Victorian Valentine's Day included a nastier tradition: the 'vinegar valentine', a mocking card sent anonymously to insult its recipient. Also called mock valentines, these cards were made in Britain and the United States from the mid-1800s, often folded like letters so the recipient had to pay postage on arrival before prepaid postage existed. They targeted obnoxious shopkeepers, pompous poets, Union sympathisers' opponents during the American Civil War, and suffragettes in the early 1900s. One 1885 case in Birmingham involved a man charged with attempted murder after his estranged wife sent him one. Many vinegar valentines survive in museum collections such as the New York Public Library's, and they declined after World War I before a comic postcard revival in the 1950s.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.