The Rodiad is a pornographic poem on the subject of flagellation published by John Camden Hotten in 1871, although falsely dated to 1810. It was falsely ascribed when printed to George Colman the Younger.[1] Its author was Richard Monckton Milnes.[2][3][4] Henderson places it in The Library Illustrative of Social Progress published around 1872 (falsely dated 1777)[5] but it is not in the list of Henry Spencer Ashbee.[6]
The Betuliad, a manuscript in the British Library from Ashbee's bequest,[7] is identical to The Rodiad.[8] It was known under this title to Sir Richard Burton[4] who wrote to Milne on 22 January 1860 praising it.[9][10]
The Canadian author John Glassco repeated the false attribution to Colman and augmented it with an equally fictitious attribution of his own poem Squire Hardman printed in 1967.[11]
References
- Ashbee, Henry Spencer [Pisanus Fraxi] (1879). Centuria Librorum Absconditorum. London: privately printed. pp. 471–4.
- Nelson, James G. (2000). Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-271-01974-3.