Around 1860, Britain was gripped with a craze for “cartes de visite”

bbc.com

106 points·apollinaire··10 comments

As the articles says, the Victorians flirted in a variety of ways, sometimes surprising. It's worth remembering, they also invented online romance, and the first novel about an online relationship was written in 1879, a novel about a romance pursued between a man and woman who were both working as telegraph operators:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6794918-wired-love

I read that a few years ago and enjoyed it. It felt surprisingly modern; but then again quite a lot of Victorian era stuff feels modern in spirit, like our own times it was a period of tremendous upheaval.

Once romance via letters was invented (a century earlier), romance over newer media was inevitable. Not unlike Sears & Roebuck making retail-over-mail a huge thing, and then Amazon doing the same with retail-over-Internet. Though a lot of things that seem obvious in retrospect aren't in the moment.

Somehow reminds me very much of Monty Pythons intro's and maybe some inspiration legacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AxiATxLofk

Heh. I came here to say this.

19th century memes?

Actually the practice itself is the meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

And suddenly . . . the Monty Python introduction sequence is put into the context of a historical tradition

Flower messages?

NFTs?

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