The Memoirs of Dolly Morton: The Story of A Woman’s Part in the Struggle to Free the Slaves; an Account of the Whippings, Rapes, and Violences that Preceded the Civil War in America, with Curious Anthropological Observations on the Radical Diversities in the Conformation of the Female Bottom and the Way Different Women Endure Chastisement was in many ways the prototype spanking novel, introduced to the British readership by Charles Carrington in 1899. It was the first book to appear with a frontispiece by Louis Malteste.
The work was published under the collective pseudonym Jean de Villiot, but it is generally attributed to Georges Grassal de Choffat, also known as Hugues Rebell. It relates the misadventures of Quakers Dolly Morton and her companion Miss Dove, who venture into the American South to help with an ‘underground railroad’. They are captured, flagellated and raped, and Dolly Morton is forced to be the mistress of a plantation owner. The book is written as the memoirs of Dolly Morton after she has become a brothel madam.
When Dolly Morton was published in French by Charles Fort, Fort commissioned a new set of illustrations from Louis Malteste, which were then reproduced in all the subsequent Fort editions.