ABSTRACT
Billington whose 'intercourse with different men was by report said to be almost unlimited' infects and is infected by applause, music and men. 'With every applause she begins a new career of vice'. Ridgway justifies so constructing the Memoir by claiming that he wishes to present vice in general rather than Elizabeth Billington in particular. Ridgway feels a moral obligation to publish the letters and to expose the 'Vice, ugly vice, in all its deformities. The material James Ridgway presents in Memoirs of Mrs Billington From her Birth, however, shatters the potentially controlling frame of life narrative. An Answer to the Memoirs of Mrs Billington, however, provides a different gloss; the source of the letters is not the 'executor' of Mrs Weichsel's estate, but rather her last lover, 'a common soldier', who 'made his mistress live, or rather starve upon red herrings, till at last it was too well known, she died of want, and in the utmost penury'.
