The Library Illustrative of Social Progress

The Library Illustrative of Social Progress was a series of pornographic books published by John Camden Hotten around 1872 (falsely dated 1777). They were mainly reprints of eighteenth-century pornographic works on flagellation. Hotten claimed to have found them in the library of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) but Henry Spencer Ashbee counterclaimed that they were in fact from his collection.^[1][2]

Titles

Ashbee lists:^[1][3]

• Heinrich Meibom, De Flagorum Usu in re Medica et Venera (A Treatise on the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs, 1638)^[4][5][6]
• Exhibition of Female Flagellants:^[7][8] describing flagellation, mainly of women by women,^[9][10] described in a theatrical, fetishistic style
• Fashionable Lectures: on the theme of flagellation by dominant women in positions of authority^[11][12]
• Female Flagellants (1777)^[13] (around 1750)^[14]
• Lady Bumtickler's Revels:^[7] comic opera on the joys of flagellation
• Madame Birchini's Dance:^[7][15] a long poem^[16] in which the heroine cures a man of impotence by flagellation^[17]
• The Sublime of Flagellation^[7]

Henderson adds:^[18]

• The Rodiad

References

1. Ashbee (1877) pp. 240-241
2. Bloch, Iwan (1938). Sexual Life in England, Past and Present. F. Aldor.; translated by William H. Forstern.
3. Hoe, Robert (2008). A Catalogue of Books in English Later Than 1700, Volume 1. BiblioBazaar. p. 92. ISBN 978-0-554-42753-9.
4. Ginzburg, Ralph (1958). An unhurried view of erotica. Helmsman Press. p. 55.
5. Crawford, Katherine (2007). European sexualities, 1400-1800. New approaches to European history. Vol. 38. Cambridge University Press. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-521-83958-7.
6. Henderson (2008) p.13
7. Prins, Yopie (1999). Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press. p. 152. ISBN 0-691-05919-5.
8. Greenspan, Ezra; Rose, Jonathan (2000). Book History, Volume 3. Penn State Press. p. 70. ISBN 0-271-02050-4.
9. Fowler, Patsy; Jackson, Alan (2003). Launching Fanny Hill: essays on the novel and its influences. AMS studies in the eighteenth century. Vol. 41. AMS Press. p. 169. ISBN 0-404-63541-5.
10. Binhammer, Katherine (2003). "The "Singular Propensity" of Sensibility's Extremities: Female Same-Sex Desire and the Eroticization of Pain in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Culture". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 9: 471–498. doi:10.1215/10642684-9-4-471. S2CID 144739362.
11. Ashbee (1877) pp.257-258
12. Thomas, Donald (1969). A long time burning. Taylor & Francis. p. 278.
13. Alexander, David S. (1998). Richard Newton and English caricature in the 1790s. Manchester University Press ND. p. 58. ISBN 0-7190-5480-X.
14. Largier, Niklaus; Harman, Graham (2007). In praise of the whip: a cultural history of arousal. Zone Books. p. 339. ISBN 978-1-890951-65-8.
15. Henderson (1998) p.276
16. Hurwood, Bernhardt J. (1965). The golden age of erotica. Sherbourne Press. pp. 166–167.
17. Henderson (1998) p.15
18. Henderson (2008) p.220

• Henderson, Andrea K. (2008). Romanticism and the painful pleasures of modern life. Cambridge studies in Romanticism. Vol. 75. Cambridge University Press. p. 220. ISBN 978-0-521-88402-0.
• Ashbee, Henry Spencer (1877). Index Librorum Prohibitorum: being Notes Bio- Biblio- Icono- graphical and Critical, on Curious and Uncommon Books. London: privately printed.