Room 2D

A Chastising Service of the 1880s laid bare Historical recreation researched and written by  Richard Manton,  from Janus 38. On 26 July 1889, an advertisement appeared in the  Church Times . It was addressed to the parents of unruly daughters, to teachers of delinquent schoolgirls, to masters of female reformatories, and to those employers whose young women treated their superiors with insolence and contempt. BIRCH RODS. — These useful articles, for which there is an increasing demand, may be had from the depot. Of different sizes. — Mrs. CLAPP, St. John’s-road, Clifton. Mrs Clapp’s surname might have raised a smile, but it was as real as everything else about her. She ran a thriving business in the regency elegance of Bristol’s most prosperous suburb. Her advertisement might cause a flutter in the press of the 1980s but not a century ago when Victorian Values were firmly in the saddle. After all, if girls were to be birched, the birch-rods had to come from somewhere....

A story from Janus 19 by Martin Kempson Sally, a very pretty, green-eyed 18-year-old brunette with a habitual impending pout, had been packed off by her elderly guardian to spend two weeks with Doctor Saverini, an old family friend and retired university lecturer living just outside Pisa. Like any teenage girl the prospect of visiting Italy, a country whose beauties she’d heard of and read about so much, appealed to her enormously. But there was one snag. It wasn’t going to be just an ordinary holiday abroad. There was another, far less pleasurable reason for her going. Although she’d left college the previous summer, Sally had not adapted at all well to the grown-up world outside. In fact she’d proved quite unable to behave herself as a young lady should, but continued to act as she had at school, more like a silly, naughty fifth-former than someone approaching responsible young womanhood. She was extravagant, insolent, moody, prone to childish tantrums and also at times inclined to...