Like Aphra Behn, but with the opposite political principles, Daniel Defoe led an active life in the world of business and politics before becoming a professional writer. He was born Daniel Foe in 1660, the year of Charles II’s restoration, the son of a successful candle‐maker living in the city of London. He and his family survived the outbreak of bubonic plague that decimated London in 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, which consumed all but three houses in their neighborhood. His family were dissenters (Protestants who refused to conform to the rites of the Anglican Church, which had been re‐established at the Restoration) and Defoe was educated at schools run by dissenting ministers, including the academy of Charles Morton at Newington Green, probably with the initial intention of becoming a clergyman. Instead he became a merchant, trading in wine and tobacco, hosiery, bricks, and tiles, and he married the daughter of a wealthy wine importer, who bore him eight children. The most odoriferous of his enterprises, ethically and otherwise, was a scheme to raise civet cats, whose musk glands could be used to make perfume; he bought the cats on credit and then sold them to his mother‐in‐law, who sued him when she discovered that Defoe did not legally own them. Other business dealings of Defoe’s, like insuring merchant ships that were picked off by French privateers, ran into sheer bad luck. He went bankrupt in 1692 for £17,000 (about $4 million in today’s purchasing power), but settled with his creditors and over the next twenty years attempted with great energy and some success to repay his debts.
His political dealings were equally fraught with danger. In 1685 he joined Monmouth’s Rebellion to displace the Catholic James II, and by his own admission fought at the battle of Sedgemoor, but avoided the fearful retribution meted out to hundreds of Monmouth’s soldiers by Justice Jeffreys’ “Bloody Assizes.” Defoe’s name appears on a General Pardon issued by James II in 1687. At the Glorious Revolution, he was among the London merchants who welcomed William III, who favored the Dissenters, and Defoe wrote poems and journalism in his praise and was even employed by William as a secret agent in Scotland.
With the death of William and the succession of Anne in 1702, Dissent immediately came under attack by Anne’s Tory government, which attempted to pass a bill to repeal William and Mary’s Act of Toleration (1688), which had granted full citizenship rights to Dissenters who took Anglican communion at least once in a calendar year. Defoe responded with an anonymous pamphlet, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” in which he put on the mask of a radical Tory churchman, an impersonation so complete that no one suspected the writer was a Whig Presbyterian. His arguments advocating the execution of Dissenting ministers and the transportation of their flocks were radical but not preposterous by the standards of that age.1 Defoe declared that he meant it as “a banter,” but, far from being read as irony, “The Shortest Way” was read literally, with terror by Dissenters who feared that its principles might be put into practice, and with dismay by the radical Tories, who were uncomfortable seeing their unspoken fantasies exposed in cold print.
No straightforward presentation of his genuine political sentiments could have accomplished what Defoe achieved through his imposture. On the one hand, complacent Dissenters were alerted that the Bill to Prevent Occasional Conformity was only the first step in a program of persecution; and on the other, the more moderate Tories, like Prime Minister Robert Harley, were made to see the alarming potential consequences of their alliance with the extremists within their party. In terms of concrete political action, Defoe hoped to give the Whigs in the House of Lords the courage to defeat the Occasional Conformity Bill, which they did.
It was a brilliantly successful political hoax, except in its consequences for Defoe. The pamphlet was declared a seditious libel, and Defoe was tried and condemned to stand in the pillory for three days and to pay a huge fine. The pillory was a triumph – the sympathetic onlookers threw flowers rather than rotten vegetables at Defoe – but the fine was beyond his means, and he was held in Newgate for eight months, while his principal business – a brick and tile works – went bankrupt. Eventually, Robert Harley visited Defoe in Newgate and recognized his potential usefulness; Harley had his fine paid from secret service funds and Defoe, freed from prison, became a secret agent and journalist, a professional writer with a dangerous talent for impersonation.
From 1703 until his death in 1731, Defoe became one of the most prolific writers in the first age of journalism. Because most work was published anonymously, as many as 545 different titles have been ascribed to Defoe; more conservative bibliographical scholars have cut that back to the high two hundreds, ranging from four‐page pamphlets to multi‐volume works, the most massive of which was The Review, a four‐page newspaper written entirely by Defoe issued three times a week for most of Queen Anne’s reign. Much of Defoe’s other journalism is factual, like his account (The Storm, 1704) of the impact of a hurricane that hit England in 1703. He also wrote lengthy “self‐help” works like The Complete English Tradesman (1726), a manual explaining current business practices, including accounting, for aspiring merchants, and travel literature, like A Tour thro’ the Whole Isle of Great Britain (1724–27). Two of his early works (The Consolidator, 1705, and Atlantis Major, 1711) were fiction, at least technically, but they are not much like the novels Defoe was later to write: these were allegorical narratives satirizing British politicians from Harley’s perspective, heading off the possible charge of libel by using invented names, and by setting the action on the moon and on the island of Atlantis.
Defoe’s major novels were all produced in a short phase of Defoe’s career, and all of them are impersonations, fictional autobiographies with a complex factual basis, beginning with Robinson Crusoe (1719) and ending with Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724).2 Just as Robinson Crusoe was based on factual stories of a number of castaways including Alexander Selkirk, expanded and reimagined by Defoe, Moll Flanders was based on the factual stories of a variety of female adventurers and criminals from Mary Carleton during the Restoration to Mary Godson alias “Moll King,” who was in Newgate awaiting transportation when Moll Flanders was published. It was written rapidly: in addition to Moll Flanders, Defoe published two other pseudofactual novels in 1722: A Journal of the Plague Year, a first‐hand account of what London was like during the bubonic outbreak of 1665,3 and Colonel Jacque, an episodic narrative about a young rogue who successively becomes, through either happenstance or divine Providence, a cutpurse, a slave, a soldier, and a tradesman.
The last five words of the novel, “Written in the Year 1683,” taken with Moll’s statement that she is “almost seventy Years of Age,” might misleadingly suggest a historical narrative of the seventeenth century, which is certainly not what Defoe wrote. Though Moll herself ages from a child to an elderly woman, history in effect stands still in the novel; the penal laws, social structures, and domestic fashions all belong to the date of publication, 1722. It is not merely that the novel omits any mention of the social upheavals of the seventeenth century, such as the English Civil War, the Protectorate of Cromwell, and the Restoration. There are also anachronisms in what does happen. For example, Moll’s mother is transported as a convicted felon to Virginia soon after Moll’s birth, though transportation as an alternative to capital punishment was extremely rare before the Transportation Act of 1718, and the Virginia colony would have been in its earliest days in 1613.4
While Defoe doubtless wrote primarily to entertain the reader, he was very mindful, as he stresses in his Preface, to convey what he considered useful information that might benefit his readers. So it is no accident that, during the crime wave of the 1720s, Defoe’s novel gives us an extensive compendium of the tricks that thieves used to relieve London’s shopkeepers and pedestrians of their money and valuables. Technically, these matters are presented from Moll’s perspective, though occasionally, when the impersonation thins, we may feel we are hearing the journalist Daniel Defoe rather than Moll the thief warning imprudent readers how to protect themselves. Larceny is Defoe’s most fascinating topic, but the novel also presents Defoe’s analysis of women’s inferior legal position, inside and outside marriage; of the dog‐eat‐dog world of early capitalism, including the insecurity of money investments; and of the defects, both accidental and systematic, of the current legal system.
We have come to call Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders, but the actual title is one of those monstrous outlines of the entire contents of the novel common in the eighteenth century:
Moll’s story is often designed to be suspenseful, but the title page and Defoe’s Preface outline the contents in such a way that our interest in the narrative is refocused away from what is going to happen toward how and why it comes about. Like Oroonoko, Moll Flanders purports to be a factual narrative, a “private History,” and not one of those “Novels and Romances” that are currently being published. Unlike Oroonoko, it is written from the title character’s own perspective, with the editor intervening with her at the verbal level, to tell her story “in Language fit to be read.” The editor also confesses to omitting stories too vicious to be told at all, and to abbreviating others, so as not to “offend the chastest Reader or the modestest Hearer.” The editor claims, in fact, that “there is not a wicked Action in any Part of it, but is first or last rendered Unhappy and Unfortunate.” It’s not exactly true, but it allows Defoe’s contemporary reader to indulge in the pleasures of a racy narrative with plenty of sex and violence with the promise that the experience will also be morally improving.
A fair amount of ink has been spilled about whether Moll Flanders is or is not a picaresque novel, the controversy centering of whether Moll herself should be considered a picara (Spanish for “rogue”), given her aspiration, throughout most of her life, to become a “gentlewoman” and her flirtation with penitence during her stay at Newgate. It’s also true that Moll changes in character as she goes through life in ways that the archetypal picaro, Lazarillo de Tormes, does not. What is not controversial is that Moll Flanders is an episodic novel: there is a single line of action rather than several interwoven lines, and the action takes place in discrete episodes. Most characters appear in only a single episode and disappear forever once the episode concludes.
Only two characters are exceptions: Moll’s Lancashire husband Jemy, whom Moll spots briefly as a highwayman shortly after they have agreed to “divorce” and whom she rediscovers in Newgate Prison after the commutation of her death sentence; and Moll’s “governess,” whom we meet as her hostess for her last lying‐in, and who becomes her fence during her career as a thief, and her agent on her return to Virginia. Defoe at one point hints that both these characters have interesting stories of their own, preparing the reader for sequels such as the one he wrote for Robinson Crusoe, but he never got around to writing them. An anonymous imitator of Defoe, however, published in a single volume an abridged life of Moll, followed by an invented life of her Governess (“Jane Hackabout”) and of Moll’s favorite husband (“James MacFaul”).5
Defoe’s episodes differ wildly in length: Moll’s career as a thief is told in what are usually very brief episodes, some running to only a single paragraph. The lengthiest episode is that of Moll’s first love affair, her secret liaison with the eldest son in the family where she is a servant and her marriage to his younger brother, which runs close to 20,000 words, about one‐seventh of the entire novel. Even here the action is comparatively rapid, though: a more prolix author like Richardson would narrate a tale of similar complexity – the first part of Pamela – in over 200,000 words.
Another feature of Moll Flanders is that it is a retrospective narration: Moll at the age of around 70 is purportedly writing the events of her long and varied life. This feature allows Defoe to present a double perspective: we can see the event as Moll saw it at the time, or as she views it in the light of experience, or Moll can present both visions at once, with Defoe allowing the reader to sort out the differences. During Moll’s first love affair, with the eldest son of the family she serves at Colchester, her lover gets her to agree to a private engagement, professing his intent to marry her once he comes into his estate and is free to do as he pleases, giving her £100 in gold at the outset and the promise of more to come – after which the virginal Moll, who is indeed passionately attracted to him, allows him “the last Favour.” For the most part, we follow these maneuvers from the perspective of the young inexperienced Moll, dizzy with both the kisses he gives her and the gold he puts into her hand, but at one point Defoe gives us Moll’s retrospective comment on all this:
The mature Moll views what happens from a commercial perspective, seeing two parties negotiating, both underestimating their own bargaining position. The elder brother does not realize that Moll is so ready to consummate their relationship that a minor bribe would be enough to secure what he desires, while Moll does not realize that her lover might actually have married her if she had prudently held back. Both young Moll and old Moll further realize that the illicit sexual relationship is both sinful according to religion and dishonorable according to current social mores, but neither Moll is much influenced by either one, provided their affair is prudently and secretly conducted, as in fact it is.
Ian Watt considered Defoe a pioneer of what he called “formal realism,” but Defoe was not particularly interested in conveying physical descriptions of people or of clothing or furniture. We know from others quoted as well as her own testimony that Moll herself is a handsome woman and, when she cross‐dresses during her years as a thief we learn that she is tall but “too smooth‐faced for a man,” but we never learn whether she is a blonde or a brunette. What Defoe excels at is presenting the inner life of his characters with the kind of detail that conveys a sense of its psychological truth.
This is a talent Defoe developed in the course of his novelistic experiments. Sometimes, in Robinson Crusoe, we may have a sense that we are reading something crudely manufactured, as in this passage taken from Crusoe’s final attempt to salvage useful objects from the wreck of his ship. Crusoe smiles at the sight of money, preaches himself a sermon on its uselessness on his desert island, where nothing has exchange value, then by force of habit takes it off the ship along with the useful tools he has also found:
That money is carefully put away, and although it grows moldy, Crusoe eventually takes it off the island and it returns to England with him. What feels wrong is the sermon: it interests Defoe, but the mask slips and the careful impersonation of Crusoe temporarily lapses. There are episodes like this in Moll Flanders as well, as when Moll and her Governess moralize together over her theft of money and valuables from a gentleman in a coach, who picks Moll up at Bartholomew Fair, whose drunken state had made him her prey: “The usage may, for ought I know, do more to reform him, than all the Sermons that ever he will hear in his Life, and … so it did.” Serves him right, Moll says, but how are we to take these animadversions against drunkenness coming from a thief and her fence? (The question of whether Defoe meant these passages, among others, as irony against the hypocrisy of his narrators is taken up later.)
But Moll Flanders is also full of passages that penetrate to the heart of human psychology, as in this vivid narrative of Moll in Newgate. Condemned to death – but temporarily reprieved through the mediation of a clergyman – she waits in the condemned cell as those who, like her, had been sentenced to hang prepare for their final journey to Tyburn:
Moll Flanders is not primarily a religious narrative, but Defoe is recording a kind of “born again” experience that Moll undergoes in Newgate, and it feels intense and genuine in its violent physicality. Once Moll’s sentence has been commuted to transportation, she begins to think less about the afterlife and more about what her life will be like in Virginia and, on the voyage there, practical matters intrude and take over the narrative, but Defoe has had his spiritual moment.
Defoe also brilliantly conveys the way in which Moll quickly acclimatizes herself to the trade of stealing. Her very first theft is of “a little Bundle wrapp’d in white Cloth” which she takes unobserved from an apothecary’s shop in Leadenhall Street:
The fugue state with which Moll walks and runs with her little bundle contrasts with the intelligent deliberation with which she makes her escape from her second theft, a necklace of golden beads worth £12, from a little child:
After her first theft, Moll is lucky not to have boxed the compass in her panic and returned to the apothecary’s shop, but after this next adventure Moll seems to know exactly where she is at each moment and is headed indirectly toward a busy thoroughfare where she knows she can get lost in the crowd.
The only element that may strain our credulity, if we bother to reflect on it, is Moll’s being able to remember that precise route from Bartholomew Close to the Holborn Viaduct at the time she writes her “memorandums,” some twenty years after the event. Defoe occasionally leaves signs of an authorial presence behind Moll’s retrospective narrative, but they are signs and not signals; we aren’t meant to pick them up, because the illusion of the fiction disappears as soon as we do.
Once she has escaped with the golden necklace, Moll’s reflects on her theft:
We hear about Moll’s “many tender Thoughts” only two sentences after she tells us that, right after lifting the necklace from the little girl, “the Devil put me upon killing the Child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry.” And like her sermon on drink the morning after robbing a drunken gentleman in a coach, Moll’s argues that the child’s vain mother and careless maidservant will be taught a valuable lesson by the loss of the necklace to behave with less vanity and with more prudence. We know from his nonfictional writings that Defoe would be in essential agreement with what Moll says: he knew how dangerous London was to those who were careless, distracted or impaired. But in Moll Flanders, these sentiments can come from nowhere except from Moll, so how is the reader to take a statement about the dangers of London from a woman who has become precisely one of those dangers? Are we meant to agree with her, to laugh at her shameless hypocrisy, or what?
Passages like this one occur throughout the novel. Once Moll’s repentance in prison has helped procure the commutation of her death sentence, Moll goes back into action as the economically driven survivor we have seen throughout her life, taking with her to Virginia £300 in gold and stolen goods worth far more than that, without even thinking of making restitution, and lying both to Jemy and to her son Humphry as needed to get herself the most secure life in that colony. Horrified from childhood at the thought of servitude, Moll buys in Virginia a white woman and a black man, whom she dehumanizes, calling them “things absolutely necessary for all People that pretended to Settle in that Country.”
Clearly there is massive moral muddle here, but whose muddle is it and what is the reader to think about it? Ian Watt has put this formal question with great clarity:
Another sort of contradiction has to do with matters factual. Moll tells us that “the first Account I could ever recollect … of my self” was of travelling with a band of Gypsies, and hiding so that she was left by them in Colchester and picked up by the parish authorities. But if this is so, then it is impossible that Moll could have proven to her mother in Virginia “by … Tokens she could not deny that I was no other, nor more or less than her own Child, her Daughter born of her Body in Newgate” because there is no way she could have any such tokens. After Moll is arrested and taken to Newgate, she is at first horrified by the prison, but after a few days she becomes acculturated and is “as naturally pleas’d and easie with the Place as if indeed I had been Born there.” As if indeed! The readers can hardly have forgotten that Moll was born in Newgate – it is the crux of the incestuous third marriage – and if we had, Moll reminded us of it only a few pages earlier. Could Moll be so muddled? Could Defoe?
Ralph Rader’s characterization of Moll Flanders as an “imitation of naïve incoherent autobiography” seems the most adequate that has been developed, because it accounts not only for what readers find in the novel but the way in which scholars have argued about it. The authorial plane, which gives us a place to stand and judge literary characters, is missing here; and because of Defoe’s virtual absence, we have to judge the characters in Moll Flanders as we do actual people in an autobiography or memoir, about which readers can legitimately differ. Defoe built his novel on the basis of real memoirs, as a false true story.
Of course, using real autobiographies and memoirs as models will get Defoe only so far, and there is also the danger of losing one’s audience by writing as badly as semiliterate authors. Defoe accounts for the general decorousness of Moll’s language in his Preface: she has been “edited” into conformity with contemporary taste. And Defoe ensures that the content will be interesting by stuffing the narrative full of incident: Moll gets married not once but five times, for example, each time to a different sort of husband with a different mode of courtship. (Once married, though, Moll has nothing much to say about her life within marriage, aside from accounting for the number of children she has had and the amount of cash with which she is left once the relationship ends. Moll makes all her husbands happy, and happy families are all alike.)
Some of the episodes are interesting because they are extraordinarily improbable. What are the odds that Moll’s third husband would turn out to be her own half‐brother? What are the odds that Moll would notice that a fleeing highwayman, seen from a distance, was her fourth husband Jemy, and be able to turn the hue and cry after him and his gang in the wrong direction? What are the odds that Moll, a long‐known but never convicted criminal, would get her sentence commuted to transportation? There is even a supernatural moment when Moll calls out to Jemy after they part and he hears her calling though she is by now twelve miles away.
In addition to these extraordinary moments there are episodes which Rader terms the “unsensational ordinary made interesting … by systematically crossing the lines of expected effect.”7 (Fact, Fiction and Form, 2011, 180–1). When Moll finds out she has inadvertently married her own brother, we expect an explosion; instead she comes to the conclusion that “it was absolutely necessary to conceal it all and not make the least Discovery to Mother or Husband,” and she holds her peace for three whole years. Moll sleeps in bed with the Man from Bath for “near two year,” without having sex with him. Moll, when she has become a thief, is given a horse to hold while she is standing in the street, and out of force of habit she walks off with it; it seems to be found money, except that she realizes, after she has brought it to her lodgings, that there is no safe way to dispose of it. And once Moll has been taken to Newgate, Moll’s Governess offers one of the witnesses £100 not to testify against her – and we are told that this represents over 30 times her annual wage – but for no particular reason the “jade” absolutely refuses to go along.
Another source of the realistic effect has to do with the texture of the narrative, particularly the clunky transitions between episodes. One can see this most easily at the end of Moll’s first marriage to Robin, her first lover’s younger brother, which lasts for five years, until Robin’s death. Moll immediately casts her accounts, letting us know that Robin “left me a Widow with about £1200 in my Pocket. My two Children were indeed taken happily off of my Hands by my Husband’s Father and Mother, and that by the way was all they got by Mrs. Betty.”8 That sounds like an authoritative ending to the episode, closing off all the causal lines before Moll begins the world again, as she is to do repeatedly in the rest of the novel. Yet the next paragraph harks back to the torch she carried for her lost first love, Robin’s elder brother: “I confess I was not suitably afflicted with the loss of my Husband,” and concludes that: “I committed Adultery and Incest with [the elder brother] every Day in my Desires, which without Doubt was as effectually Criminal in the Nature of the Guilt, as if I had actually done it.” Is that it, end of story? No, for a further paragraph tells us about her removal with Robin to London, and about her first lover’s marriage in Colchester, and her maneuvers to avoid going to the wedding because “I could not bear the sight of his being given to another Woman, tho’ I knew I was never to have him my self.” And finally, after two false endings, that segment of story is over (“I was now, as above, left loose to the World”) and the narrative is now free to begin the sequence that will lead to Moll’s second marriage. Professional writers – and Defoe was a consummate professional – don’t generally end story segments that way, which makes us believe the more firmly that Moll was real and that these are, more or less, her very words.
The incoherence of the writing is matched by the incoherence of the structure. Life in Moll Flanders is very much like our own lives: one damned thing after another. The courtship/marriage stories don’t build up to a climax; we have no way of predicting by its place in sequence whether Moll will wind up wealthy, moderately comfortable, or impoverished when her current husband dies or runs away, or agrees to separate. But there is a transition: after the final marriage, Moll slowly sinks into poverty and, once she is almost entirely without funds, is tempted to become a thief. The crime narratives are shorter, but equally unpredictable: Moll grows in skill as she learns her craft, but she also takes great risks at times. She admits that she has realized enough from her crimes to retire, but she does not do so; she has found something she is good at and she enjoys practicing her craft. As with the final marriage, we know that the final episode in her life of crime must be a disaster – because only being caught will lead Moll to the next phase of her life, to Newgate and the Old Bailey, to trial and condemnation and penitence, and ultimately to her new life with Jemy in Virginia. These phases of Moll’s life are emplotted, but they are emplotted the way our own lives are. We are all children, then grownups; we marry and have children, sometimes more than once; we have jobs and we succeed or we fail; ultimately, we retire, grow old, decline, and die. Similarly, here Moll has phases as a girl, a wife, a thief, a prisoner, a transportee.
Within an episode, Moll may keep us in the dark about the outcome for a long while, but at other times she will predict in advance the way things are going to go. “I was not averse to a Tradesman,” Moll tells us when she is on the lookout for a second husband, “but then I would have a Tradesman, forsooth, that was something of a Gentleman too; that … he might become a Sword, and look as like a Gentleman, as another Man.” In seeking this “amphibious Creature … call’d, a Gentleman‐Tradesman,” she says, “I was not Trepan’d I confess, but I betray’d my self.” Given this prolepsis (flash‐forward), we are hardly surprised when Moll’s second marriage ends in failure, in her husband’s bankruptcy and his flight abroad, and with Moll much less wealthy than she had been before she met him. Similarly, during the life of crime, Moll proleptically flags the episode when she works with “a young Woman and a Fellow that went for her Husband,” by telling us that, “they robb’d together, lay together, were taken together, and at last were hang’d together.”
Since we know from the title page and the preface that Moll’s career as a thief leads to her becoming a transported felon, we are certain that some day or other she is going to be caught. But, in addition, we are reminded of this several times as we draw closer to the end of Moll’s career. The first foreshadowing occurs when Moll is falsely arrested by a shopkeeper (both she and the actual thief were wearing widow’s weeds). The real thief is caught while Moll is in the hands of the constable, and Moll demands reparation for the false arrest, and gets £150 plus a black silk dress, and her attorney’s fees to boot. Moll totals up her wealth and discovers that though she has over £700 and could retire from the life of crime, she “could not forbear going Abroad again.” Six episodes further on, there is a second foreshadowing: her Governess “began to talk of leaving off while we were well” but Moll sees no reason to stop. What follows is a complex narrative in which Moll travels into East Anglia where she preys on shopkeepers in market towns and on other travelers. We follow her route from London to Cambridge to Bury St. Edmunds, then to Harwich and Ipswich, and from there to Colchester. Colchester, we cannot have forgotten, is where her youth was spent, where as a servant girl Moll fell in love with a young gentleman and wound up marrying his younger brother. So, in a sense, the traveling episode has us circling back to Moll’s past, and the only place before Colchester is her birthplace, in Newgate Prison. And indeed, when Moll brings her narrative back to London, she is caught almost immediately. This is the most “shapely” and proto‐novelistic element in Moll Flanders, the one episode which seems to hint at a novelist pulling the strings, rather than life in the raw. The full emergence of the authorial plane, though, we find in the next chapter on Richardson’s Pamela.