ABSTRACT
Publicly, George Augustus Sala had deplored corporal punishment for most of his life. In his autobiography he went to great pains to outline his horror and fear at being beaten while a child; in fact he claimed that his early education in Paris was a direct result of France’s more enlightened policy regarding physical chastisement. In his regular column in the Daily Telegraph he supported those who were advocating the abolition of corporal punishment in schools, in the Services, and in the prisons. He was also a humanitarian, arguing in essays for Household Words against cruelty towards animals and speaking out against public executions. Yet privately he was obsessed with pain and flagellation; not only was he a participant in the tight-lacing and flagellant correspondence phenomenon, but he would also contribute to a collaborative pornographic play entitled New and Gorgeous Pantomime entitled Harlequin Prince Cherrytop and the Good Fairy Fairfuck or the Frig the Fuck and the Fairy (1879) 1 and write at least half of one of the most admired pieces of flagellant pornography of the nineteenth century, the novella entitled The Mysteries of Verbena House; or, Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving (1882). 2 Early nineteenth-century pornography had its roots in radical and satirical humour, while from the 1860s on there developed a documentation of sexual taste based upon the ‘professional, scientific gaze’ that ‘contributed to the fields of psychology, ethnography, and medicine.’ 3 This in turn was replaced by the importance of a consumption of pleasure manifested in producing pornography of a more explicit fetishist and consumerist nature. Sala’s movement from penning anonymous titillating articles in family magazines to producing a satirical pornographic play and a fetishist novella loosely follows this shift in the production of explicit material during the century. While his pornographic play is representative of the ‘Cannibal Club pornography’, he manages in Verbena House to fashion his own version of erotic material; one less explicit and relentless in its depicting of the sexual act, one more discursive and philosophical than that of his peers, one more in tune with his own style of writing. Sala was also physically interested and involved in the flagellant scene, being a frequenter of whipping brothels like Verbena Lodge at 7 Circus Rd. in St. John’s Wood, whose notable clients included Algernon Swinburne. Both men readily consented to be whipped and thrashed by at least two ladies of a mature age. By highlighting incidences from his childhood, the way his penchant for flagellation was manifested in his early illustrative work through his fascination with slavery, his involvement in club life, his fascination with ladies’ clothes and fashion, and his status as first a Bohemian and then a Special Correspondent, this chapter will outline how Sala became a part of the flagellant pornographic scene.
