Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker

In the assembly-room of the Society of Aristocratic Flagellants, Mayfair, Colonel Spanker strives to confirm his thesis that the punishment of a refined young lady produces more exquisite pleasures than flogging lower-class women and prostitutes… Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker is one of the most notorious nineteenth-century English flagellant novels. Henry Spencer Ashbee's Catena Librorum Tacendorum describes it as ‘the most coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent of any we have ever read, [it] stands entirely alone in the English language.' (Fraxi, 1885: 250) This edition of Experimental Lecture also includes the full text of The Yellow Room or, Alice Darvell's Subjection, a late Victorian novella focusing on the delights of birching and the pleasures of cruelty. Following the death of her aunt, beautiful Alice Darvell is sent to live with Sir Edward Bosmere, a stern disciplinarian and devotee of Venus Callipyge, who initiates her into the mysteries of the rod. The Yellow Room was first published in 1891. The name of the author, M. Le Comte du Bouleau, is a pseudonym. Authorship is attributed to an English lawyer, Stanislas Matthew de Rhodès (1857-1932). He is also credited with writing Gynecocracy (1893) and The Petticoat Dominant (1898), which are available from Birchgrove Press.