When Caroline Hodgson (aka Madame Brussels, notorious brothel-keeper) died in 1908, her probate records included — “along with the diamonds, pearls and sapphires, and the gold fob watches” — a “Silver mounted purse (Bent coin inside).”
Barbara Minchinton includes this detail in the closing pages of her new biography, Madame Brussels: The Life and Times of Melbourne’s Most Notorious Woman. She tells us that this coin was probably a copper penny, a contraceptive device to be affixed to the cervix with quinine or Vaseline. At several points earlier in the book she raises the question: did Madame Brussels sleep with her clients as well as managing her brothels? Here she reads the bent penny as at least suggesting Madame Brussels did.
I am happy to record that I was in at the beginning of one of the lines of enquiry in this book. In his afterword, Minchinton’s researcher Philip Bentley tells how he began his thirty-year pursuit of Madame Brussels with a research essay written for my third-year course in Australian history at Monash University.
I required students to write a biography, preferably of someone obscure, and I’m proud to say that the experience gave several Australian historians currently leading the field their first taste of the joys and frustrations of research. Philip’s essay was among the best; he subsequently extended it into a honours dissertation and an Australian Dictionary of Biography entry. Later, with the digitisation of birth, death and marriage records, he found more information about Caroline’s husband, Studholme Hodgson, but her German family background remained a mystery.
Minchinton began researching Madame Brussels’s life while interpreting the results of archaeological digs in the “Little Lon” precinct — that part of Little Lonsdale Street where Melbourne’s best-known brothels operated in the 1880s and 1890s — which was the subject of her previous book, The Women of Little Lon: Sex Workers in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne. An article Minchinton wrote for the Conversation caught the interest of a descendant of Studholme Hodgson’s brother, who offered to share family photos and memorabilia. Clues in this trove sent Minchinton and Bentley back to records in Germany and England, where they discovered new information presented in this biography.
For those readers unacquainted with Madame Brussels’s story, a brief summary is useful. Caroline Hodgson was born Caroline Lohmar in Germany around 1846 to an unmarried mother who was probably in a long-term de facto relationship with the child’s father, an itinerant miner. In London in her mid-twenties, Caroline married Studholme Hodgson, whose family was part of Britain’s colonial elite of army generals and governors. The couple emigrated to Melbourne, where Stud joined the police as a mounted trooper and was posted to a country town.
Now separated and still in Melbourne, Caroline became a brothel-keeper; by the mid-eighties she was the city’s most successful and best known. Her premium establishment offered luxurious surroundings, food and drink of the highest quality, and music, dancing and card games as a prelude to sexual activity. From the late eighties she became the target of press and legal attack from reformers, but she seemed immune to prosecution until the turn of the century. In 1907 a court case forced the closure of her brothels; she died in 1908.
There are lots of questions here, and this new account offers at least plausible answers. The Hodgsons’ marriage certificate shows the couple living in the same London boarding house before they married; a close look at the family connections of the owner allows the inference that Caroline came from Prussia to London as the nursemaid of a German-English family. Later, in Melbourne, Caroline’s relations with the German community are read to explain her adoption of the baby who became Irene Hodgson.
Caroline’s path to ownership of substantial property in Little Lon is mapped from rate books, title deeds, planning records, sewerage survey books and the account books of people who lent her money — a huge body of meticulous research. The possibility that she bribed magistrates to dismiss or downplay charges is examined and rejected; her power probably lay in what she knew but didn’t tell.
Did any of Madame Brussels’s brothels offer services more exotic than heterosexual coupling? This question takes the author on a lengthy bypass to London, where Studholme’s uncle was a member of the Cannibal Club, an elite dining club that “indulged in pseudo-scientific conversations on topics that ranged from cannibalism to clitoridectomy, and from fetishes to flagellation.” Minchinton establishes that members of the Cannibal Club visited Melbourne and may even have visited Madame Brussels’s establishment. She also reminds us that Melbourne’s own Cole’s Funny Picture Book featured a salacious image of “Cole’s Patent Whipping Machine for Flogging Naughty Boys in School.” But she can find nothing to suggest any such goings-on in Caroline Hodgson’s houses.
More generally, historian Raelene Frances, author of the most extensive history of Australian prostitution, has told me that she found very little evidence of unusual sexual practices anywhere in the industry. It was said that the only women willing to experiment were French; the Irish-Australian women didn’t have the imagination.
Minchinton works hard at understanding Caroline Hodgson’s sense of self and her personal relationships. Drawing on her dealings with the women who worked for her, and on family memories, she concludes that Caroline loved and cared for others and was loved in return. Unpromising sources are made to yield results.
Studholme Hodgson died in 1893, cared for by Caroline in his last months. Every year thereafter she published in the Melbourne papers an in-memoriam notice for her husband, usually containing a verse of banal poetry. Minchinton reads these apparently conventional verses as reflecting Caroline’s state of mind. Thus in 1897, when her second marriage had failed:
Dear husband, sleep and take your rest
Your earthly cares are o’er;
For you have left a troubled world
To reach a peaceful shore.
Minchinton finds “a subtle note of envy as well as grief” in those lines. She interprets subsequent notices as reflecting optimism in cases and loneliness in others. Readers may or may not be convinced.
The book is not always easy to follow. Chapters pursue particular issues through particular sources, and I found myself looking backwards in search of a narrative line. On the other hand, individual sections are elegantly written, especially those dealing with Madame Brussels’s “times.” Minchinton’s summation of the trading economy of Melbourne in the 1850s is a model of clarity: it was “a global marketplace, and although most of its outward goods — gold and wool — went to Britain, its inward goods (which in the early years meant almost everything except gold and wool) came from anywhere and everywhere.”
And here is Minchinton on Studholme Hodgson’s family: “It is sometimes said that the sun never set on the British Empire in the nineteenth century, and there was probably one of [his] relatives drenched in sunshine the whole time, either governing a far-flung territory or making war on it.”
This new biography of Madame Brussels should intrigue readers who already have an interest in nineteenth-century Victoria, and catch the interest of those new to the subject. Caroline Hodgson was a fascinating woman and her story enriches and complicates Melbourne’s history. •
Madame Brussels: The Life and Times of Melbourne’s Most Notorious Woman
By Barbara Minchinton, with Philip Bentley | La Trobe University Press | $36.99 | 304 pages
