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, first introduced to the British readership in an unillustrated version by Charles Carrington in 1899.

The Memoirs were 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.

This 1904 edition, with ten unsigned anonymous full-page plates and a number of smaller in-text drawings by the French poster artist George Dola (1872–1950), was produced for the American market in a tiny numbered edition of just 100 copies. Though the in-text drawings by Dola appear to have been commissioned for this edition of Dolly Morton, the ten full-page plates had first appeared two years earlier, in 1902, in another Charles Carrington title, Le beau négre (The Handsome Negro), the themes of which are close enough to the narrative of Dolly Morton to be interchangeable, as the captions indicate.

We are grateful to Steve Mullins of the Olympia Press website (www.parisolympiapress.com) for these illustrations, and to James Henry for drawing our attention to this edition.