The Mysteries of Verbena House: An 1882 Birch Novel by Sala and Reddie

The Mysteries of Verbena House, or, Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving is an 1882 piece of Victorian erotic print, signed with the pseudonym Etonensis. George Augustus Sala started it. James Campbell Reddie finished it. Reddie also co-wrote the male homoerotic classic The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. The book was limited to 150 copies at four guineas, aimed at collectors who wanted boarding-school discipline and birch fantasy. Read it as adult print. The school roles are adults acting, not children.

The setting is Verbena House, an exclusive girls’ school in Brighton. The central case is the pupil Miss Bellasis, accused of stealing two gold coins from another girl. While the staff search desks for the money, two more students turn up: Miss Hazletine has hidden a bottle of gin, and Miss Hatherton owns a pornographic book. Headmistress Miss Sinclair does not want to use the birch at first. She listens to the German teacher, the French teacher, and her spiritual advisor, the Rev. Arthur Calvedon, and then changes her mind. Calvedon remembers the flogging culture at Eton and asks to watch Bellasis punished in person. That request pushes ordinary school discipline into a flagellation scene with an erotic charge.

Victorian pornography bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee said that as the writing gets more explicit, another hand shows, and that the punishment of Miss Bellasis runs very long, even too long. Miss Sinclair, who had been nothing like a headmistress who liked the birch, becomes what Ashbee called “the lascivious lady of Verbena House.” After the birching she finds herself highly aroused and has sex with the clergyman. The next day Hazletine and Hatherton are beaten first with a riding whip and then with a hairbrush, while Calvedon watches through a spy-hole. Voyeurism, delayed punishment, and an educator turning into an erotic participant are the book’s power circuit.

Ashbee treated the long descriptions of women’s underwear as material later readers might value as history. He found the first part acceptable, even entertaining, and called the book one of the best of its kind. Verbena House sits in histories of Victorian pornography and of sadism and masochism in fiction because of the birch scenes, and also because school discipline, a clergyman at a spy-hole, and lingerie detail were sold to a private high-end market. The map is simple: people with authority, pupils being punished, a spy-hole, and a headmistress who discovers that the birch is a pleasure. The pupils are adult roles.