‘Punish me as much as you like’: When flagellation was a national obsession Victorian culture was awash with pornographic photographs, books, poems, and illustrations all revelling in a love of the lash

“I should like to see two things again, the river – and the block.” So wrote Victorian literary superstar, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), when recalling his time at Eton College. It was the French who first coined the phrase ‘le vice Anglais’ to describe the English predilection for being flogged. Victorian culture was awash with pornographic photographs, books, poems, and illustrations all revelling in a love of the lash. So much so that flagellation was not so much an English ‘vice’, but a national obsession.

The explicit themes of sexuality, blasphemy, and sadism in Swinburne’s work came to symbolise poetic rebellion against Victorian conservative values. But not everyone was a fan. A shocked Thomas Carlyle once described Swinburne as “standing up to his neck in a cesspool, and adding to its contents”, and Punch magazine renamed him ‘Swine born’. Had his critics known of his private publications, Swinburne would likely have faced charges of indecency.

Swinburne attributed his taste for being flogged to his time at Eton and it became a lifelong obsession for him. He secretly wrote works with titles such as ‘The Whippingham Papers’, and ‘The Flogging Block: A Heroic Poem by Rufus Rodworthy, with annotations by Barebum Birchingham’. He is thought to have published several works anonymously in The Pearl, an underground pornographic magazine that ran from 1879-1880. One such work is Charlie Collingwood’s Flogging, by Etoniensis, that includes verses like this:

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‘How his brawny bare haunches, all bloody, and wealed, with red furrows like ruts, Shrink quivering with pain at each stroke, that revives all the smart of past cuts! How the Schoolmaster seems to hit harder, the birch to sting more at each blow! Till at last Charlie Collingwood, writhing with agony, bellows out, “Oh!”’

England: ‘the classic land of sexual flagellation’

As well as writing about whipping, Swinburne was also a regular customer at a flagellation brothel in St John’s Wood in London. Some years after Swinburne’s death, his friend Edmund Gosse wrote this establishment was a place where “two golden-haired and rouge-cheeked ladies received in luxuriously furnished rooms gentlemen who they consented to chastise for large sums”.

You would be forgiven for assuming this kind of specialist brothel would be a rarity in Victorian London, but it seems the capital’s masochists were very well catered for. After surveying the sheer number of London brothels where one could buy a birching, the German sexologist Iwan Bloch (pen name Eugen Dühren) declared “England today is the classic land of sexual flagellation”. Writing in his Bibliography of Forbidden Books (1877), Henry Spencer Ashbee claimed that, “At the early part of this century very sumptuously fitted-up establishments, exclusively devoted to the administration of the birch, were not uncommon in London; and women of the town served, as it were, an apprenticeship in order to acquire the art of gracefully and effectively administering the rod”.

Ashbee goes on to namecheck some of the cities’ most famous disciplinarians, such as Mrs Collett, a “noted whipper” who allegedly counted George IV amongst her clients, and Mrs James who had earned her fortune running a flagellation brothel in Soho and retired “covered with jewels”. But there is really only one name in Victorian BDSM and that is Theresa Berkley (d. 1836).

Theresa Berkley ran a brothel at 28 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and by all accounts was the queen of corporal punishment. She also employed a number of women to flog and be flogged; including ‘Miss Ring, Hannah Jones, Sally Taylor, One-Eyed Peg, Bauld-Cunted Poll, and a black woman called ‘Ebony Bet’. Not much is known of Theresa’s personal life, but a great deal is known about her services. Venus School Mistress (1830) is an erotic book devoted entirely to flagellation and contains a preface by another London madam, Mary Wilson. Mary writes that she is retiring and urges her clients to seek out the talents of Mrs Berkley:

“Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o’-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. […] Thus, at her shop, whosoever went with plenty of money could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phlebotomized, and tortured until he had a belly full.”

But Theresa wasn’t just an institution, she was a brand. The ‘Berkley Horse’ was a contraption she famously created in 1828 to flog her customers on.

Theresa died a very wealthy woman and left her fortune to her brother, a missionary who had spent the last 30 years spreading the gospel in Australia. After learning how his sister had amassed her wealth, he refused to accept it and swiftly returned home. Amongst Theresa’s possessions were several boxes full of letters from the great and the good of the day, both men and women. Sadly, these incriminating documents were destroyed by the executor of Theresa’s estate, Dr Vance, and we can only guess at the names on her naughty list.

One of the most famous Victorian flagellants was Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-98). Gladstone started visiting brothels as a young man and felt so guilty afterwards that he whipped himself as penance. He later channelled his considerable sexual appetites into ‘rescuing’ fallen women around London. Gladstone would seek out ‘erring sisters’ late at night, inviting them back to his house, the Houses of Parliament, or accompanying them home, where he would talk to them for hours. After these meetings, he would scourge himself and mark this in his diary with a drawing of a whip.

Other notable devotees include James Joyce (1882-1941), who confessed his flogging fantasies in letters to his wife, Nora. In 1909 he wrote, “Punish me as much as you like. I would be delighted to feel my flesh tingling under your hand … I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh. […] I would love to have done something to displease you … and then to hear you call me into your room and then to find you sitting in an armchair with your fat thighs far apart and your face deep red with anger and a cane in your hand … Then to feel your hands tearing down my trousers and … to be struggling in your strong arms … to feel you bending down … and to feel you flog, flog, flog me viciously on my naked quivering flesh!”

T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia, attended flagellation parties in Chelsea and regularly paid his friend John Bruce to whip him with a birch branch. The explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-90), author D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), and occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), were all partial to a spanking. Even the renowned Christian moralist, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), developed what his biographer Alan Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”. In private letters, Lewis listed women he would like to spank, and signed them as ‘Philomastix’ —’whip-lover’.

Why was it so widely practised in Victorian Britain?

Erotic flagellation has existed all throughout history and has millions of devotees around the world today, but quite why it was so widely practised in Victorian Britain is a matter of some debate. Violence was endemic in Victorian culture. Husbands beat their wives, teachers beat their students, parents beat their children, masters beat their servants, and judicial corporal punishment remained legal in Britain until 1948. Not only was physical punishment the norm, but it was often thought to be of great moral benefit, as long as it wasn’t excessive. Perhaps it is not too surprising that corporal punishment would take on a sexual aspect in a culture where violence was the norm.

But, for the madam Mary Wilson who penned the preface for ‘Venus School Mistress’, and many others, the English vice was directly linked to being birched at school. Mary considers the appeal of flagellation, and then concludes, “It is very true that there are innumerable old generals, admirals, colonels and captains, as well as bishops, judges, barristers, lords, commoners and physicians, who periodically go to be whipped, merely because it warms their blood, and keeps up a little agreeable excitement in their systems long after the power of enjoying the opposite sex has failed them; but it is equally true, that hundreds of young men through having been educated at institutions where the masters are fond of administering birch discipline, and recollecting certain sensations produced by it, have imbibed a passion for it, and have longed to receive the same chastisement from the hands of a fine woman.”

Corporal punishment in school was finally outlawed by the British parliament in 1986, but private schools did not abolish it in England until 1998, 2000 in Scotland, and 2003 in Northern Ireland. Time alone will tell if this has had any effect on the nation’s sexual predilections, but according to Pornhub’s 2018 data review, searches for ‘bondage’ are some of the fastest-growing search terms worldwide. It seems the English vice is as popular as ever.