Karen Fox review of Barbara Minchinton with Philip Bentley, Madame Brussels: The Life and Times of Melbourne’s Most Notorious Woman

(Collingwood: La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, 2024), 322 pp., PB $36.99, ISBN 9781760644932

Madame Brussels: The Life and Times of Melbourne’s Most Notorious Woman tells the story of Caroline Hodgson, otherwise known as Madame Brussels. Described as ‘the most legendary brothel keeper in nineteenth-century Melbourne’ (back cover), Madame Brussels has become ‘a cult figure of sorts’ in the twenty-first century (p. 1), with a lane named for her at the location of one of her brothels, a city rooftop bar bearing her name and even a guided walking tour visiting some of the locations associated with her. Yet, despite her present-day fame and past notoriety, until the publication of this biography relatively little has been known about the flesh-and-blood woman behind the alias.

In her own time, Hodgson was a divisive figure. From one perspective, prostitution was a ‘necessary evil’ (p. 4), and Madame Brussels’s business was ‘a good deal better managed than most’ (p. 105); from another, she was a morally bankrupt woman who made her living from the ruin of young women lured into an evil trade. Either way, she would not have seemed the kind of person who warranted a biography, at least not the kind of praise-filled tome extolling the great and the good that we tend to associate (however erroneously) with the Victorian era. From the vantage point of the early twentieth-first century, however, Madame Brussels has taken on a new image, whether as a kind of female larrikin, to be celebrated as a colourful and entertaining figure of old Melbourne, or as something of a heroine, a woman with a difficult start in life who used her skills not just to make a living, but also to build a successful business that created significant wealth—and all that on her own, as her husband pursued his own path as a country policeman.

For Barbara Minchinton, Hodgson is more than anything a representative of a past world: she ‘represents much of what Melbourne was in the nineteenth century and what it became in the twentieth’ (p. 1). As she argues, Hodgson:

rode the wave of Melbourne’s boom in the 1880s, weathered the storm of the depression years in the 1890s and suffered as a result of the outburst of moral panic in the 1900s. (p. 1)

‘Her death in 1908 signified the end of one kind of Melbourne’, in which sex work was subject to an ‘uneasy tolerance’, ‘and the beginning of another’, which saw ‘complete prohibition’ (p. 1). Minchinton’s rationale in telling her story is both to give depth to the ‘relatively superficial’ existing understanding of this woman who has been a source of ‘enduring fascination’ (pp. 1–2), and to ‘explor[e] the moral and political context of her venture into commercial sex’ (p. 3).

Both Minchinton and her collaborator, Philip Bentley, are eminently qualified to tell this story. Minchinton, an independent researcher and historian, is an expert in the history of sex work in Melbourne in the era, having previously published The Women of Little Lon: Sex Workers in Nineteenth-Century Melbourne (La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, 2021). Bentley—with whom she researched the life of Madame Brussels, and who wrote an afterword to the present book, having been unable to contribute as planned to its writing due to illness—had earlier researched the history of prostitution in early Melbourne, as well as authoring the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Hodgson, published in 2005.¹ This new, full-length biography brings together the research that Minchinton and Bentley had each done on Hodgson and the history of prostitution in colonial Melbourne, as well as showcasing the significant new research that they have conducted.

The biography itself consists of 30 chapters, most relatively short, punctuated with a rich selection of illustrations—including photographs, hand-drawn sketches and maps—and ends with Bentley’s afterword, along with three appendices containing family trees and a list of property transactions. Beginning with an introductory reflection, the remainder of the book is arranged in six parts, coinciding with different phases of Hodgson’s life. Two chapters deal with her life before arriving in Australia in 1871, aged in her mid-20s. Few biographies cover the first two decades and more of a subject’s life with such rapidity, but this reflects the paucity of detail discoverable about Hodgson’s early years. The chapters revolve around one of the few firmly established facts from this period of her life: her wedding to Studholme George Hodgson, the son of an English family with a history of service to the British Empire and the British Army, at ‘the venue for society weddings in London at that time’ (p. 11, original emphasis). The second of this pair of chapters is essentially a close, perceptive analysis of a photograph of the couple taken around the time of their marriage. Born of necessity, this brief chapter is an exemplar of visual source analysis, of how to integrate visual sources into historical research and writing, rather than merely deploying them as illustrations. Six chapters then cover Hodgson’s early years in Melbourne, another six address her ‘halcyon’ years (p. 61) as a brothel madam, and seven deal with the ‘complicated’ (p. 113) period during which Studholme died and she married again, only to find herself quickly deserted by her new husband. Four chapters then cover the more difficult years of her later career as a madam, as social mores changed and she was effectively forced out of the trade, and another four conclude the story with her final illness and death.

Throughout, Minchinton and Bentley have attempted to resolve the many puzzles about Hodgson’s life, such as whether she was connected to the infamous loss of Victoria’s parliamentary mace, why she took the name Madame Brussels for her professional alias and whether she had an affair (or a child) with the music critic Alfred Plumpton. Among the notable strengths of this book are the way Minchinton navigates mysteries like these, and the way she makes the most of limited sources by the use of detailed contextual research. (The nearly 50 pages of endnotes at the end of the book are a testament to the extent of the research that has been undertaken.) A great deal of careful inquiry into the contexts in which Hodgson lived and worked, and how various aspects of life operated—from the means by which her brothel might obtain liquor to the procedures and practices of Melbourne’s courts—allows Minchinton to paint a picture of the world in which Hodgson operated, and to offer informed speculations about her life based on this broad contextual information in conjunction with the tidbits of detail to be found in such diverse sources as newspapers, property records, archaeological evidence and court proceedings.

Methodologically, Madame Brussels is thus an instructive example of the kind of ‘small history’, enabled by the digitisation of archival records, recently championed by Julia Laite.² Bentley acknowledges the importance of this process of digitisation in his afterword, describing ‘the digitisation of information and the internet’ as ‘game changers’ (p. 251), and, indeed, a project such as this one is probably only possible in today’s era of digitised sources, when diverse scraps of information can be found with a few clicks and keywords, trawling records from around the world that would otherwise be out of reach.

At the same time, there are limitations to this methodology, and occasionally questions must remain unanswered, as Bentley concedes, remarking particularly on the fact that Hodgson’s character and personality remained largely out of reach (p. 253). If one could wish, at times, for more solid answers—as in Chapter 16, dealing with the question of Hodgson’s rumoured relationship with Plumpton—this is no criticism of Minchinton’s and Bentley’s efforts, but merely reveals the impossibility of ever knowing the past in its entirety, especially when dealing with a subject as deliberately shadowy as sex work. One danger inherent in this kind of detailed blending of tidbits of information with contextual material and speculation is losing the biographical subject (and the reader) in a morass of detail, as happened for me in Chapter 13, where the discussion of surveys, maps, rooms, fences and paths became a touch overwhelming. Another is taking the speculation further than the limited evidence can support. Minchinton has largely avoided this problem, although I at least was not entirely convinced by the evidence offered for Studholme Hodgson’s possible homosexuality.

These, however, are minor quibbles, offered by way of reflection on the pitfalls of this kind of biographical research rather than as criticisms. Overall, Madame Brussels is an impressive piece of historical and biographical research, reconstructing a life from scattered and diverse sources, and the book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how women lived in the past, as well as to our knowledge of early Melbourne. As Laite suggested in relation to her own foray into the history of the sex trade, ‘there is a power in complexity and imperfection, in showing, through histories of individual lives, that our understanding of a phenomenon such as sex trafficking simply cannot ever be complete or monolithic’. Stories like these, as she suggests, allow us ‘to find exceptions, disrupt stereotypes, dismantle tropes, question stock characters, and challenge assumptions based on big data’.³ Anyone who seeks to achieve such goals in their historical work will find this biography a rewarding read, as will all those interested in women’s history, the history of prostitution, or Australian biography and history generally.

1. 1 Philip Bentley, ‘Caroline Hodgson (1851–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2005, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hodgson-caroline-12986/text23473.

2. 2 Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (2020): 963–89, doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shy118. See also her own venture into this kind of biography: Julia Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (London: Profile Books, 2021).

3. 3 Laite, ‘Emmet’s Inch’, 982.