The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After

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THE ENGLISH VICE
Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian Britain and After
by Ian Gibson
Duckworth, London, 1978, 364pp
Review by C. Farrell

There is no such thing as the 'standard work' on corporal punishment in Britain, but this rather strange book perhaps comes nearer to it than any other I have found.

It is not, however, to be recommended for the author's opinions. Ian Gibson was brought up in Quaker schools and clearly does not understand these things. The English Vice is, for him, 'flagellomania'. His tone of voice throughout is one of pained astonishment that the official striking of buttocks could ever have been contemplated. He devotes considerable space to show that it was already apparent, several hundred years ago, that such a practice had sexual overtones. There is a lot of heavy-going stuff about Meibom (1590-1655) and Rousseau and various other theorists on how beating allegedly causes impotence and turns people into 'flagellomanes'.



Gibson has explored the works of Doppet, Acton, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and many others. The problem with all these authors is that they are mistaken. They are the people who regarded homosexuality and masturbation as unacceptable perversions. We now know all that to be nonsense. Yet Gibson simply takes it as read that a taste for CP -- he calls it all "sadomasochism" -- is a bad thing, and that CP in schools is therefore bad because it is the cause of that taste. How, I wonder, would he explain away the presence of so much sadomasochism in France -- just look at the small ads in any French gay magazine -- when that country has had no CP in its schools for well over a hundred years? And what about the fact that most men over 35 in Britain today were probably whacked at home or at school, or both, but the large majority of them appear not to have turned into CP fanatics? Even if they had, why would it really matter?

It is mainly to the great public school headmasters of 150 to 200 years ago that Gibson attributes the quick spread throughout British society of the idea that the main way of punishing boys is to beat their bottoms. He finds it scandalous that these men did not quickly take on board the sexual implications of whacking, and abolish the custom forthwith. This suggests a certain naiveté on the author's part about the way the world works.

The three long chapters which form the core of the book - "Home and school beating in the 19th century and later", "Eton, the birch and Algernon Swinburne", and "Judicial, prison, army and naval flogging in Britain" -- are the ones likely to be of most interest. There is a great deal of factual and descriptive material from a variety of sources.

However, there are some major weaknesses. Firstly, Gibson relies too much on secondary sources -- especially "The Humanitarian", organ of the Humanitarian League around the beginning of this century -- when the primary sources are quite easily available (19th-century parliamentary papers, for instance). Thus, for example, he says the 1862 Juvenile Male Offenders Act specified that the birch should be applied only to the naked buttocks; that did indeed become the standard practice from the 1860s onwards, but there is no mention of it in the Act itself, or in any other Act. Similarly, he thinks that boys in the Navy were flogged with the cat on the upper back before the 1860s (when the birch was introduced instead), despite his own quotation from The Lancet a few pages earlier making it clear that it was the cat on the buttocks.

Secondly, the author is too ready to take at face value the writing of those who share his own horror of corporal punishment, like the Humanitarian League, Bernard Shaw, W.T. Stead, STOPP, and others. These are all useful sources, but some of their prose exaggerates. Proponents of a cause always overstate their case.

Thirdly, Gibson is somewhat misinformed about corporal punishment in modern times. He recycles (in two places) the hoary old myth that "where State schools are concerned, caning is usually applied to the hand", for which statement he adduces no evidence at all. There have always been some schools which punish on the hand, but in most parts of England and Wales, the majority of secondary modern, comprehensive and grammar schools more often caned on the backside, at least in the case of boys.

Indeed, the book concentrates far too much on the major public schools -- as if these were where most CP took place. It's true of course that these few famous schools have traditionally produced Britain's ruling class, and thus largely set the tone for what was and was not acceptable throughout British society. But to ignore completely the much more numerous minor public or direct grant schools and, especially, grammar schools, seems quite perverse. These schools were nearly all enthusiastic users of the cane and were the main source of provincial England's middle classes for several decades. That, as much as stories in Gem and Magnet, is surely why CP is so much to the fore in the national (at least male) psyche, at all levels of society. The whole phenomenon is a lot more widespread than Gibson appears to realize.

There is a very full bibliography. In an appendix, some of Swinburne's birching poems are quoted at length. There is a section exploring possible relationships between corporal punishment, shame, ritual, and humiliation, with particular reference to blushing and the possible erotic overtones of the bending-over 'rump presentation' posture, though this latter notion had already been done to death by Desmond Morris in his numerous books.

For all its faults, this is a book which no serious student of the subject can really be without.

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