The Memoirs of Dolly Morton was published in London in 1899, and the full title is long enough to be a joke: 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. The title packs two kinds of goods. On the face of it, a woman in the abolitionist struggle, whippings and rapes before the American Civil War, and fake “anthropology” about how women’s bottoms differ and how different women take punishment. Under that, abolition is the cover story. Flagellation and rape erotica are what the book is selling. That kind of wrapper was common in the late-Victorian and Edwardian underground trade. The byline is the pseudonym Jean de Villiot, probably Hugues Rebell, or the publisher Charles Carrington. Another edition appeared in Philadelphia in 1904.
Quakers, a lynch mob, and a memoir told later
The leads are the Quaker Dolly Morton and her companion Miss Dove. They go into the American South to help the Underground Railroad and are captured by a lynch mob. The mob flogs them and forces them to ride the rail. Dolly is then coerced into becoming a plantation owner’s mistress. The frame is the usual one for this kind of exploitation erotica: a reformist pretext, then captivity and whipping, then forced concubinage, told afterward from a life in sex work. The book is cast as a memoir, narrated by Dolly after she has become a madam. The erotic “confession” sits inside a life story instead of a stack of loose scenes. The reader looks back at the flogging and the coercion from the later brothel career.
Carrington’s market, and a Joyce rumor
The Villiot name and Carrington’s hand put the book in the European and English underground pornography trade, which specialized in flagellation and “historical” cruelty, sold to adult buyers. Scholars have suggested it may have influenced James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whether or not Joyce borrowed the plot, the rumor is enough to show that an underground text sold on whipping and on how bottoms take punishment leaked into wider modernist talk. Readers of historical flagellation literature find it both in spanking bibliographies and in a footnote.
