“The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine”

A couple of years back, one of our annual summer “Best of the kinky rest” selections was an article about “The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine”. This nineteenth-century journal was published by the widower of the famed Mrs Beeton, and its letters column at times degenerated into (or some might say ‘was enlivened by’) lengthy discussions about Victorian corporal punishment.

I’ve since been reading Kathryn Hughes’s magnificent biography, “The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton” – a truly exceptional work. It describes the Victorian era as “a time when middle-class homes could afford to keep a full complement of domestic staff, none of whom would think of answering back”. Indeed:

“One magazine, the Ladies’ Companion, dedicated a regular monthly column to dealing with servants (what to feed them, how much to pay, what to do when they answered back).”

Anyone care to guess their recommendation on the final point? I’m imagining the liberal application of the hairbrush to maids’ bare bottoms for their cheek, with birchings for more serious or regular insolence.

There’s a description of the school that Isabella attended – yes, to my shock, Mrs Beeton had a first name other than “Mrs”:

“The Heidel’s establishment had started as a day school in the late 1830s, providing a rigorous syllabus for the daughters of well-to-do local people. However by 1850 the 40-year-old headmistress Miss Auguste Heidel was actively seeking British girls as boarders for her school, which occupied a series of premises in the picturesque heart of the city…

Isabella probably entered the school in the summer of 1851, when she was fifteen and a half. It is most likely that she was accompanied by her stepsister Jane Dorling who was vitually the same age.”

‘Rigorous’, eh? Who else is imagining cold showers and regular canings?

Then, on to the “Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine” itself – and the corruption of the letters column, or ‘Conversazione’ as it was known:

“The scandal started quietly enough, with a couple of letters that appeared in the spring issues of 1867. A mother wrote to say that she had returned from abroad to find that her daughter had been subjected to a ‘system of torture’ at the hands of her headmistress designed to reduce the waists of her pupils by means of tight lacing.”

The correspondence then “took flight into erotic fantasy. Every month there would be more letters, purporting to be from regular readers, which nudged the debate into distinctly sado-masochistic territory”:

“Just when it looked as if the tight-lacing correspondence was about to die down for good, an even more controversial conversational thread started up in the ‘Conversazione’. This time the subject was that well-known staple of soft porn, the whipping of maidservants and young girls…”

Readers “eagerly sent in accounts of ‘real life’ experiences which grew more preposterous by the month. Correspondents with pseudonyms such as ‘Etoniensis’, ‘A Rejoicer in the Restoration of the Rod’, ‘Miss Birch’ and ‘R.O.D’ told in immense and repetitive detail of ritualised floggings in ladies’ boarding schools and in clergymen’s studies”:

“The virtues of different implements were discussed with relish, as were the elaborate performances of removing clothing and strapping down the victims, the penitent tears and the urgent begging for mercy. Running in parallel was a second stream of letters purporting to be from women who had undergone such punishments and remembered them with gratitude, not to mention an enormous amount of detail.”

Sam Beeton published the material in a two shilling supplement, which “in addition to the letters themselves… carried advertisements for canes, whips and birches, as well as A History of the Rod and Flagellation and the Flagellants by Revd W. Cooper.”

It’s rather as though some respectable modern-day magazine – Tatler, say, or The Lady – suddenly branched out and produced a “spanking special”. And why not, I say? Perhaps we should all try writing in with appropriately inappropriate letters, and see if we can start a trend.