Elizabeth Needham, also known as Mother Needham was an English procuress and brothel-keeper of 18th-century London. She has been identified as the bawd greeting Moll Hackabout in the first plate of William Hogarth’s satirical etchings, A Harlot’s Progress. Needham’s house was the most exclusive in London and her customers came from the highest strata of fashionable society. She ran afoul 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.
About Elizabeth Needham in brief
Elizabeth Needham, also known as Mother Needham was an English procuress and brothel-keeper of 18th-century London. She 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. Needham’s house was the most exclusive in London and her customers came from the highest strata of fashionable society. She eventually ran afoul 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. Henry Fielding refers to her in his Pasquin and used her as the model for Mother Punchbowl in The Covent Garden Tragedy. She went by a number of aliases: Bird, Howard, Blewitt and Trent are among those ascribed to her. Chief among her customers were Francis Charteris and his cousin the Duke of Wharton—Charteris is lounging in the doorway behind Needham in Hogarth’s picture.
She was apparently ruthless with the girls and women 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. In The Dunciad, Alexander Pope warns not to ‘lard your words with Mother needham’s style’ She was mentioned in the last verses of his Coronation Epistle : For Want of you, we spend our random Wit on the first we find with needham, Brooks, or Briton. She may have introduced Charteris to Sally Salisbury around 1708 and was kept as pre-eminent prostitute by the Salisbury family. When she died in 1719, she became a member of the household and brought a client from the Earl of Cardigan to her house.
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This page is based on the article Elizabeth Needham published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
