The Sexual History of London (29 page)

Flagellant literature falls into a number of categories: from the accounts of elderly roués who require sexual stimulation from a briskly administered whipping, as documented by Cleland in
Fanny Hill
, to the well-connected and influential men who enjoy a sex game during which they are ‘punished' by a dominatrix, while other parties look on, and even join in. This is a form of role play, with each participant assigned the character of ‘naughty child' or birch-wielding disciplinarian, as in the following extract. This depicts a flogging enthusiast pretending to be an impudent young boy who has insulted his mother and is now being punished for it by the redoubtable ‘Mrs Trimmer' while his ‘nurse' or governess looks on. The
mise-en-scène
is highly dramatic, with appropriately blood-curdling language, but while there cannot be any doubt about the measure of pain inflicted upon the individual concerned, we are also left in no doubt that this is how he obtains his pleasure

As the rascal begs his assailant to stop, the attack becomes more vigorous, with the dominatrix declaring that ‘I'll whip this bold backside of his till I strip every bit of skin from it…You may roar, and cry, and kick, and plunge, and implore, my pretty gentleman, but all will not do; I'll whip you till the blood runs to your heels! You shall feel the tuition of this excellent rod!'
¹⁴

Another popular sub-genre of flagellant literature added a lesbian twist by depicting the beating of young women by other young women, as in
The Merry Order of St Bridget
, which describes the erotic punishments within a closed order of nuns:

While
The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine
featured a long series on flogging, with hoax letters coming in from all quarters testifying to the benefits of flogging one's daughters, more extreme cases of sadism included the reflections of the brutal ‘Colonel Spanker' (in reality one William Lazenby, 1825–88) whose
Experimental Lecture
revelled in the ‘exciting and voluptuous pleasures to be derived from crushing and humiliating the spirit of a beautiful and modest young lady'.
¹⁶

The lesbian proprietor whips young Sabrina in Charles Lubbock's
Madame Zuleika's Sapphic Academy c.
1901.

Henry Spencer Ashbee, a Victorian collector and self-appointed pornography expert, found flagellation so distasteful that he had to recruit a specialist to write about it in his catalogue of erotica. For Ashbee, the practice was ‘the wild dream, or rather nightmare, of some vicious, used-up, old rake, who, positively worn out, and his hide tanned and whipped to insensibility by diurnal flogging, has gone mad on the subject of beastly flagellation'.
¹⁷

According to the publisher John Cannon, flagellation was so popular ‘and so extensively indulged in London at this day, that no less than twenty splendid establishments are supported entirely by this practice.'
¹⁸
London's dominatrices swished their way to a fortune: Mrs James, of 7 Carlisle Street, Soho, retired to a life of luxury in Notting Hill, while many had handsome addresses: Mrs Emma Lee, of 50 Margaret Street; Mrs Phillips, of 11 Upper Belgrave Place; and Mrs Shepherd, of 25 Gilbert Street.
¹⁹

While much of the literature of flagellation is either coy or brutal, there is an account by ‘Walter' which is so realistic as to have the ring of truth about it. The anonymous author of
My Secret Life
witnessed this incident during a trip to Belgium, when he and his mistress, a prostitute he refers to as ‘Helen Marwood', visit a specialist brothel, as Helen's interest is piqued by the vice. It is a vivid but sordid description of a sexual encounter. Escorted by the ‘Abbess', or dominatrix, who runs the brothel, Helen, wearing only her chemise, and ‘Walter', in just his shirt and a mask, enter a room where they encounter a man kneeling on a large chair at the foot of the bed. The chair is draped with a towel to ‘receive his spendings'. As if this was not enough, the ‘patient', as ‘Walter' refers to him

The ‘patient' asks to see ‘Walter's' penis – a request with which ‘Walter' graciously complies, although he refuses to let the ‘patient' touch him; the ‘patient' also wants a look at Helen's cunt, but is refused. After some backchat, the abbess takes up her switch and begins to whip her ‘patient', as the two other girls, ‘Walter' and Helen look on.

‘Walter' decides to walk round to the other side to see if the ‘patient' is responding to this stimulation, and describes his prick as ‘longish, pendant' but not sufficiently aroused, despite the fact that the abbess is swishing away with a will. ‘Yellowhead', the woman with dyed hair, takes hold of the ‘patient's' penis from behind, while the abbess winks at ‘Walter'. Despite escalating cries of pain, the ‘patient' still cannot obtain satisfaction, gripping the bedstead and crying as his backside becomes increasingly red. There is a rest, and some whispering between the abbess and her ‘patient' and then Yellowhead takes up the birch, as ‘Walter' and Helen move round the bed to watch, ‘both of us excited, H's face flushed with lust, I felt her cunt, and she my pego, now stiff'. The ‘patient' livens up at this display. ‘Let me lick her cunt,' he whispers, and at first Helen refuses, but, short of money as usual, she eventually consents, demanding £5 for the pleasure. ‘He'll pay, he's a gentleman,' the abbess reassures her, and Helen settles down on the bed, although it takes several pillows to manoeuvre her into a position where the ‘patient's' tongue can reach the goal. But this is still not enough for the ‘patient', who demands that ‘Walter' ‘frig' him. ‘Walter' obliges, for a second, as the rod falls on the ‘patient's' backside and he continues to lick Helen. Eventually, Yellowhead takes hold of the ‘patient', gives him one or two gentle tugs, and a shower of semen spurts out. As he collapses, all passion spent, the only unsatisfied person in the room is Helen. ‘Damn it,' she exclaims, ‘I was just coming!' ‘But the “patient” was lifeless,' ‘Walter' tells us. ‘All desire to lick her had gone.'
²¹

‘Walter's' anecdote is an absurd and pitiful take on human sexuality, in which the protagonists appear pathetic and comical, from the punter trussed up in a frock to the frustrated Helen, deprived of her orgasm, while the voyeuristic ‘Walter' looks on and relishes every detail. It is far removed from the cheerful role play of the ‘naughty boy' being ‘swished' by the draconian ‘Mrs Trimmer' in an earlier extract; and it is also, as Steven Marcus has noted, so graphic and so factual in its depiction of sexuality as to prefigure the Modernism of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence.

As far as mainstream pornography was concerned, anything ‘French' was considered titillating and there was an insatiable demand for Gallic erotica. ‘My French Friend', a short story which appeared in
The Boudoir
magazine, dealt with the adventures of a ‘pretty little morsel, ripe and melting as a plum, acquiescent and charming, ready to make the beast with two backs, to play the game of sixty-nine, to exercise the delicate manipulations of her soft fingers, or do the lolly-pop trick with her ripe lips at a moment's notice', who later proceeds to seduce her chambermaid.
²²
To satisfy the demand for French pornography, booksellers smuggled contraband into England, with the help of contacts based in Paris. One such bookseller was Frederick Hankey, who had moved to Paris to give himself up, body and soul, to sexual fulfilment and decadence, although as his friend Henry Spencer Ashbee observed, he was ‘a second Sade without the intellect'.
²³
An unprepossessing young man, Hankey was short, with a head like an orange and a mouth like a slit. He was also a necrophiliac. Sir Richard Burton, the explorer and orientalist, had promised him the skin of an African woman, preferably torn off a live one, during a campaign in Dahomey (now Benin), although he was disappointed in his sick wish. ‘I have been here three days and am grievously disappointed,' Burton wrote to a friend. ‘Not a man killed, nor a fellow tortured. The canoe floating in blood is a myth of myths. Poor Hankey must wait for his
peau de femme
.'
²⁴
When he heard that there was to be a public hanging in Paris, Hankey and a friend took a couple of young women along to the execution so that they could have sex during the event.

For all his considerable shortcomings, Hankey was a committed publisher and would do anything it took to get the job done. When his bookbinder became difficult, Hankey discovered his particular fetish and procured young girls for him; the books were bound, but the man's marriage was left in tatters. Hankey used couriers to smuggle the books into England, sometimes via the diplomatic bags of the British Embassy, thanks to his cousin's valet. On more than one occasion, a Mr Harris of Covent Garden smuggled books in and out of England ‘in the bend of his back'.
²⁵

The need to smuggle texts in, combined with the prospect of fines and even imprisonment, had become a reality for pornographers thanks to the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the development of literary censorship. Up until the 1840s, censorship had been comparatively relaxed; a gentlemanly blind eye was turned to the excesses of pornography if it was distributed and enjoyed with discretion. The only law against sexually explicit material was King George III's 1787 Royal Proclamation ‘For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality', including the suppression of all ‘loose and licentious Prints, Books, and Publications, dispersing Poison to the minds of the Young and Unwary and to Punish the Publishers and Vendors thereof'. This was policed by groups such as the Proclamation Society, which became the Society for the Suppression of Vice, instituted in 1802 to ‘check the spread of open vice and immorality, and more especially to preserve the minds of the young from contamination by exposure to the corrupting influence of impure and licentious books, prints, and other publications', but this had little effect, because it had no power to destroy the material. However, purity crusaders were tightening their grip on the nation's morals and gaining widespread support for their campaign to clean up Britain. The society mustered sufficient establishment support to drive legislation through Parliament in the form of the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which gave magistrates the powers to order the destruction of ‘any obscene publication held for sale or distribution on information laid before a court of summary jurisdiction'.
²⁶

According to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, anything ‘obscene' was called ‘pornography', literally, writings about or by prostitutes, or ‘porni'; according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the first use of this word in the English language dates from 1850.

The Obscene Publications Act was introduced in September 1857 by Lord Campbell, the Lord Chief Justice. William Dugdale was one of the first to be arrested. When he appeared in court before Lord Campbell, Dugdale defended himself by protesting his innocence, pleading for the sake of his children, and then threatening the court with a knife. As one might expect, this final gesture was not well received and Dugdale was found guilty and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. He died in the Clerkenwell House of Correction in 1869. Also arrested was Mary Elliot, one of the few female booksellers in Holywell Street. Elliot pleaded guilty and promised never to sell pornography again, but she was still sentenced to a year of hard labour, even though she was forty-nine years old.