Introduction
In the history of erotic literature there at least two distinct styles. One is subtle and suggestive, full of gentle seduction and languorous heroines, pastel colors and silken textures. The other belongs to Rabelais and the Marquis de Sade. Its tone is often sardonic and political, its heroes are sexual ogres, and even some of its girls give as good as they get. To such a kind does School for Scandal belong.
Lord Frederick, the rather naive narrator, discovers that the real world of upper class sexuality is a free-for-all which would make the denizens of a brothel blush. Indeed, Mr. Snook and Mr. Bowler can do the most outrageous things to the girls in their care without a murmur of reproach. They are pillars of law and respectability. It is their duty to take down the panties of delinquent young women and chastise them, or mortify in more overtly sexual ways. Are two girls found making love together? Then they must expiate their "crime" by repeating the performance on the dinner-table in front of their master and his guests. Morality requires that they learn such a lesson in shame. Is a rebellious young woman to be birched? Duty requires that, when she is stripped, her master's fingers shall carry out a minute inspection of the areas of her body to be dealt with.
If books like School for Scandal are unpopular with the authorities, it is not merely because they have an erotic content. They also blow the whistle on what those authorities themselves are up to. Despite its prudery, the Victorian age actually paid its magistrates and others to see that the panties of delinquent girls were taken down so that the whippings or enemas or other "mortifications" might be carried out. Indeed in Chapter Six of the book, legal authority is carefully quoted to sanction this. The details of the offending girl's penalty are entirely at the "discretion" of the worthy justice in whose charge she is.
Lord Frederick, encountering this, wakes up at last. All his life as he seduced, spanked, or otherwise enjoyed his girls, he thought he was a libertine. Now he realises that if only he had been a magistrate, judge, or reformer of moral delinquents, he could have done exactly the same things and been a pillar of law and order for doing them.
Fiction may exaggerate but there was an essential truth in this. For instance, there was a well-known "chastising service" which operated in England at the end of last century. It advertised in the press-including the Church Times. Its premises included a suburban villa, in Oakfield Road, Clifton and a townhouse at 10, Porchester Gardens, near London's Hyde Park. It collected the girls and returned them after a few days or weeks, in which they had been regularly undressed and chastised, naken from the waist down.
The chastisers did not pay for their pleasures. On the contrary, they charged for doing it and the families or employers of the girls paid them for doing it. There was an extra fee for girls over twenty. The normal rate was three guineas a whipping-twice the weekly income of the average wage-earner. Mrs. Walter Smith who ran the service made a fortune from it. Despite the high prices, chastisers could hardly keep pace with the public demand for their services. There was never the least doubt that they thoroughly enjoyed their chosen calling in the special punishment-rooms with tables and straps. Best of all, the local press spoke of their "most estimable" moral characters.
Perhaps, then, School for Scandal is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem in the (literally) whacky world of Victorian discipline. Even its randy, public-spirited heroes echo a certain realism. Mr. Bowler, with his bevy of strapping young trollops, as he calls them, is a manic disciplinarian whose kinky exploits would nowadays cost a petro-dollar fortune in a brothel. Yet he is admired for his moral fervour as a magistrate, rewarded with a knighthood by a grateful nation. The grotesque old justice, Mr. Snook, is a study in aged impotence which owes something to Sade's Jerome. Unable to satisfy himself in the usual ways Mr. Snook sets upon his girls with squirts and syringes, showing an enthusiasm for their bodily functions which is both senile and childish. To some degree, at least, he might serve as an Hogarthean warning on the final rewards of debauchery.
It seems appropriate in such a story that the girls are not the helpless sylph-like creatures of erotic romance. They are sturdy warm-blooded young women, well able to endure most of their masters' attentions. One of them twice does grievous bodily harm to poor old Snook, a calamity unthinkable in pure erotic fantasy. These buxom wenches yell and kick, curse and fart, in a manner which perhaps the Elizabethans would have understood more readily than the Victorians. They are healthy and even aggressive female animals.
Yet the scandal in School for Scandal is political as well as sexual. The public moralists are actually having the time of their lives and being well rewarded for it. As Lord Frederick remarks, however, they are esteemed by their tenants and the leaders of the nation. They are the enemies of revolution and Red republicanism, as one of them puts it. The fact that they enjoy teaching discipline and obedience to delinquent girls by such bizarre methods shows them for what they are. The backbone of England with an unswerving allegiance to some very special Victorian values.
F.M. LePays
A PRIVATE LETTER from Lord Frederick C to the reader of this first memoir
I wish that you could sit in the chair I occupy now as I scribble these few words, a little preface to the three volumes of my adventures. It would convince you that truth may often be stranger than fictionand yet be truth none the less.
It is late evening, a few hours after dinner, and my chair is not the substantial leather kind of study or drawing-room. It is, rather, the easy basketwork of bedroom furnishing, for I write in the most sumptuous boudoir of this fine house. My two young female companions-I shall summon one or two others presently-are engaged in turning back the counterpane and setting the mirrors of the dressing-table so that the occupants of the bed may see themselves reflected. The stories of these two girls, Kim and Susan, are no less remarkable than my own. Though they are slaves and I their master, I would not for the world treat them otherwise than with amorous passion. Every little randiness they feel is indulged and encouraged.
Kim has just turned down the counterpane. Her thick dark hair is put up in a coquettish bun, its fringe combed forward and a few charming tendrils straying round her slim neck. At nineteen, she has a lithe and agile figure, the intensity of her dark eyes and her full lips giving her an air of brooding fair-skinned sensuality. She is still in brief tight-fitting underwear. But now there is a snap of the elastic waist-band as Kims panties come down and she steps out of them.
In a moment Kim will ask my leave to come and put herself face-down over my knee. She is a warm-tempered girl and-likes to be well roused before we adjourn to the bed. How easily she responds with sighs and wrigglings to the first caress of my fingers, inserted through the rear of her thighs. In so convenient a posture, you may be sure that Kim will be spanked a little too. She has been caned and even whipped on other occasions so a smacking is a small price for the increased excitement she will presently enjoy.
And what of proud Susan, a disdainful young puss at twenty-five years old? Her pert face, blue eyes, and crop of brown hair are matched by firm branching thighs and mature young bottom-cheeks. Already she is pulling off her long boots and tight riding-trousers. After her first reluctance was overcome, Sue became accustomed to playing with other girls in her masters presence. She and Kim approach at the moment, lips nuzzling, nipples touching lightly, fingers seeking one another's pubic bush and the opening of the legs where the little clitoris stands guard.
When I am ready, they will position themselves-Susan on her back, her knees hugged up to offer the spread of hips and love nest-Kim bottom-upwards over the pillows. I have only to touch the bell and summon what other assistants to our pleasure I desire. Shall it be Sandra, a fifth-form tomboy with lank brown hair and adoring blue eyes? Perhaps a younger and lewder girl is required. Linda, a soft and sensuous little blonde, pressing her short mane of fair hair to her lips and sniggering at the fun. Or shall it be her classmate Valerie, a slim and freckled gamine with a shock of auburn hair and a giggling awkwardness? These and twenty others are mine to choose from. Judith, a nymph of sixteen. Noreen, a strapping young trollop of twenty-one. Tania at eighteen with her short curls and buxom rear. Claire at twenty with her thin pale figure, her pudding-basin cup of red hair and the vicious slant of her blue-green eyes betraying her for the immoraliste that she is. ... Have no fear, I shall not attempt a history of these girls in the present volume, for there are others you must meet first.
And yet, you wonder, can such things be? Believe me, the proof of it is before my eyes at the moment.
All the same, you are right to doubt. Not every girl is ready to accept such a destiny. Some would even deny that beauty must have her master. There are, you see, two female sexes and a man may be hard put to it to choose which is which. Those of whom I speak are only one class. Let me explain it to you before our adventure begins.
A year or two ago you might have strolled through a fashionable street where a famous saddler had his premises. Being a man who-likes to admire girls of a certain sort, it is probable that you would have paused at the window of his premises to take a view. Laying out the saddles and leatherwear you might have seen a young blonde called Maggie whom many a fancier woujd prefer to have in harness herself.
Imagine her. About twenty years old, the fair-skinned oval of her face with its hard young features framed by the veil of straight blonde hair which lay loose on her shoulders. For such work, where voluminous skirts would be too clumsy, they dress her in snug white singlet and the tight denim of riding-pants. You might thus observe the young tart's figure at will. I know you would find her a robust young creature with a slight stockiness in her trim legs and firmly rounded bottom-cheeks. Standing in a slack-hipped and sluttish manner, Maggies very posture reveals her moral character.
Dressed in such a manner, you might suppose the girl would act with special modesty to avoid giving offence to those who saw her. Far from it. She would, as if by calculation, turn her back to the public view and place the saddles by bending over as tight as could be. The denim was pulled smooth on her stocky young thighs as her head went down and the blonde hair spilled forward. The cheeks of Maggie's bottom were deliberately offered, not only fuller and broader but lewdly separated. Between her legs, one might even glimpse the swell of vaginal flesh in skin-tight cotton.
A shopgirl of this kind, lacking all sophistication, shows the manners of the back streets. Yet Maggies warm young blood and the sluttisliness of her attitude suggested something more. You might have observed her on hands and knees, pretending to mop the tiling round the saddles while offering her young thighs and butt fully spread under thin denim to the men who stood and watched her. Yet more. You shall later hear how the young bitch would lift her hips high as she knelt, touching her head to the floor, pretending to look for a pin or a stud. Concealed only by the thin, splittingly tight seat of the denim Maggie's rear cheeks and thighs were stretched lewdly in a manner which the most passionate wench might blush at on her honeymoon night.
Think to yourself whether you have not often seen such girls in your travels. It is of their kind that I write now. Have you not often wondered what private fate befalls them-what secret bondage in which they are used as they deserve?
Perhaps you did, indeed, cast eyes upon this coltish young blonde with her hard young features and the Celtic lilt of her voice. She was last seen publicly at twenty-two years old in a working costume of red sleeveless blouse and white jean yachting trousers. like many a slum girl, Mag's hard and insolent features were matched by a certain fattening of her seat and thighs. Only a little, however, and not too much. It was at that point that she disappeared from the public view.
You shall hear all in a future account. Were you one of Maggies admirers-and do you wonder what became of her? She was taken protesting rudely to a place her master had prepared for her, and from which there was no return. This is the truth which one only sees when probing beyond the public view.
It has been my chance to see Maggie naked but for leather collar and wrist-cuffs, her anklets and waist-belt, a strap round each pale thigh. Maggie on her back, knees bent up and being held wide open by the attendants while her masters penis-bone enters the damp and velvety warm cunt. Then Maggie's bottom-upwards over the cushions, anus stretched extremely round the base of a thick masculine root. Maggie kneeling afterwards with the lank blonde hair long as a little girl's, defiant at first but at last taking the penis in her mouth and playing tunes on it with her tongue. After a night of passion, Maggie's bottom-cheeks bearing oyster colored bruises and thin empurpled weals. Maggie obliged to have sex with Noreen, then Ange, then Pat, the pair of girls lying head-to-tail for the fun on the table round which the dinner guests sit. Maggie sold at last to a certain plantation-owner, harnessed naked and bending between the shafts of his little garden-carriage. Smack goes the whip across Maggie's bottom and round go the wheels!
Not every girl is apt for such usage and yet there is something-is there not?-which tells a man by instinct when the case is right. You have a wife, a daughter, and a petite amie whom you keep somewhere in St. John's Wood or Bayswater, perhaps. You could not imagine that any of them might be trained to such a life as Maggie now lives. Perhaps the truth would surprise you, or perhaps you may be right. Yet as you go about your business, consider the girls whom you see and encounter. Do you not meet one or two every day about whom you have a different feeling? Would these beauties truly prefer death to the sweet bondage of erotic slavery? Would they resist a master's amorous tyranny even if it meant a throat-slitting or the strangling-collar?
Some of them would, perhaps. It is not of such excellent moral creatures that I write. There is also another species, a beauty which needs a master and too seldom gets one. To such girls there is nothing more vexing than to have a man who always insists on acting as they wish and seeking their preferences tiresomely. If you understand that, then you will know that what I tell you is the truth.
Now, if you please I will leave you to peruse this first volume. Kim wishes to place herself naked over my knee and I cannot deny her longer. She stands there-dark eyes so intense-already squeezing her agile thighs together furtively, unable to wait....