Love's Ruin? Victorian valentines rival our modern age for cynical cruelty

This commissioned 900-word article for The Conversation draws on selected elements of my research into popular practices of sending and receiving insulting valentines in the Victorian period. The article draws comparisons with public discourse in the 21st century, and shares little-known details about valentines practices from a range of local and national newspapers during the 19th century, and rarely seen examples from collections of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove. The piece, published on 14 Feb 2017, accompanied a range of other national and international interviews, web articles and media appearances on the subject in February 2017, including BBC Radio 3, La Liberte (a French-language Swiss daily newspaper), Abebooks USA and Germany, New Zealand public radio, and the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute, USA.