Experimental Lecture is an English pornographic book published in 1878 under the pseudonym “Colonel Spanker” for the “Cosmopolitan Society of Bibliophiles,” an imprint of erotic publisher Charles Carrington. The Colonel and his circle keep a house on Park Lane where genteel young ladies are kidnapped, humiliated, and flagellated—class theater turned into a private whipping fantasy.
Critical Verdicts
Victorian bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee called it “coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent.” Sexologist Iwan Bloch labeled it “completely sadistic.” Later commentary by Simpson framed it as focused on anti-female violence. It sits on the harder edge of nineteenth-century English flagellant erotica: pain and degradation as spectacle, not mutual play. Related topics: Victorian flagellation literature, Carrington imprints, and the birch-novel lineage behind modern spanking fetish media.
