User Profile

I am the author of Curious Pleasures: A Gentleman's Collection of Beastliness. My book was inspired by a single photograph, found between the pages of my grandfather's copy of the Reverend J. G. Wood's "Natural History". This shows a scholarly clergyman of middle years, wearing a cassock and dog-collar. He is standing by a library chair, one hand on an open book, a perfectly ordinary picture in every way except that in his other hand he holds a dark, menacing school cane. Given the period, this might simply be a picture of some master in his study, but the photograph bears an inscription that suggests otherwise.

"To Lucy, that she does not forget herself a second time. Rev'd Dr Erasmus St. Jude Croom."

That is all, but is was enough to spark my imagination. Who was the mysterious Lucy? Exactly how had she "forgotten herself", and what had been the consequences? The cane suggests that they were painful, but to send her such a photograph the Reverend Doctor clearly felt he had done the right thing and that her response should be remorse rather than resentment. Perhaps it was? After all, the Victorians did not think as we do and she may have accepted her chastisement as no more than justice. On the other hand, one corner of the picture is burnt, while it is my feeling that the Reverend Doctor's inscription carries a hint of the erotic.

The situation conjured up a dozen pictures in my mind, and from those grew the idea for the book, a tome written by a man who had spent a lifetime of amateur research, as so many Victorians did, only not into the usual subjects, but sexual deviance, all of which he had thoroughly enjoyed but cloaked in the hypocrisy so typical of the period. My idea was taken up with enthusiasm by an editor at Virgin Books, now part of Random House, who had himself been considering a comic encyclopedia of unusual erotic practices. It was published in October 2007, as a beautiful presented hardback complete with fifty fine illustrations, but the question remains: who was the real Reverend Doctor Erasmus St Jude Croom?

This journal exists to answer that question.

Friends (1):

Friend of (5):