Spare the rod and spoil the pervert: Corporal punishment and the nineteenth century in popular culture

Abstract

This article compares corporal punishment in nineteenth-century fiction with corporal punishment in the fictional recreation of the nineteenth century in twentieth-century film and television. It locates in the literature of the actual nineteenth century two creative impulses influencing the dramatic representation of Victorian schooling in modern adaptations. One is the evocation of schools in Victorian works of fiction, which became television and film adaptations. Another impulse is the subversive and covert flagellation literature of the fin de siècle. Both the respectable and the illicit literatures adduce core elements of corporal punishment: the formation of tableaux of bodies; the importance of access to the body; the subversion of what should be an act of correction because the subversion becomes permanent; and the way the restorative becomes aberrant. This article proposes that the popular culture of the twentieth century made overt what had been covert in the nineteenth century. Surveying period drama on British television and film using the 1971 adaptation of Tom Brown’s School Days as a focal point, this article proposes the fusion of the overt and covert of the preceding century. Close readings of popular culture productions show, as do the reactions of contemporary viewers, that they presented corporal punishment which subverted rather than chastised and which perverted rather than restored. These twentieth-century evocations of the previous century were contiguous with debate on the use and abolition of corporal punishment in modern schools. This article weaves together the past and the present, suggesting that classic works made by modern interpreters evoked the past in ways that subverted the present.