Torture Garden

Illustrated edition of Torture Garden, which was first published in France in 1899 as Le Jardin des supplices. It is a scathing, unrelenting, and savagely funny satirical assault on late nineteenth-century Western civilisation, French and English colonialism, bourgeois capitalism, political corruption, and moral hypocrisy. Through the medium of a manuscript, a ruined bureaucrat recounts his journey to China on a pseudo-scientific mission. He falls in love with a beautiful, wealthy, and sadistic young English woman who believes sex and death are inextricably intertwined. In Canton, she takes him to a prison with an extravagant garden where torture is practiced as a fine art:

“…the Torture Garden! Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering. What I saw today, and what I heard, exists and cries and howls beyond this garden, which is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth.” Octave Mirbeau - Torture Garden

This Birchgrove Press edition of Torture Garden is based on an edition published by Claude Kendall in New York in 1931. It includes nine black and white illustrations by Jeanette Seelhoff.