Vickers then takes an interesting little detour down the lane of Lolita precursors. He discounts a couple of the relationships Humbert uses to justify his appetites as natural, but notes that Edgar Allan Poe did indeed marry his thirteen-year old cousin when he was 27. The reference to Poe is interesting, as Poe’s poem, “Annabel Lee,” supplied Nabokov with plot details and imagery for the young girl in Humbert’s past. Taking leave of the book’s references, Vickers brings up Charles Dodgson, who wrote as Lewis Carroll and was very open about his appreciation for the beauty of little girls - to the extent of having several come to stay with him and be drawn and photographed in various states of undress. Nothing was ever conclusively proven about the nature of Dodgson’s contact with these girls and his reputation did not suffer - Vickers postulates partly because the Victorian era’s focus on controlling sexuality made it define almost everything in terms of sexuality, including childhood.

In the twentieth century, Vickers finds some very direct Lolita precursors. There is a 1916 short story by Heinz von Lichberg about a young girl called Lolita who gets sexually involved with a much older man. Whether Nabokov ever read the story is unknown and his son says his father’s weak knowledge of German makes it unlikely. In any case, despite the similarities, Nabokov’s story is very much his own creation. Nabokov himself wrote a story in Russian called Volshebnik in which a middle-aged pedophile marries a woman in order to be near her 12-year-old daughter. And then we get a gossipy bit, where Vickers discusses Charlie Chaplin’s tendency to get involved with very young teenage girls. The most interesting part of the discussion, though, is Vickers’ unearthing of a case eerily similar to Lolita’s, which Nabokov slyly references in his book, showing that he had followed the news reports.

In 1950, the media carried stories about Sally Horner, who had been abducted at 11 by a 52-two-year old man and taken on a two year tour of the country, controlled by threats of being sent to reform school because he had noticed her shoplifting. Like Lolita, she was made to submit to sexual relations. Vickers notes that unlike Lolita, the media did not portray Sally Horner as the author of her own misfortune. Vickers wraps up the chapter with the more recent case of Natascha Kampusch, a child abducted at ten and kept captive until she escaped at 18. In this one, the extent to which the child succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome is yet to be established.

Vickers argues that the issue of complicity and Lolita was taken up by the media with a vengeance in the Amy Fisher/Joey Buttafuoco case. Sixteen-year-old Amy Fisher was cast as a sultry teenage temptress with an out-of-control sexuality focused on ensnaring men. And the sound bite tag given to her was The Long Island Lolita. Vickers writes that at this point, “the ‘Lolita’ label carries with it a certain assumption of guilt,” and the name is now in the public consciousness associated with the tawdry case of Amy Fisher. And interestingly, he says that “Lolita-tagged titillation tended to gravitate to cases like that of 15 year old Georgina Brundle [a fifteen-year-old who had an affair with a married man], while crimes involving pedophilia, kidnapping, and murder were often just too gruesome — or the victims too young — to risk implying that the little girls were somehow complicit in their own misfortune.” Elizabeth Smart, for example, was never tagged with the Lolita label in the media. Lolita is now media shorthand for “a provocative teenage sex siren, a tart, a slut, a voracious and proactive seducer of middle-aged men.” And Vickers says a far cry from Dolores Haze.