Sex, lies and arias
On 14 January 1792, James Ridgway did something that set Georgian London’s gossip-mongers into overdrive: he published the Memoirs of Mrs Billington. This account of one of the darlings of the 18th-century stage – the prima donna Elizabeth Billington – was so shocking, so salacious that, according to composer Joseph Haydn, it had sold out by 3pm that same day. Yet this was a publishing sensation with a difference.
Prima donnas were the leading female singers in Europe’s operatic productions – and Billington was among the most popular. But, as it turned out, she hadn’t actually written her own memoirs – Ridgway had done that. That didn’t stop advertisements declaring that Ridgway’s publication would include revelatory letters written by “that lady to her late mother, Mrs Weichsel”, who was also a famous singer.
Ridgway argued that, by releasing the he was revealing Billington’s true character, stating: “Vice, ugly vice, in all its deformities, is too often countenanced upon the stage; and it is a lamentable reflection, that in the were something of a character assassination
