Moll Flanders

"Yes, his name wasn’t put on the book for several decades afterwards. The full title of the novel is The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders . So it’s trying to make the claim that it’s a true story, which is supposed to bring the punters in. But Defoe, from the outset, is always playing with the idea that people will know it’s a fiction; they won’t really think it’s true. The novel is based on an actual woman called Moll King who was an accomplice of a well-known organized crime boss in the 18th century called Jonathan Wild. Defoe found out about Moll King when he was visiting a journalist he’d collaborated with in Newgate Prison in the late 1710s. Moll King was irrepressible. She was constantly committing crimes—I think she was sentenced to transportation to America four times and went twice. On both occasions, she came back, which was illegal. She was also constantly making new marriages. Defoe adapted this story for Moll Flanders , which is the story of a woman who is born in Newgate Prison, where her mother was a prisoner, and goes on to lead a life of crime. What’s groundbreaking about Moll Flanders is that even though Moll is a criminal, a prostitute, a swindler, and a total scoundrel, she’s depicted as a kind of genius entrepreneur. She turns crime into a business, and she turns marriage into a business as well, always upgrading from one husband to another. She scatters illegitimate children across the globe. At one point, she even marries her half-brother. There’s a real interest in incest in the 18th century, and Moll Flanders is one of the novels it comes up in. Then, eventually, she returns to America and has a happy reunion with the one husband that she truly loved and makes lots of money. You could make the claim that Moll Flanders is one of the early feminist texts. She’s very likeable. She has huge amounts of energy and no mental health issues. She doesn’t seem to suffer from anxiety at all. Defoe recognized as early as Robinson Crusoe that he had to figure out how to break stories up into manageable units, and he did come up with ways to divide up the book, into his journal, into different locations he visits, and so on. But the idea of the chapter as a formal convention of novels hadn’t really kicked in. That actually comes with Tom Jones…"