Lady Bumtickler’s Revels is a pornographic

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

 comic opera on the theme of flagellation

Flagellation

Flagellation or flogging is the act of methodically beating or whipping the human body. Specialised implements for it include rods, switches, the cat o' nine tails and the sjambok...

 written and published by John Camden Hotten

John Camden Hotten

John Camden Hotten was an English bibliophile and publisher.Hotten was born in Clerkenwell, London to a family of Cornish origins. He spent the period 1848–1856 in America and on his return opened a small bookshop in London at 151a Piccadilly, and founded the publishing firm later known as Chatto...

 in 1872 in his series The Library Illustrative of Social Progress

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 . They were mainly reprints of eighteenth-century pornographic works on flagellation...

. It purports to have been "performed at Lady Bumtickler’s private theatre in Birch Grove, with unbounded applause". The characters, Master Lovebirch and Lady Belinda Flaybum, praise the delights of sadomasochism: "the male sex may taste something exquisitely sweet in a whipping from the hands of a woman".