Insecure and socially awkward Amy Bartlett finds it hard to adjust to her first term at Dundee University. Then she meets Barbara, an older women on a...More

This assortment of genuine Victorian CP scenarios is gathered from a number of anonymously penned works of erotica and their nigh on six hundred pages dish out plenty of thwack for your buck; however, given this compendiousness — and the similarity between many of the selections — they also represent a slightly monotonous read for anyone other than the flagellation obsessive. (Having said that, this is probably not meant to be read from cover to cover, merely dipped into, an impression enhanced by the fact that a great number of the excerpts are quite short.)
Mademoiselle Fosse is typical of the sort of thing you’ll find here, with its spanking ‘initiation’ scenario which takes us behind the scenes of Miss Flaybum’s (ha! ha!) school for girls. Other contributions, however, transport to the dark heart of a less civilised age. The Sultan’s Virgin describes the breaking of a reluctant harem girl and drips with the kind of dangerous frisson described by James Bond creator Ian Fleming as ‘the sweet tang of rape’; the introduction to beating of Juliette’s eponymous heroine and the narrator of Sister Constance are nothing short of what we would call child abuse; Angela, the story of a teenager’s relationship with her step mother, even has a touch of incest about it.
The Collector’s Edition Of Victorian Erotic Discipline will certainly get the blood racing to those parts aficionados know only the flogging rod can reach. However, its length may put off those with only a passing interest in its theme. But both connoisseur and casual reader should — even as their extremities are all a-tingle — brace themselves for another epoch’s occasionally more outrageous attitudes.

Jack Lawrence
J.L.