Henrietta Hodson

Henrietta Hodson (26 March 1841 – 30 October 1910) was an English actress and theatre manager best known for her portrayal of comedy roles in the Victorian era. She had a long affair with the journalist-turned-politician Henry Labouchère, later marrying him.

Hodson was born at Upper Marsh in St Mary's parish, Westminster, London. She was the eldest daughter of George Alfred Hodson (1822–1869), an Irish-born comedian, singer and innkeeper, and Henrietta Elizabeth Noel, an actress and singer. Her two sisters, Kate (later Mrs Charles Henry Fenton, but known on stage as Kate Gordon) and Sylvia (Mrs J. Stripling Blythe), were also actresses. Her cousin was George Musgrove, the theatre producer.

Hodson made her first professional stage appearance at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, in 1858. In 1860, she and Henry Irving worked together in Manchester in The Spy, or, A Government Appointment. She joined J. H. Chute's Bath and Bristol companies in 1861 and built a reputation as a popular soubrette and burlesque actress. An 1883 New York Times article calls her "the cleverest Aladdin in H. J. Byron's piece I remember to have seen." In 1863, at the Theatre Royal in Bath, England, she played the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream under the management of Madge Robertson (later Mrs Kendal), who also starred in the play, and Ellen Terry. There she also played the title role in the burlesque Endymion. In 1864, she married Richard Walter Pigeon, a solicitor and widower from Bristol, England, who had several children, and left the stage. They had one child, George Walter Noel Pigeon, born in 1865. Hodson left her husband, amid rumours of abuse, and returned to acting, using her maiden name.

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