Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

Getting beneath the skin of the tickling phenomenon

The paps so small
And rounde with all
The wast not myckyll
But it was tyckyll!

Shakespeare was fascinated by tickling, both the word and the activity. As he says in Twelfth Night, ‘Here comes the trout which must be caught by tickling.’ He was well aware that the method was much more easily employed to get a woman than a fish.

I think the popularity of erotic tickling reflects the elaboration of women’s clothes and plentiful use of starch. It is one of the complaints of Doll Tearsheet against the awful Pistol that he spoils a poor girl’s ruff with his clumsiness.

The Edwardian age was another time of ‘full tickel’. Harry Cust, the outstanding seducer of the day, was an expert tickler. So was Wilfred Scawen Blunt, reported to have slept with more society women than anyone else. He bred Arab horses, and was a notable stud himself. He had learned the refinements of tickling in Cairo whore-houses, where the art reflected centuries of harem practices. But Edwardian tickling and stroking occurred in contexts which were not, strictly speaking, erotic. Perhaps the best prep school of the day was Durnford, kept by Thomas Pellatt. His wife Nell, a beautiful lady with a thrilling voice, used to read to the boys, all 60 of them, every Saturday night for half an hour, reclining on a chaise-longue. One of her choices was Moonfleet, by John Mead Faulkner. One little boy recalled at the age of 80, ‘No book made so deep and lasting an impression. I can still remember the agony of those Saturday evenings, when she would close the book after half an hour — never more — and leave us in torture.’ The story was only part of the tableau of the beautiful Nell. Another little boy was Laurence Irving, who later recalled in his memoirs The Precarious Crust that Nell, while reading, wriggled in delight while ‘privileged pages stroked her neck and tickled her silk-stockinged feet’.