Sweet nothings: suggestive Brighton postcard inscriptions

Abstract

This article details the results of a research project searching for evidence of courtship in Brighton Museum's holdings of mainly topographical early twentieth-century postcards. Assembling a body of evidence that demonstrates Brighton as a historic location for romance and the postcard as a flirtatious form of communication, "Sweet Nothings" argues that while postcard inscriptions have been largely overlooked in academic literature, the coded and truncated messages intended to covertly express intimate exchanges in a public medium provide a suggestive means of understanding mass-produced postcards through their private singularization and use.