Portal:Biography/Selected article/June 28

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Elizabeth Needham (died 3 May 1731), also known as Mother Needham, was an English procuress and brothel-keeper of 18th-century London, who has been identified as the bawd greeting Moll Hackabout in the first plate of William Hogarth's series of satirical etchings, A Harlot's Progress. Although Needham was notorious in London at the time, little is recorded of her life, and no genuine portraits of her survive. Her house was the most exclusive in London and her customers came from the highest strata of fashionable society, but she eventually fell foul of the moral reformers of the day and died as a result of the severe treatment she received after being sentenced to stand in the pillory.

Nothing is known of her early life, but by the time she was middle-aged she was renowned in London as the keeper of a brothel in Park Place, St. James. Her house was regarded as the most exclusive in London, superior to those of Covent Garden, even to that of the other notorious bawd of the time, Mother Wisebourne. She was said to still be attractive in middle-age; Hogarth described her as a "handsome old Procuress...well dressed in silk", but mentions "patches on her face" and in his picture her face is seen to be pock-marked. She went by a number of aliases: Bird, Howard, Blewitt and Trent are among those ascribed to her, although Mother Bird was also the name of another brothel-keeper who was committed to Newgate with Needham in 1724. Needham was apparently ruthless with the girls who worked for her. They were forced to hire their dresses from her, and, if they were unable to pay the exorbitant rentals, she would force them to take more customers or have them committed to debtors' prison until they met her demands (a scheme John Cleland's heroine falls prey to in Fanny Hill (1748)). Once they were too old or too ill to attract customers, she would throw them out. (Read more...)