Sentimental fools...

Someone who should know better and just happens to be my oldest daughter posted this status on Facebook the other day and it kind of set me thinking, the way that often statements that make no real sense do. The status was as follows:

‘is sad that old fashioned sentiment is mostly dead!’

Old fashioned sentiment! I ask you - what on earth is that? It seems to me that old fashioned sentiment is very much a modern invention, more marketing than anything to do with genuine feeling.

In the past people were too poor and too busy staying alive for sentiment - there was work, war and death, and that was about it. I doubt that there were many miners who had time to ponder their luck and reminisce about how lovely their lives were down t’pit – basking in the light of a flaming fire as it cast a rosy glow of warming satisfaction over their old fashioned chintzy company hovels.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can be as sentimental as the next bleeding heart (as I am sure that you are aware). But I find it hard to believe that anyone who had lost their nearest and dearest in the first world war (or any war come to that) would look back on the experience with any degree of old fashioned sentiment. Even those old fashioned pastoral farm workers - up at five in all weathers to work twelve hours shifts of hand-tooling, back-breaking labour, returning home to a family too large to feed and a consumptive wife - might find the countryside just a little less idyllic than Constable sentimentally painted it up to be.

Yes, the past was work, war and death - a daily struggle with no room for sentiment. Still is in a good proportion of the world.

It was probably Mr Charles Dickens who invented old fashioned sentiment - what with his Great Expectations and Old Curiosity Shops. He certainly invented our sugar-plum view of Christmas. Before ‘A Christmas Carol’ it was all yule logs (as a necessity to keep warm) and as much sorrow-drowning alcohol as you could manage to consume before falling asleep in the unheated room you shared with six others. Toys and even play were a Victorian invention. Prior to those enlightened times children were too busy working up chimneys or in factories on Christmas day to unwrap their non-existent presents or eat their non-existent sweets and Father Christmas was still in Holland putting coal into bad children’s shoes.

And then along came the bloody Pre-Raphaelites, all long hair and poetic sentimentality, and that led to all the overly-sentimental pictures of cute spoilt brats and even cuter sad, protective doggies that the Victorians loved so much.

Yes, the Victorians have a lot to answer for. Not only did they sentimentalise life (whilst visiting prostitutes, contracting syphilis and drinking gallons of gin), but they were also responsible for the popularisation of greetings cards - that other driver behind the trumped-up miasma of nonsensical sentimentality that we seem to believe has existed throughout history.

Before the Victorians there were no Christmas or birthday cards, nor any Valentine’s and congratulations cards - but even the Victorians would have found it hard to believe some of the ridiculous cards available to us today. These days there’s a card for everything, and if there isn’t – well, you can simply design your own on-line with a printing batch of one.

‘Happy Divorce’, ‘Welcome Spring’, ‘Glad You Two Have Got Together’, ‘Happy Grandmother’s Day’, ‘Happy Birthday to my Dog’ - all invented by Hallmark and the rest of the card companies to get us to part with our cash and drive the misguided belief that ‘saying it with a card’ is somehow better than a phone call, text, e-mail, hand-written letter, or even a face-to-face conversation.

So, am I sad that old fashioned sentiment is mostly dead? Well, I don’t believe that it ever existed, but if it had the answer would be a resounding ‘No!’