Name Sally Lodge | ||
Sarah "Sally" Lodge (1680-1735), later known as Mother Lodge, was an English prostitute and brothel keeper in London.
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Early life
According to a posthumous and possibly unreliable account of her life, Lodge was the daughter of a barber and a seamstress who died in debt and left her in the care of a vicar. The vicar placed her in domestic service and later paid £7 for her to be apprenticed for five years to a dressmaker. Lodge complained that the work was drudgery and she was treated like a slave, so at the age of 14 she ran away and eventually started her own brothel in the parish of St Martin's-in-the-Fields near Strand in London.
Success as a madam
The venture was very successful due, in part, to the high class patrons it enjoyed from Court, and Alexander Pope wrote an encomium in praise of the establishment around 1720 but lamenting that age prevented him from enjoying it as he had in the past.
Lodge lost all her money when she was conned by an Irish confidence trickster and, older now, she was unable to reestablish herself as a prostitute or a madam. She went to the West Indies as the mistress of a wealthy planter but he died soon after and she was sent back to London, penniless. She returned to prostitution before becoming a barmaid at the Whale on Wapping Broadway.