The lizard walks on her verse
Every February, for about twenty years, Elizabeth Cobbold sat down with a pair of scissors and a stack of letter paper and cut some eighty valentines by hand.1 Each was folded once, so the scissors made two of everything at a stroke, and each was inscribed — in her own hand, in her own verse — with lines written for whoever would draw it.2 This is one of them.
One night a year
Cobbold hosted an annual Valentine's ball at The Cliff, her house in Ipswich, from around 1806.3 The cut valentines went into two baskets, one for the women and one for the men; the unmarried guests drew at random, and the verses were read aloud — a matchmaking lottery she staged, and wrote, herself.4 She kept it up until near her death, which puts the count, over the years, well past a thousand valentines cut and versed by one hand.
Red for a lady
The colour is not decoration. Cobbold mounted a lady's valentine on red paper and a gentleman's on blue.5 This lizard is on red. The white shape is the cut; the two columns of ink beneath it are the verse she wrote to go under it. Nothing on the sheet is printed. The commercial valentine — the machine-embossed paper lace — did not yet exist; it arrives a generation later, with Esther Howland in the United States after 1847.6 Cobbold's are the earlier kind: handmade, unrepeatable, from just before the industry.
The monitory lizard
We call it The Monitory Lizard, and the pun is the point: monitory and the monitor lizard both descend from the Latin monere, to warn.7 Her valentines ran to Fairy Queen Mab, a Chinese landscape, a pyramid of hieroglyphs, a pen and a porte-crayon — and a lizard, which she read as a figure of adaptability, changing its colour to suit.8 The warning is gentle, and it is a joke; that is the register of the whole enterprise.
A poet who collected fossils
Cobbold was a published poet before she was a papercut artist — her first book appeared when she was about eighteen — and a serious fossil collector besides.9 The naturalist James Sowerby named a fossil bivalve after her, Nucula cobboldiae, a rare honour for a woman of her day.10 The valentines were the smallest part of her, and they are the part that came through whole: this album is held by the New York Public Library.11
What you wear is not a picture of the object. It is the object — her cut, her red, her verse underfoot, in a single ink. The lizard still walks on the poem she wrote for it.
Notes & sources
- "generally to the number of eighty, which were all curiously cut out on a half sheet of letter paper, and each inscribed with verses applicable to the subject." Poems, with a Memoir of the Author (1825).
- Folded once, the half-sheet yields two identical copies — hence "some eighty" reads as roughly forty pairs. Johns Hopkins Cobbold Valentines exhibit; Cobbold Family History Trust.
- The annual St Valentine's ball at The Cliff, Ipswich, from c. 1806. Johns Hopkins exhibit.
- Two baskets (ladies / gentlemen), drawn at random, verses read aloud. "Her Reputation for Accomplishment."
- Ladies' valentines mounted on red, gentlemen's on blue. Johns Hopkins exhibit.
- Esther Howland's mass-produced lace valentines, United States, from shortly after 1847. Worcester Historical Museum.
- Both monitory and the monitor lizard derive from Latin monere, to warn.
- Cobbold's motifs, incl. the lizard glossed as "Lacerta Chameleon," an emblem of adaptability. "Her Reputation for Accomplishment."
- Poems on Various Subjects (1783), published when Cobbold was about eighteen. Wikipedia; DNB.
- Nucula cobboldiae, named for her by James Sowerby. Wikipedia.
- Elizabeth Cobbold (1767–1824); valentine c. 1823; The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library; public domain in the United States.