. Valentine's Day into a holiday that encompassed all the complex webs of social relationships," writes Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of the 1997 book Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.

Whereas sentimental, romantic valentines were popular, others preferred something out of the mainstream, Nickels says.

"Vinegar Valentines, or penny dreadfuls, as the comic ones were also called, were tasteless, even vulgar, and sent anonymously to drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, penny-pinchers, and the like," he writes in his 2010 book. "Adding injury to injury, the recipient had to pay the postage."

Nickels used three of Richards' penny dreadfuls in his book, although she offered him more than 150, "an extraordinary and selfless contribution," he said.

He called her "the consummate collector, more indefatigable than any I know."

More than half of Richards' collection is drawn from the work of illustrator Charles J. Howard and writer W.J. Rigney, who collaborated from 1873 to 1905, she says. Richards found herself drawn to Howard's artwork.

"His caricatures are so ugly, how can you not like them?"

Some of Howard and Rigney's work, which targeted a wide range of occupations and subjects, was ahead of its time.

Case in point, one of Richards' favorites: "Slow Suicide," which tackled the issue of cigarette smoking more than a half-century before the U.S. surgeon general deemed it dangerous. The card features a hapless smoker alongside a box of cigarettes dubbed "Coffin Nails" and a cautionary verse:

If health and strength a man would lose / One certain means there is to choose / Inhale the cigarette's deadly smoke / And prematurely he will croak.

Though Howard was a prolific artist who also illustrated children's books under the name Constance White, he was a man of mystery.

"No one knows where he was born or died," says Richards, who has been able to find two photographs of Howard. "I would like to get a photograph of his grave site."

Despite more than a quarter-century of collecting, some of his work has eluded her, most disappointingly, "The Dentist," which skewers the dental profession.

Other factors have made the cards difficult to find, says Nancy Rosin, president of the National Valentine Collectors Association.

"The early ones were on fine paper, but then they began to be printed very cheaply on wood pulp paper, so survival of the paper was not assured," adds Rosin, of Franklin Lakes, N.J. "Many either deteriorated because they were not cherished like sentimental ones, or were perhaps torn and discarded on receipt because they were so mean or naughty."

Not all dealers find penny dreadfuls worth their attention.

"Some would tell me, 'We don't carry that trash,' " Richards recalls. Nonetheless, they are all dear to her heart.

"I want them buried with me," she says with a smile. "I'm going to prove that you can take it with you."