The turning part of the novel, back from Virginia, will be summarized as briefly as possible with an eye on social conventions and economic circumstances.
2nd 2-Hour Recording
Moll’s husband was jailed for debt. He had squandered most of their goods. Being a gentleman, he advised her, “fop” that he was, from behind bars, to make off with what goods she had in that she might have been jailed for his debt. Her husband escaped the poor house jail and fled to France. “My husband was so civil to me,” Moll recalls her husband, sending letters and money from France. They had a child, her and this gentleman “draper,” which had died at birth. Moll disguised herself as a widow and called herself “Mrs. Flanders,” and entered a debtor prison, to avoid being taken up by creditors. She managed to make some money off of the upper class men in that place. “These men were too wicked even for me,” so she quit the place.
With “not a friend or relation in the world… and filled with horror at the place I was in, I resolved to be gone.” Moll, allied with a widow who was in “the mint,” returned with that widow of a merchant ship captain to her house and met various men who of the sea who saw in a wife “advantage,” in the form of money that could “put the young man into a good ship.” In London, “love ahd no share,” in the matter of marriage, “that money only made women agreeable,” and that the beauty, piety, shape or character that man wished in a whore, was not a concern in a wife, that a wife was a business partner. Wanting to marry, Moll found that the men had much choice everywhere in a wife, but that women had no ability to inquire as to the “character, morals, or substance,” let alone his financial state. The various widows were preyed upon by young captains and ship masters looking to marry a financial backer, yet these men “had but little money to recommend them.”
It was common for ship captains to have multiple wives in different ports, especially in the West Indies, to support their maritime enterprises, which were very risky. The loss of a ship would ruin a captain. Moll does marry a young captain, who owns three plantations in Virginia. She did not want to go there, but agreed, as he was the most pleasant sort of man. Handing over all f her money she accompanied him to where his mother lived. Storms and pirates bedeviled them.
But, at last Moll got to meet her new mother who tells her story, that she was to be hanged in Newgate for a thief, but plead her belly, gave birth and was transported to Virginia, leaving the baby behind. Her master and mistress had been kind. Many of the leading people having been “burnt in the hand,” branded as a thief, including a major and a judge, a “Newgate bird.”
Her mother does inform her that of the two sorts of people who come to Virginia, that the first were servants, “more properly called slaves,” and the second felons. Her mother’s mistress had died and her master took her to wife. She eventually inherited the estate on his passing and lived well.
Here Moll discovers that she has been sleeping with her brother, that this is her mother. No longer being able to “bed” with her husband and unable to tell him why for shame, the marriage goes rotten. Jilted, widowed, deserted, and now marooned in incest in a place very distant from home and hard to escape one’s master or husband, Moll was threatened with imprisonment by her husband, by being “put to the cure,” in a madhouse or to begin punishment by violence. There were step children to consider, Moll’s half brother having lost his first wife, as was so often the case in that age. The river of orphans streaming across the Atlantic for a hundred years before Defoe wrote, must have resulted in known, suspected or unknown cases of incest. Such might have been one of the reasons why it was unlawful for servants to wed servants in the plantations as no assurance that such a union was not “unlawful,” in relation to incest.
A remarkable scene when is when moll is negotiating with her husband/brother that he not punish her for revealing him the truth, nor discover it to any other person except his mother. This involved the writing of signed contracts. “To ask you under your hand,” that the husband would write down guarantees not to punish his wife for revealing the truth about their parentage. She reasoned with her brother to discuss “a scheme for the government” of their situation. He hung himself. The women cut him down “with the help of a negro servant.” Surviving he agreed to let her return to England as a sister and that they would feign that she had passed so he could marry again.
“After eight years in that country,” Moll was returning with a cargo in August. Her tobacco cargo had been spoiled in a storm and reduced to “two or three-hundred pounds on the whole.” Moll claimed, or hoped, to have a share in the family’s Virginia tobacco business and expected a regular income with the annual coming of the fleet. “Are the Virginia ships taken by the French?” was one great concern.
Terms for prostitution included “contracting an unlawful treaty,” “gallantry,” “wicked correspondence,” and “keeping an ill house.” Moll suffered from a “narrowness” of her “circumstances.” She frequented The Bath and found cheap lodging with a sympathetic woman. She became, through long negotiation, the mistress of a gentleman whose wife was insane and under the care of her relatives. Again, known as “the widow” but still a young woman, courtship with this gentleman revolved around negotiated finances. When he grew sick she acted as his nurse and wife. The fear of poverty, loneliness and the loss of a single loved one grows thick about the story. The concern for propriety and an image of chastity, “to put an honest face on the thing,” remains a focus of the story of lonely people wanting company as much as pleasure. Eventually, Moll proves the hussy, “thus the government of our virtue was broken,” and she was “a whore.” It is a cold measure of the times that morality was vested in law and private life in government and that a long term monogamous relationship between two adults no longer eligible to marry, amounted to whoring, simply because written contracts had not been drawn up. Her gallant man put her up with a residence, a midwife, wet-nurse and maidservant, to take care of her child, “a fine boy indeed,” and was finally in the “height of her prosperity,” wanted more than ever to be a “wife,” but that there was no room for that, and that men who keep mistresses some times exchange them. Her life was “the most undesigned thing in the world.”
Fear of poverty remains Moll’s chief concern, over six years, with the second and third children she delivered of him not surviving. He sent a letter that he was unwell and at the last extremity. Moll had a sad heart over the passing of her man and wondered how to “bestow myself over the residue of my life,” with a modest savings, no income, and a five year old boy, as she must have been in he late 40s.
The Virginia described by Defoe was of the late 1680s or 1690s. The England of Moll’s alter life, that is described, and more briefly summarized is of interest in that its terrible economic circumstances and severe lack of compassion for the unfortunate was the seed crop of American plantations and workhouses of the 1700s. England wanted dearly to be rid of its poor and its jail birds, one in the same population, and had a hard tie selling off women out of Newgate, for it was men who were wanted to clear the American forests. Newgate was bursting with female felons in the time of Jenny Voss. But by 1700, with light industry in the new cities and the need for housemaids in the great plantations women would begin to be exported more and hung less.
The British Critical Review would warn of Americans in the midst of the next century, “Beware the complicated cunning of the race whose Adam and Eve emigrated from Newgate.” Note that all who so emigrated were, by definition, shipped in chains, to labor against their will.
The points of order concerning widows, orphans and criminals in parts 3 thru 6 of Moll Flanders will not be summarized in narrative form but noted as social conditions as an overture to Of A Planted Land: In this New Isrаel—1700s
