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Fashionable Lectures: Composed and Delivered with Birch Discipline
Fashionable Lectures: Composed and Delivered with Birch Discipline
A pornographic book originally published in the 18th century and republished by John Camden Hotten as volume 7 of his series The Library Illustrative of Social Progress.
The first edition was published around 1750, and again with illustrations by William Holland in the 1780s. The theme of the work is flagellation by dominant women in positions of authority. It promoted the names of ladies offering the service in a lecture room with rods and cat o' nine tails.
Within the 18th century, female "Birch Disciplinarians" advertised their services in a book masked as a collection of lectures or theatrical plays, entitled "Fashionable Lectures" (c. 1761). This included the names of 57 women, some actresses and courtesans, who catered to birch discipline fantasies, keeping a room with rods and cat o' nine tails, and charging their clients a Guinea for a "lecture".
The 19th century is characterised by what Anne O Nomis characterises as the "Golden Age of the Governess". No fewer than twenty establishments were documented as having existed by the 1840s, supported entirely by flagellation practices and known as "Houses of Discipline" distinct from brothels. Amongst the well-known "dominatrix governesses" were Mrs Chalmers, Mrs Noyeau, the late Mrs Jones of Hertford Street and London Street, the late Mrs Theresa Berkley, Bessy Burgess of York Square and Mrs Pyree of Burton Crescent.
Pictured: "The Cully Flaug'd"
Caption reads: "What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction! To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection. Firk on Fair Lady, Flaug the Fumblers Thighs, Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise"
https://britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1881-0611-320
The most famous of these Governess "female flagellants" was Theresa Berkley, who operated her establishment on Charlotte Street in the central London district of Marylebone. She is recorded to have used implements such as whips, canes and birches, to chastise and punish her male clients, as well as the Berkley Horse, a specially designed flogging machine, and a pulley suspension system for lifting them off the floor.
Pictured: The Berkeley Horse
One customer of Berkley’s wrote to her proposing a sliding scale of payment based on how hurt he ended up, suggesting “a pound sterling for the first blood drawn, two pounds if the blood runs down to my heels, three pounds if my heels are bathed in blood, four pounds if the blood reaches the floor, and five pounds if you succeed in making me lose consciousness."
There was also almost certainly some kind of class-based psychosexual phenomenon at play. Upper-class men of the time—which were the people paying hefty sums to be walloped, were educated in single-sex environments, and the only women they would generally come into contact with were educational disciplinarian. The English education system of the time leaned heavily on corporal punishment, and an entire sub-genre of erotic literature of the time centered on stories of boys experiencing sexual awakenings as the petticoats of the governess thrashing them rode up.
In France, so many British men were requesting to be beaten up by a sex worker that it became known as “the English vice”.
Such historical use of corporal punishment and suspension, in a setting of domination roleplay, connects very closely to the practices of modern-day professional dominatrices.
Sources
https://getmaude.com/blogs/themaudern/how-victorian-britain-went-bdsm-bonkers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Lectures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominatrix#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Berkley
https://britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1881-0611-320
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM#History