Like the whore that dons her finery in hopes of emulating respectability before embarking on her trade, so too does the ‘whore story’ require ‘new dressing’ to attain a level of acceptable modesty and chastity in the face of its readers. Daniel Defoe no doubt imbued his concern for the reader with a hint of irony, given the direct ‘first-hand’ account his early eighteenth-century prostitute protagonist, Moll Flanders, related in her allegedly autobiographical tale. But anxiety over the reception of such subject matter survived well past Defoe's literary milieu. More than a century later another prostitute protagonist got to tell her story. Although there were no claims this time to factual history or autobiography, Mercy Merrick, from Wilkie Collins's The New Magdalen (1873), communicated the history of her fall into prostitution.