- Source: The Library Illustrative of Social Progress
The Library Illustrative of Social Progress was a series of pornographic books published by John Camden Hotten around 1872 (falsely dated 1777). They were mainly reprints of eighteenth-century pornographic works on flagellation. Hotten claimed to have found them in the library of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) but Henry Spencer Ashbee counterclaimed that they were in fact from his collection.
Titles
Ashbee lists:
Heinrich Meibom, De Flagorum Usu in re Medica et Venera (A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs, 1638)
Exhibition of Female Flagellants: describing flagellation, mainly of women by women, described in a theatrical, fetishistic style
Fashionable Lectures: on the theme of flagellation by dominant women in positions of authority
Female Flagellants (1777) (around 1750)
Lady Bumtickler's Revels: comic opera on the joys of flagellation
Madame Birchini's Dance: a long poem in which the heroine cures a man of impotence by flagellation
The Sublime of Flagellation
Henderson adds:
The Rodiad
References
Henderson, Andrea K. (2008). Romanticism and the painful pleasures of modern life. Cambridge studies in Romanticism. Vol. 75. Cambridge University Press. p. 220. ISBN 978-0-521-88402-0.
Ashbee, Henry Spencer (1877). Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London: privately printed.