Sex Collectors by Geoff Nicholson

Author:Geoff Nicholson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Flagellation

Female culprits whipped at Bridewell,

A powerful aphrodisiac, J. Davenport quoted,

Enjoyed by boys,

J.J. Rousseau describes his whipping by Mlle. Lambercier,

Old men crave for it,

Shadwell and Otway introduce it in their plays,

Women are fond of administering the birch,

Some cruel women instanced,

Elizabeth Browning beats Mary Clifford to death,

Female whipping club in London depicted,

A female pantaloon slapped,

Actually there are times when I think the indexes are the best part of, and possibly even an excuse for, the whole enterprise. If you look up “Copulation” in Catena, for instance, you’ll find “See also Fornication, Incest, Love, Marriage, Men, Polygamy, Rape, Seduction, Prostitution, Sex Virgins, Seigniorial rights, Women.” If you look up “Women,” you’ll find “See also Adultery, Brothels, Copulation, Flagellation, Hermaphrodites, Trials, Tribadism.” You can amuse yourself like this for quite a while.

Henry Spencer Ashbee was part of a coterie of Victorian bibliophiles, collectors, and sexual adventurers who shared a theoretical and practical interest in flagellation. The most famous was Sir Richard Burton, translator of the Kamasutra and The Perfumed Garden, and very possibly the discoverer of the source of the Nile. There was Richard Monckton Milnes, a Member of Parliament, a man who unsuccessfully proposed marriage to Florence Nightingale, and who is now thought to have been the author of The Rodiad, which Ashbee praises by quoting Hotten: “The author describes all the varieties of flagellation—domestic, scholastic, penal, and eccentric—and is very enthusiastic in his praise of the Rod.”

On the fringe of the group, a dealer as much as a collector, was the Paris-based Frederick Hankey, an all-round scoundrel by most accounts. He was the one who supposedly set Burton the task of finding a female human skin to bind his copy of Justine. We can safely assume it wouldn’t have been a white skin.

It may be tempting to think this was just Hankey playing the stage villain, but when the Goncourt brothers met him in 1862 they certainly thought he was the genuine article. They called him “a madman, a monster, one of those men who live on the edge of the abyss.” By contrast, Swinburne, who was also one of his customers, approved of him and said of his collection, “Nothing low, nothing that is not good and genuine in the way of art and literature is admitted.”

The idea of this group of rich, serious, outwardly respectable Victorian men getting together to discuss flagellation, no doubt in a bookish, scholarly, high-minded way, strikes me as infinitely depressing. It may have struck Ashbee’s wife, Elizabeth, in much the same way, though no doubt she took it a lot more personally. In his introduction to Prohibitorum Ashbee tells us that flagellation “has caused the separation of man and wife” and I suspect there’s a deliberate ambiguity there about whether he means its occurrence in books or in real life.

Ashbee was a Bloomsburyite long before there was a Bloomsbury group. When he was first married he lived in a street just off Bedford Square, then in the square itself in a bigger house, number 53—now an expensive and soulless set of offices.

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