Published in 1722 by Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders is either a pseudonymous or anonymous biography of a woman born in Newgate Gaol and still alive in 1722, is begun with much apology to the sensibilities of the upper class reader. It is written on two levels, for the lower and upper class, and seems to have been based on actual interviews by Defoe, who made many criminal connections while in and out of prison for debt. By the standards of our current morality there is very little to impugn the character of Moll, who, begins her story at age 3, as an orphan child of a criminal woman who had been condemned to die. The woman was instead permitted to give birth to the baby and was then sold off to the Plantations, as a “transport” never to be heard of again, having “plead her belly,” in defense against execution. Moll, through the pen of her biographer, Defoe, states that while in another country, probably France, orphans of the condemned were brought up in schools and “put out to service,” as servants, that in England there were no such institutions. Money, and the need for it to keep from starvation is the central theme of Moll’s childhood.

Using the audiobook, it is clear that Defoe wrote his work in fear of censorship or worse, as his introduction, he devotes page upon page to apologizing for telling the story of a woman who had been a Newgate orphan [which was odious], a whore, a thief, a transport and a bawd, but was now penitent. The fact that Moll, now a respected woman of about sixty, was penitent and had come to Christ, is excused mostly in this manner. Defoe writes like Dickens a hundred years later, and indicts society like him as well. He lived in a harder time and continually apologizes to the upper class reader who might take offense, blaming Moll, the victim, in her own words as much as narratively feasible. Defoe places the Christian morality of England in the material realm, with the breaking of the unjust and predatory laws of man amounting to an affront to God. The Anglican church is involved in the processing of orphans into a useful capacity, with a former woman of substance, supported by Church donations in raising up Moll and a parcel of other ophans. These are to be put out at age 8 or older, as soon as they might become useful as servants. Moll has a great dread of “being put out to service,” is pretty, well spoken, energetic, loving and hard working, producing good clothing as young as age 8.

She begs and pleads and promises to work hard for her “mother” and “earn” her “bread.” She is so darling and able with her needle work that local ladies of substance visit her and refer to her as “Mrs. Betty” and “the Little Gentle Woman.” For Moll’s chief ambition, when asked, is “to be a gentle Woman.” When asked about her ideal of a gentle woman by real gentle women, and her nanny fallen from status through some misfortune to orphan rearing, the girl, from age 4, answers that a gentle woman was a lady who could work with her hands well enough to earn her keep and her bread, not to starve. This notion was the height of naive comedy in the eyes of her worldly benefactors. The girl has become an avatar of innocence yet to learn of her preordained earthly damnation. She is become a pet of hope to her jaded betters.

Moll was a girl of three when she was found by the mayor. She had been traveling with gypsies or “Egyptians,” who did not keep her, and had not yet blackened her skin to make her look like one of them. She hid, and when they moved on, appealed to adult charity, and found it. This eventually runs out, at about age 16 when her mother died. At every turn, the major subtext emerges, that as bad as Moll had it as a child, girl and young maid, that she was “most fortunate.” She was adopted by a family of substance, the father an esquire, the mother lording it over three homely daughters and two sons involved in profitable business.

Tricked by the eldest son that he will marry her when he comes into his estate, she falls in love with him and serves as his mistress. Then, the youngest son openly courts her, scandalizing the family. Moll, in love with the older son in secret, is heart broken when he proposes that she marry his brother. Conscious now that she had been tricked into use “as a whore,” thinking she was at the brink of being his wife, she manages to keep their secret, winning the approval of the mother through high character. For she would not elope, but demanded from her sick bed to only marry into the family if the parents agreed. The older brother gets the younger so drunk on the wedding night that he does not recall having relations, and is assured by Moll that they did, as a way of avoiding discovery that she was not a virgin.

Moll and her husband move off, she giving him two sons. They were loyal husband and wife. He died after 5 years a wife in her mid twenties. The class separation then swept in, with the family of her husband taking the children, her children, away from her. Earlier, when her “mother’ had died, the kind lady’s “daughter” had arrived and put Moll, the step child, out, even holding back the money the good maid had held for the girl. The death of a husband, for any woman not part of a family of status with inter-generational wealth, was a sentence of economic death, loss of lodging, income, and usually the children. These were either taken by gentlefolk relatives as their own, or taken by Church Wardens one at a time to be put out to service in exchange for bread for the widow and other children. Moll’s plight reminds us that the high parent mortality rate of the age maid for many an orphan and step child, that to make of a child of two loving parents and orphan, required but the death of one. This thread will run down through the pages of this inquiry.

Moll was befriended by a woman of semi-gentile status, who had a “gentlemanly” brother. She had hidden her wealth, every shilling and pound given to her by the two sons of her adopted family, and earned through her work. Earlier, much of the conversation in her adopted family, centered on marriage for the brothers that wooed her, that she had no name, and no many to recommend her, that men married for money, to get their hands on a woman’s assets inherited from her family. In Moll’s case she had her own money. When she married the “gentlemanly” fellow, she soon realized that she had stepped off a precipice. She relates that she went along with his many suggestions to spend “their” money, being unwise and weak in moral fiber.

The increasingly jaded protagonist takes blame for every misfortune, speaking editorially to the upper class reader of Defoe’s peers, and at the same time, bluntly to the lower class reader for whom her story was a best case relation of their many fears; the triumph of a jailhouse orphan. She seems to have been a composite of a few women, with her mother based on the “London Jilt,” Jenny Voss who was hanged for thievery in the 1690s. If the main person interviewed by Defoe was born, as he writes, 60 years earlier, then that puts her date of birth at 1642. This was the initial boom time for transportation to Virginia, in which George Alsop and John Hammond were caught up in the 1650s. These men would be forced to write glowing portrayals of Virginia and Maryland in return for being freed from the brutal service there. Both put a socially critical subtext in their accounts, as does Defoe in Moll Flanders and his General History of the Pyrates. The latter was written from debtors prison from accounts by actual pirates.

In Moll Flanders, in the darling voice of that daughter of misfortune, Defoe ever softens the cruel blows of the English system of “use” of people and of the preeminence of money over all humanity, by assuring the reader that these terrible misfortunes by this sympathetic and self-critical daughter of original sin, were due to “the wickedness of the times.” This absolution of the predatory merchant class, the amoral gentility and uncaring “wardens” of Christian “charity,” reflected in the story, by way of suggestion that the well-to-do reader of the 1720s occupied a morally higher station then the debouched middle and upper classes of the late 1600s. This was genius self-editing. A merchant or church man of the time could read this as reflecting the corruption under Charles I of the 1640s and 50s, and of Charles II from the 1670s. The gentile reader could assume that the Puritan Protectorate of the 1650s and 60s was the wicked times in question. However, the lowly reader, the maid or servant, who was not permitted to walk up the stairs of the upper floor where the master class slept, could read Moll’s story as yet true all around.

Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year set in 1666 gave us a picture of period morals. Moll Flanders and Robinson Caruso [based on a real person’s tragedy] take us over the cusp of the arbitrary year of 1700. By the 1720s, in debtor’s prison, the famous writer, the Steven King of his day, will lead us into the first quarter of 1700s English society, across classes, from the precarious perch of good fortune into the yawning abyss of misfortune. To close Planting America, Moll Flanders is a good distillation of the hazards of economic and class navigation that faced the working class person of that age.