One of my favourite poets, W.B. Yeats, had some painful moments in his school days, if you trust his “Autobiographies” (1926):
I was very much afraid of physical pain, and one day when I had made some noise in class, my friend the athlete was accused and I allowed him to get two strokes of the cane before I gave myself up. He had held out his hands without flinching and had not rubbed them on his sides afterwards. I was not caned, but was made to stand up fo the rest of the lesson. I suffered very much afterwards when the thought came to me, but he did not reproach me.
Call me cynical, but I actually think the athlete friend was loving it. Oh, what a hero he was, to have taken the cane on behalf of another boy, and taken it so bravely. Just look how happy similar circumstances had made Tom Sawyer!
Tom Sawyer suffering to save Becky Thatcher has always made me happy too… one of my first and favourite spankings found in mainstream books
I think it might have been my very first, actually
Mind you, it convinced me that you had to be a boy to ever get a spanking, and therefore it may be said to have caused the eventual genesis of Ned Corwin. 😉
My very first was Pip Pirrip getting walloped by his sister in Great Expectations, and that was a bit of a cheat really, saw the film first and took the book out of the library the very next day, I recall my parents being very impressed that I wanted to tackle Dickens… if only they knew! It was quite a long time before I found a girl being spanked in a proper book but Minnie the Minx showed me the way in … was it the Beano?
I don’t know. Funny old teacher to cane the athletic boy but only have the boy who actually made the noise stand up, even after he allowed the other boy to take the rap. It suggests that he wasn’t up to being caned and would have thus been looked down on. Only one boy went through my husband’s old school’s boarding house without being caned and he has gone down in history as a total misfit. I mean, everybody got caned at school back then. So what was wrong with him?!
David Niven’s autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon is full of canings, strappings, and spankings.
As for fiction, didn’t Tom Brown’s Schooldays have a scene in it where a bigger boy takes a caning on the hands for a smaller boy. The ‘cruel’ male teacher is subsequently replaced by a pretty young schoolmarm.