Lusitania Survivor Avis Dolphin was
the Real Lolita
of Vladimir Nabokov's famous 1955 Novel.
Originally thought by many to have been inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee,
or by the American schoolgirl Sally Horner, I discover a string of coincidences which
surpass belief – and uncover a girl who has flown completely under the radar.
"When the coincidences mount up, as they do mount up in this case, we find ourselves looking at one coincidence too many."
-- Learned Counsel, Opinion sought in 1996.
Nabokov consistently denied that Horner was the original Lolita. But then, knowing who the original Lolita really was, he would, wouldn't he? He could not reveal the true identity of Lolita because, unlike Horner and Holborn, Avis outlived him and would almost certainly have sued him for libel for effectively calling her a slut.
* * *
12-year-old
Avis Dolphin and 42-year-old
Professor Ian Holborn. She went to live
with him while he told the world she had
nowhere else to go, despite her having close
family on both sides of the Atlantic.
This piece of research has to be one of the
earliest I ever carried out, and I have kept schtum about it all my life, until
now. As for why, read on.
The
famous novel Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955, has long
been the subject of controversy regarding the possible real-life identities of
its main characters. The novel concerns a young 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze,
known as Lolita, whose father is dead, and who falls in with her mother's new
flame, a middle-aged traveling teacher and hebephile, who once went to the
Arctic studying glaciers and who adopts the alias Humbert Humbert.
He is from Europe and travels around America while writing and lecturing,
although he had originally intended to enter the priesthood. He takes her out of
a childrens’ camp, and then to hotels as
she travels with
him in a sexual relationship. He later enrolls her in a private school for girls
(her mother was going to send her to boarding school).
However, he is being followed by another man, whom Lolita eventually goes off
with, before at length she marries yet another guy, called Richard, and
procreates with him before she then dies young.
Nabokov
originally entitled his drafts of this novel "The Kingdom by the
Sea", with a brief pilot called "The Enchanter.” In
the finished Lolita, he mysteriously makes
reference not only to Tristram but also to a "Dr. Tristramson",
the suffix son indicating a
latter-day Tristram, the original Tristram having been, in lore, a Celtic lord
who escorted a young girl out of Ireland, only for their journey to end in
forbidden love. Nabokov also mentions a shipwreck, being alone with a drowned
passenger’s child, and Lolita in a tartan skirt. Read on…
Now theories regarding the real-life sources for these two characters have for some reason centered on 11-year-old Sally Horner, an American schoolgirl, and Frank LaSalle, a middle-aged car mechanic who told her he was an FBI agent. In 1948 LaSalle abducted Horner and travelled around America with her, frequently raping her (1), until eventually she caused him to be reported to the real FBI, which led to his arrest and imprisonment. She died a few years later in a car crash. This theory has been floated from time to time since 1955, apparently for no reason other than that Nabokov mentioned her case, in passing, in his novel.
However the
differences between these two people and Nabokov's characters are so numerous
and diverse that my first wonder was how on earth the connection was ever
established. First, Sally Horner was not 12 and Frank La Salle the car mechanic
was nothing like Nabokov’s enchanting, travelling teacher who’d come over
from Europe. It is difficult to see where Nabokov could have come up with such
keywords as ‘teacher’, ‘travelling lecturer from Europe’ and ‘12’,
let alone 'Arctic explorer', just by looking at Horner and La Salle -- and in
any event Nabokov in his mind had the book as good as written ten years before
the Horner LaSalle event, that is, the central theme of the novel – making off
with a young the girl for hebephillic motives
and then traveling around with her – was by then already a decade old in
Nabokov’s head.
Further,
Nabokov himself, the horse’s mouth, so to speak, consistently denied that
Horner was Lolita, despite the fact that she was by then dead and
he would have been free of any threat of defamation proceedings from her, and
therefore at liberty to identify her – if it were true.
This
considered we must therefore, despite the volumes of ink that have been spilled
on it, consider the Horner candidacy pure coincidence, or at best a superficial
reminder to Nabokov, when the Horner incident occurred in 1948, to finally get
the job finished.
However this
leaves us with a question: who on earth, then, were the original Lolita and
Humbert? I decided to do some digging....
First
of all, I asked myself how many known cases do we have, in the entirety of
recorded history, of a suspected relationship between a 12-year-old girl and a middle
aged travelling lecturer? The answer turned out to be very
encouraging, and also potentially labour saving
– one. And the lecturer in question, a professor, was
almost certainly known to Nabokov.
In
1915 a 12-year-old British-Canadian girl called Avis Gertrude Dolphin embarked
on the ill-fated Lusitania to travel back to the UK, where she had been born, to
stay with her grandparents there. Her father had died some years earlier and she
was being unofficially accompanied by two nurses, Hilda Ellis and Sarah Smith,
who were going to the UK on vacation from their jobs at her mother’s nursing
home in St.Thomas, Ontario in Canada.
In
May of that year her
mother Alice (nee Schofield) sent her back over the Atlantic
to England to stay with her grandparents in Bromsgrove. Mum’s plan was that
from there she was to attend boarding school and ‘become a lady’.
This
42-year-old Oxford Professor had travelled alone to America to do lectures around the
country (mainly in Art but many colleges persuaded him to deliver sermons as he
had originally intended to become a minister), and was now returning home. He
once went to the Arctic studying glaciers,
and presently owned the Shetland island of Foula (“Fyew-lah”),
which even today remains in the hands of his descendants. Upon purchasing the island he
declared himself its laird (lord), and was even described by some American
newspapers as a king in his own right, of his kingdom by the sea. He was very
charming, witty and well loved by his
students, who generally regarded him as something of an eccentric.
His wife, Marion Constance Archer-Shepherd, was only 16 when they met (he was 29), and about 3 years later they married, much against her parson father’s wishes, although he said that their differences were of a religious nature.
Avis
said he was charming and enchanting but very persistent; however, she found him
interesting as she did the stories with which he regaled her while she was
suffering from seasickness. She was very precocious, may not have wanted to stay
with her grandparents, and
on the ship she probably felt free from
family accountability. And so, perhaps it may be said, they saw each other
coming. They began to socialize on the ship, that is, he began to take her out.
Meanwhile, although both her nurses were out for a good time, he appears to have
expressed no
interest in either.
When
the Lusitania was torpedoed just off the British Isles, Holborn took very great
care of Avis and secured her a place in a lifeboat. He publicly kissed her
before she was lifted aboard.
When
brought ashore at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland he spent a week in a
makeshift hospital (a hotel now called the Commodore) suffering from
hypothermia, while she turned the town over looking for
him. Meantime he had fretted very greatly over what might have become of her,
until at 2am the first night he learned to his great relief that she was safe.
Alas both Avis’ nurses were lost and
their bodies were never found.
After
that, instead of Avis going with the Cunard party (the disconnected children of
which were tightly overseen by its officials) to the ferry at Dublin, he removed
her from the group and took her to a high-end hotel there.
Holborn,
the Celtic lord, then escorted her out of Ireland to her grandparents in
Worcestershire, where incredibly Avis and Holborn apparently explained that she was
not now coming to stay with them but was going to Scotland to move in with
Holborn instead, which she did for the next 12 years until she was 24. One
wonders what the driving force must have been, to forge such a bond in so short
a time. They had known each other for just two weeks.
Nabokov,
again having consistently denied that Horner was Lolita, had in fact gone back
to the First World War for his sources, and 1916 was a key date. In that year Holborn wrote a
book for Avis, “The Child of the Moat”, a bestseller, which he
dedicated to her by name and which contained at the very beginning the lamest
excuse as to why she was living with him -- because there was no one else to
look after her. He also proffered the same line to a local Scottish newspaper.
He wrote Avis and himself into the leading roles in the story.
This
book, which features a 12-year-old heroine called Aline Gillespie (A for Avis
and G for Gertrude?) who is desired by a Scottish lord called Ian,
has been examined by modern critics who found it disturbing in its
lecherous undertones and in that Holborn seized the opportunity at almost every turn to
intimately describe her, and Scottish Lord Ian’s feelings towards her (he
passionately kisses and fondles her a lot; on one occasion, after another
prominent character in the story, who may have been inspired by Holborn’s real
life wife, had gone to bed, Aline slides her legs over him to sit on his lap
while he fondles her hair (we might remember at this point that the setting is
1557 and they were both wearing kilts in the traditional sense i.e. probably no
underwear), and towards the end of the story he suggests marriage to her). In
the story Aline goes to Scotland to be with Ian, and at the end of the story she
embraces him and their lips meet, and he
assures her that she will be safe with him ever after. However, he has a rival
suitor called Richard. The book actually ends with a message to the reader from
Holborn which says, “With best wishes from Avis and myself.
Now do not tell me that you do not know who Avis is (meaning in the story), --
look at the dedication and the first chapter, and guess”.
Avis
loved this (2) and took part in the promotion of the book, allowing herself, the
shipwreck survivor, to be photographed in a tartan skirt. Tristram, alluded to
in Nabokov’s novel together with “shipwreck survivor” and “tartan
skirt”, was, again, a Celtic lord who escorted a young girl out of Ireland
only for their journey to result in forbidden love. Tristram and the girl
subsequently remained together, travelled and
had many adventures. Sound familiar?
In real life, Avis eventually arrived at her boarding school to find her
accommodation was no longer there due to a catastrophe, while in Lolita Humbert
arrives in the USA to begin a teaching job, only to discover that his
accommodation was no longer there due to a catastrophe. Regarding educational
establishments, a false address of a school is also given in Lolita:
“Bird School, Bird, New Bird”. Perhaps the reader might wish to look up the
Latin for “bird”.
Avis
eventually married a younger friend of Holborn’s, one Thomas Foley, a
journalist and amateur playwright who at one point habitually followed Holborn
around, and she had two children with him.
Now this will scarcely be believed - but nevertheless it is the plain and simple
truth – that one of the girls that Nabokov mentions in Lolita is
named Avis. This Avis, introduced as a friend of Lolita’s, appears more than
once, and more than just in passing, and although the background he gives to
this Avis is nowhere close to that of tartan wearing, shipwreck surviving,
lecturer accompanying Avis Dolphin, the name Avis was, and is, so
rare that it remains a matter of straight mathematical probability that Nabokov
would have to introduce over three and a half thousand girls
into his story, each individually named, before one of them would just happen to
be called Avis (3).
Further,
on the very next page (in Pt 2 ch 25)
the very next girl to be introduced is named Marion (with an ‘o’, a rarer form of Marian), which of course was the name of Holborn’s wife
(Marion Constance Holborn). ‘Stepmother’ is also raised in the very same
sentence, and of course Marion Holborn, very loosely speaking, was a kind of
stepmother to Avis Dolphin.
Yet
further, of the countless millions of nicknames that exist, Avis Dolphin’s
nickname at school was Dolly, as was that of Lolita herself (Dolores Haze) (4).
So
these two Dollys were both 12, had both lost their father when very young, were both sent away by
their mother with
intent to send them to boarding school, both passed through a childrens’ lodging
situation before being removed by, of all the jobs that one can think of, a
travelling lecturer, from Europe, who had originally considered a career in
religious ministry, who once went to the Arctic studying glaciers, and as soon
as their adult, female mentors had died young, through calamities, both Dollys then went through hotels with him
before
being introduced by him into the girls’ private education system. I mean, come
on! But the coincidences don’t end there…
Humbert
and Holborn were within a year or two of each other in age, both had a father
who married at age exactly 30, both lost their mother when they were 2 or 3,
both had a stern aunt, and both switched degree subjects in mid
course from a science to the Arts, while Avis and
Lolita both had auburn hair and both lost a 2 year old close, male relative when
they were 4 or 5.
Avis
lived with Holborn and his wife at their Edinburgh house in Scotland during the school
holidays, and they would have had plenty of opportunity for romance as he also
had a 9 ton yacht moored in the local
marina there, in which they used to sail up to Foula. Thus it
may well be that Holborn had taken in a lover right under his young wife’s
nose. (5)
Now
the Lolita novel mentions an Inchkeith Avenue,
of which there are only two in the world. In comparison with the vast dimensions
of the earth, this same Edinburgh marina is just a short walk from one of them. Another
placename, mentioned several times in Lolita is
Elphinstone. There are just four in the whole world, none in the USA, three in
Canada and the other – wait for it – just across the fields from
Holborn’s castle of Penkaet, a
single turreted building similar to the
novel’s Pavor Manor, which stands in a clearing in the woods 15 minutes east
of Edinburgh. Pavor
Manor means scary
mansion, Penkaet actually
being a mansion rather than a castle and having a
reputation for being badly haunted (5). ‘When
the coincidences mount up…’ -- but they
don’t end there either.
Nabokov’s
Pavor Manor -- Holborn’s castle of Penkaet near
Elphinstone
east of Edinburgh, Scotland. This scary mansion is famously reputed to be the home of
several ghosts, including that of King Charles I. Note the single turret as mentioned in Lolita.
The
place also stands in a clearing in the woods, again as Nabokov described.
One of the ghost stories about the place may have been concocted by
Avis and Holborn to cover up an amorous nocturnal liaison (see Note 5).
Drawing:
MacGibbon and Ross c.1902
Now
the fictional Beardsley College of the novel is in Minnesota, and in real
history Holborn was specifically connected with, of all the States, Minnesota.
He founded the Art department at Carleton College there, with which he had much
subsequent involvement. Perhaps cryptically, the novel mentions a ‘Carleton
Place.’
Yet further, in chapter 25 of Lolita Humbert, missing his lost
Lolita, sends her belongings, as a gift, to a home (for orphaned girls) on a
windy lake on the Canadian border. Avis’s mother ran a home (a nursing home
which was also Avis’ own home) very
close to, of all places, a windy lake on the Canadian border.
Regarding Wales, however, this country has a history of coal mining, the resultant slag heaps tarnishing the beautiful image of which it is generally more deserving. Another placename mentioned in the novel is Coalmont.
Tartan
clad 'Dolly' (Avis Dolphin), having just been escorted
out of Ireland by her Arctic exploring Tristram. Seen here promoting
The Child of the Moat, which Nabokov probably read.
It
is inconceivable that Nabokov did not personally know of Holborn, because both were professors of the Arts and Holborn’s lecturing circuit took
in Nabokov’s college in the US northeast. Reading between the lines,
I think it possible that Nabokov
may have gotten wind of something going around about
Holborn having a liking for young girls, and had decided to find out more.
There
are also however some notable departures from the Nabokov novel, e.g. it
was Horner who died not long afterwards while Avis lived for almost the entire
length of the twentieth century. The fact that she was still alive when I
researched all this, was the reason I filed it
away and forgot about it for decades. Although Holborn had died in 1935, this
being entirely a conjectural subject I might still have incurred The Wrath of
the Avis. (6).
In
summary, here is what I think has happened: Nabokov’s story has two major
roots, the “make off with the daughter” root, and the more central Dolphin-Holborn
root. The first of these is almost certainly derived from an old story of
Nabokov’s, inspired not by Sally Horner, then barely a newborn babe, but
loosely by Annabel Lee, a character of Edgar Allen Poe’s, and is originally
nothing to do with Horner and LaSalle (7), LaSalle himself being almost at the
opposite social pole from Nabokov’s enchanting teacher.
Nabokov
initially laboured with this root and with
what I am introducing as the deeper and more central Dolphin-Holborn root, under
the appropriate working title of The Kingdom by the Sea (with
the brief pilot called The Enchanter), but ten years later the story
was still on hold when the Horner abduction occurred, that event’s only
relevance being to rekindle the whole idea in Nabokov’s head due to a
superficial similarity of gist, whereupon the original Dolphin-Holborn concepts,
‘teacher’, ‘enchanter’, ‘travelling lecturer from Europe’, ‘Arctic explorer’, ‘Dolly’,
‘tartan skirt’, ‘Tristram/Celtic lord’, ‘priesthood/Ministry’,
‘bird‘, ‘shipwreck survivor’, ‘kingdom by the sea’, ‘Inchkeith’,
‘Elphinstone’, ‘Coalmont’, ‘Avis’,
‘twelve’ etc...all survived the Horner abduction event, were combined with
the Make off with the Daughter root (8) and went into the finished product that
was Lolita.
Had
Nabokov not consistently denied that Horner was Lolita I might have concluded,
despite the fact that Horner theorists may have found themselves confronting a
book loaded with Avis/Holborn keywords which they could not explain let alone
organize and which they may well have glossed over, that the number of Lolita
proteges in real history, in common with the cases of Emrys Merlin and Robert
Hood, was two, our Avis here having flown completely under the radar. However I
do still harbour a
suspicion that Horner gave Nabokov a little more than just a reminder to finish
his novel, and may have provided him also with a firmer direction for the
backbone of a story which had hitherto sailed the seas for ten years with no one
at the helm and a hold crammed with these Avis/Holborn keywords which, although
sufficient both in likelihood and in number to defy all coincidence, had never
really been coherently organized and focused into a novel with a spinal thread,
to such a point that Nabokov tried at least twice to scuttle the ship for this
lack of a compass, his wife Vera fortunately having been on hand to literally
snatch his manuscript back out of the fire, and in a sense it may well have been
our Sally who prevented this from happening again. When Nabokov denied that
Horner was Lolita, I think it possible that he meant that she was not the original Lolita,
the Avis he’d lived with in his mind for fifteen years.
In an abstract sense, looking at the finished Lolita is
a bit like looking at a great story written on a sheet of recycled paper. While
the text of the main sheet seems to follow the Horner case in terms of general
thread, if you look close, the paper contains everywhere, throughout, from one
end to the other, embedded patches of the original paper that this sheet was
made from, and upon every patch there can still be seen the detailed fragments
of the story of Avis and Holborn.
Nevertheless, it is the business of a professional researcher to trace a case
all the way back to its ultimate origin and therefore, in conclusion, Avis
Gertrude Dolphin was the original Lolita, while Professor Ian Stoughton Holborn
was the inspiration for Humbert. As for myself, it is at least as great a
fascination for me to be able, in addition to pioneering the tracking down of
two such fascinating people, to retrace the
thought processes of a great author and to explore my way along forgotten
psychological trackways not traversed since the man himself, long ago, had
passed that way.
---
Michael Alan Marshall (Researcher)
Avis
Dolphin, 12, just after
the Lusitania
disaster. Precocious, slightly insensitive, from no-nonsense
nursing stock, she had been around the
block.
Notes
1…“Rape
with consent”, legally a contradiction in terms but socially informative,
might be a more appropriate term in Horner’s case. She was precocious, and
over a prolonged period she left for school every day and then returned to
LaSalle in the evening. At any time at school she
could easily have asked the Principal to simply ask the FBI to check out
LaSalle’s story (that he was an FBI agent), and when it didn’t check out she
could have been detained at school until the police arrived. The fact that she
didn’t indicates a bond between them, which was observed and
commented upon at the time by some neighbours,
and it was probably after an argument that she confided in a friend thereby
causing him to be reported to the FBI.
2… It might be considered inconceivable that if no sexual relationship had yet
developed between she and Holborn, then
Avis at 13 would not have taken a fright at the book’s contents rather than
the opposite, and would at best have become wary and aloof, with future face to
face contact an embarrassment. Instead, she loved it, travelled with him to
promote it, and continued to live with him for another 11 years.
3…
How many novels have you read which contain the given name Avis? And, out of
those, how many had a storyline with a travelling lecturer and a 12
year old girl? And out of those, how many
contained on the very next page the slightly unusual name of the real-life
lecturer’s wife, and mention of ‘stepmother’?
4… Nabokov said that he hated codes and ciphers, but there’s evidence that he actually liked to toy around with them.
For
example, the name of one of his characters, Vivian Darkbloom,
is a perfect anagram of Vladimir Nabokov.
Also,
the vowel/consonant sequences for “Holborn” and “Humbert” are identical;
this is not a remote coincidence but is still probably dozens to one for a
7-letter word. “Avis” and “Haze” are the perfect inverse of this, but
this is not uncommon with such short words.
Further, Avis in the novel is described as
‘heavy’ and ‘fat’. Curiously, the very next time Nabokov uses both these
words, he is talking about, of all the heavy and fat things you can think of, a
dolphin.
Nabokov also features a Bird School, Bird, New Bird, as well as a Mr. Byrd. The Latin for bird is of course Avis.
5…
There’s an interesting story about Avis and Holborn which comes from Penkaet Castle.
It’s a ghost story and has since found its way into the various tourist
leaflets and guidebooks about the place, which has a reputation for being badly
haunted.
The
story goes that Avis, by then aged about 20, was in her bedroom in the dead of
night when she heard noises downstairs, so she went to wake Holborn. The two
then went downstairs, only to then hear groaning noises coming from Avis’ room
upstairs.
An
interesting tale – but if
you don’t believe in ghosts it’s possible to see, between the lines, that a
cover story has been put out here, while in my opinion the truth may run like this:
It’s
the dead of night and Holborn leaves his bed to visit Avis in her room as
arranged. Later, the groaning noises coming from there might need some
explaining away, and so, in the cover story it’s best that Avis was not in her
room. So where can the cover story put her? Well she
couldn’t be upstairs in one of the other bedrooms because that defeats the
object of the cover – so logically she must therefore have been downstairs,
with Holborn of course (to cover the possibility that his wife may have noticed
in the night that he wasn’t there next to her). But how would they explain
being downstairs? So they
said they heard noises downstairs and went down to explore. But the noises up in Avis’ room
still haven’t been explained. And so – finished
product -- Avis was alone in her room when she heard the noises downstairs, she
went for Holborn by knocking on his door (fiddlesticks -- the wife invariably
wakes up first), they went down to explore, and then they heard noises upstairs
in Avis’ room.
A
cover story pure and simple. I don't think it would fool a seasoned Columbo
- like copper, or a judge, but it might fool anyone who
believes in ghosts and who, upon hearing such a tale, would be out of there
faster than a bishop in a brothel raid, but personally I don’t believe in
ghosts and if I’d been there at breakfast the next morning I might have taken
Avis aside and quietly advised her in future to shove her hand over his mouth in
the heat of the moment while swivelling her concerned looking eyes towards the
door -- might save them both a bit of hurried ghost story composition the next
morning.
6… Avis Dolphin died in 1996 at the age of 93. As late as 1981 she still had a soft, seductive voice. She showed this in a tv interview she gave that year (for Leonard Nimoy’s show, “In Search Of”, about the Lusitania) at the age of 78. Makes one wonder how sensuous she was when she was younger.
7… Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) and Charles Chaplin have also been
considered for Humbert, but the evidence for these is almost non-existent.
Nabokov does however offer a small
reflection of Chaplin in his character Charlie Holmes, the boy at
the summer camp, Chaplin having made his acting debut in a production of Sherlock
Holmes at around the turn of the 20th century.
Regarding
Chaplin there is a possible insight into how Nabokov came up with the names Dolores and Lolita.
Chaplin’s wife was called Lillita, and
crossing this with Dolly, Avis Dolphin’s nickname at school (and
the only Dolly we have in real life), we at once get Lolita. But
Lolita also needed a ‘real’ name, and so, coming back to Avis/Dolly, we get
the name Dolores from Dolly alone, with Lillita playing
no part in its derivation.
So, Lolita comes
from Dolly and Lillita,
and Dolores comes just from Dolly.
8…
Nobody in the frame actually married a
mother to gain access to her daughter. Holborn didn’t, LaSalle didn’t;
neither did Chaplin or Dodgson. If this part of the story is based on a real
event, I don’t know who it was. The closest fit is Avis’ mother’s
boyfriend, Avis’ prospective stepfather,
whom Avis seduced, given the maxim during his liaisons with Avis that it takes
two and that he was there at the scene as well. But as to whether he got
together with Avis’ mother to gain
access to Avis I just don’t know.
Regarding the murder in Lolita, none of the candidate protagonists are known or
suspected of having committed one and my suspicion here is that Nabokov simply
wanted a climactic ending to his novel.
Lolita herself eventually married one Richard Schiller. Richard is the name of
the rival
suitor in The Child of the Moat, while
the passenger liner Schiller, out from New York as was the Lusitania,
was also wrecked in the British Isles on the very same day of the year as the
Lusitania (7 May, 1 chance in 365) but in a different year.
Pointers
for the more interested reader:
A
History of: Avis Dolphin, Ian Holbourn and the Sinking of the
Lusitania - YouTube
This
is an innocent account (i.e. minus the Lolita factor which still isn’t
publicly known) of the story of Lusitania survivors Dolphin and Holborn. Note
the further references at the end.
Sinking
of the Lusitania Terror at Sea - YouTube
This 2007 movie
features the role of Avis Dolphin and Professor Holborn in the Lusitania
disaster. Minus the Lolita factor because this isn’t publicly known.
LOLITA
Read Online Free Without Download - PDF, ePub, Fb2 eBooks by Vladimir
Nabokov (readanybook.com)
Lolita,
by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
The
Project Gutenberg eBook of The Child of the Moat, by Ian B. Stoughton Holborn
The
Child of the Moat (1916), written for
Avis by Professor Ian Holborn. In the story, “Aline Gillespie” is really
Avis, and “Ian” is really Holborn.
Professor
Ian Holbourn -
The Lusitania Resource (rmslusitania.info)
Details
of Ian (John) Stoughton HOLBORN.
Miss
Avis Gertrude Dolphin - The Lusitania Resource (rmslusitania.info)
Details of Avis Dolphin.
Data
Ian
HOLBORN (He
liked to use HOLBOURN, but was
born John Bernard HOLBORN. He later inserted STOUGHTON, his mother’s maiden
surname, to make Ian Bernard Stoughton Holbourn).
Birth: 5
Nov 1872 Certificate Ref: Prescott 8b 598
Marriage: June
Quarter of 1904 Cert Ref: Bromyard 6a 1147 (Unusually he is entered twice, same
certificate number. Notice he adds the initial “S”. That’s his mother’s
maiden name of STOUGHTON which he liked to use but was not given at birth;
evidently the registrar thought it a little improper to enter this (but Holborn
was a very persistent man) and so he entered it twice).
Death: 15
September 1935 in Edinburgh. Consult the Scottish BMD records, but as a
Lusitania survivor it is also Public Domain.
Birth: Mar Qtr of
1885, Cert Ref: Colchester 4a 516
Marriage: Jun Qtr of
1904, Cert Ref: Bromyard 6a 1147
Alfred HOLBORN (Ian Holborn’s father)
Birth: Mar Qtr of
1841 Cert Ref Islington 3 171
Marriage to STOUGHTON: Sep Qtr of
1871 Cert Ref: Kensington 1a 344 (Note that he was exactly 30 as in the novel)
Mary Jane STOUGHTON (Ian Holborn’s mother)
Birth: Dec Qtr of
1837, Cert Ref: Windsor 6 211
Marriage: Sep Qtr of
1871 Cert Ref: Kensington 1a 344
Death: Sep Qtr of
1874 Cert Ref: Prescot 8b 516 (Note Ian Holborn’s age at the time. As per the
novel).
Avis DOLPHIN
Birth: 24 Aug 1902 Cert Ref: Rotherham 9c 778
(Note her age in May 1915 on the Lusitania)
Marriage: Sep Qtr of
1926 Cert Ref Bromsgrove 6c 466
Death: 9 Feb 1996 in Meirionnydd Wales (As a Lusitania
survivor, data is Public Domain)
Birth: Mar Qtr of
1905 Cert Ref: Rotherham 9c 787
Death: Dec Qtr 1907
Cert Ref: Rotherham 9c 443 (Note his and her age at his death).
For Avis’ auburn
hair (as per novel), see A
History of: Avis Dolphin, Ian Holbourn and the Sinking of the
Lusitania - YouTube (Avis herself,
5m 07 s into the vid. Notice also the soft, seductive voice, even in old age).