Bøger af Mark McDougal

The Flogging-Block is Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's mock-heroic tribute to corporal punishment. In a prologue and twelve eclogues, Swinburne describes, with considerable vigour and black humour, the torment, anguish, and delights of the scholastic rod from the perspectives of beaten school boys, despotic masters, and joyous witnesses. It does not contain explicit sexual content. This edition of The Flogging-Block is a page by page transcription of the original manuscript, which is owned by the British Library. It does not reproduce Simeon Solomon's illustrations. A master of lyric, rhythm, and rhyme, Swinburne was one of the most brilliant poets of the Victorian era. He was also a life-long enthusiast of flagellation, weaving flagellant scenes and motifs into his poems, letters, novels, and dramatic works. He composed The Flogging-Block, which remained unpublished until now, between 1862 and 1881.

The Romance of Chastisement; or, Revelations of the School and Bedroom is arguably the most sophisticated, most literary, and most amusing mid-Victorian fictional text focusing on flagellation. A collection of short stories and verse sparkling with sexual suggestion and wit, it was first published by John Camden Hotten in 1871 in a volume bearing the false imprint date 1870. It was reprinted by Edward Avery in 1888. An earlier book with the same title was issued by William Dugdale in 1866. This work had a different sub-heading: Revelations of Miss Darcy. The Victorian bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee suggests that both books were written by the same author, whom he reveals to have been St. George H. Stock. Formerly a lieutenant in the 2nd or Queen's Royal Regiment, Stock issued his work originally in episodes from Dublin. Hotten purchased 200 sets from him and bound them into a single volume. St. George H. Stock also wrote the four short flagellant works that constitute Rosy Tales! (1874) and contributed to The Whippingham Papers (1888 [1887]), which are also available from Birchgrove Press.

In the assembly-room of the Society of Aristocratic Flagellants, Mayfair, Colonel Spanker strives to confirm his thesis that the punishment of a refined young lady produces more exquisite pleasures than flogging lower-class women and prostitutes... Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker is one of the most notorious nineteenth-century English flagellant novels. Henry Spencer Ashbee's Catena Librorum Tacendorum describes it as 'the most coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent of any we have ever read, [it] stands entirely alone in the English language.' (Fraxi, 1885: 250) This edition of Experimental Lecture also includes the full text of The Yellow Room or, Alice Darvell's Subjection, a late Victorian novella focusing on the delights of birching and the pleasures of cruelty. Following the death of her aunt, beautiful Alice Darvell is sent to live with Sir Edward Bosmere, a stern disciplinarian and devotee of Venus Callipyge, who initiates her into the mysteries of the rod. The Yellow Room was first published in 1891. The name of the author, M. Le Comte du Bouleau, is a pseudonym. Authorship is attributed to an English lawyer, Stanislas Matthew de Rhodès (1857-1932). He is also credited with writing Gynecocracy (1893) and The Petticoat Dominant (1898), which are available from Birchgrove Press.

A superb example of Victorian erotica focusing on sexual flagellation, The Mysteries of Verbena House, by Etonensis, was first published as two volumes in one in 1882. Only 150 copies were issued, probably by William Lazenby, at the price of four guineas. The first volume was issued in 1881 under the half-title: Birched for Thieving, or the Punishment of Miss Bellasis. The second volume and the full title appeared in 1882. As in most flagellant erotica, the plot is rather slim. Verbena House is a fashionable school for young ladies in Brighton. Miss Montes, a student from Cuba, is robbed of two golden doubloons. The nominal 'mystery' centres on the discovery of the culprit: Miss Catherine Bellasis, the beautiful sixteen year old daughter of a Chancery barrister. During the hunt for the stolen coins, a number of other offences are detected: Miss Hatherton possesses an obscene book, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, and Miss Hazeltine has hidden a bottle of gin. The girls are condemned to be flogged by the headmistress, Miss Sinclair. Volume I is taken up with the narration of these events. Volume II is primarily concerned with the castigation of the culprits. Up until the detection of her students' misdemeanours, Miss Sinclair, the headmistress, has been averse to corporal punishment. After deciding that the girls' are to be beaten, she seeks the advice of the school's spiritual advisor, the Reverend Arthur Calvedon, on the appropriate disciplinary procedure. A devotee of the rod, he becomes Miss Sinclair's lover. In the process, and during the course of the girls' chastisement, Miss Sinclair undergoes a remarkable conversion: she is transformed from a "maid-mistress" into a lewd votary, registering "a vow to become a fearless heroine of the birch, and make the sufferings of her pupils minister to her devices." The book's title hints at this lascivious metamorphosis: the psycho-spiritual transformation it represents is a deeper 'mystery' than the question of who stole Miss Montes' doubloons.