I have to class George Orwell’s wartime journalism as the most unusual source of a spanking startle that I’ve ever come across. Writing in Tribune in 1945, he discussed

…the Fairchild Family, which was written in 1813 and was for fifty years or more a standard book for children.

Here is Mrs Fairchild, telling the children how when she herself was a child she disobeyed orders by picking cherries in company with the servant girl:

“Nanny was given up to her mother to be flogged; and I was shut up in the dark room, where I was to be kept several days upon bread and water.”

Now, I wonder what happened to the servant girl?