Exhibition of Female Flagellants: The 1830 Whipping Novel

Exhibition of Female Flagellants is a pornographic novel published in London in 1830. George Cannon issued it through the city’s underground erotic print trade and put the name of Regency dominatrix Theresa Berkley on it as author. Berkley’s name was already tied to professional female flagellation and to the Berkley Horse, but the attribution was marketing more than a proven authorship, and it is probably false. The book’s main activity is flagellation, chiefly women whipping women, written in a theatrical, fetishistic style. It is adult fiction. It is not a record of how to carry out a whipping.

The same use of her name continued. Around 1872 John Camden Hotten republished the book in the series The Library Illustrative of Social Progress, still under Berkley. That reprint belongs to a Victorian habit of issuing whipping fiction again under a “social progress” banner and packing erotic material into a sociological frame. The book is an early text of female flagellation erotica, and it links Regency publishing taste to Victorian publishing taste.