HISTORY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews Moll: The Life and Times of Moll FlandersBy Sian Rees Chatto & Windus, 224pp. £18.99
IT WAS THE WORST of times; it was the best of times to invent the novel. Daniel Defoe, who was born around 1660 and died in 1731, struggled to make a living in London as a journalist, a pamphleteer and a secret-service agent, when crime was even more widespread and punishment more severe than in London this summer. Can we blame him for writing novels, though they led the way for Dickens, Cartland and Archer? In the 17th century, plague killed a fifth of the population of London; the Great Fire of 1666 devastated the city; England was blighted by the civil war between the royalists and Roundheads, war with the Dutch, regicide and acute poverty. When starving people were caught stealing as little as a loaf of bread they were liable to hanging, drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, being crushed to death with large weights and even being forced to sail to America to cultivate tobacco.
Desperate to make ends meet, Defoe resorted to the profitable new idea of the "false memoir", adapting readily available reports of harrowing experiences into melodramatic first-person narratives. Thus he produced Robinson Crusoe, based on Alexander Selkirk's recent account of four years marooned on a Pacific island, Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Roxanaand Moll Flanders, the last of these the subject of Siân Rees's excellent literary and sociological history.
To reveal the probable sources of Defoe's quasi-fictional autobiography of Moll Flanders, Rees tells the stories of some actual contemporary Molls, Moll Raby, Moll Hawkins and Moll King, in all their flamboyant, adventurous squalor, in England and on "His Majesty's Plantations" in Virginia and Maryland. While comparing the criminal careers of all the Molls, one is able to appreciate how much more arduous lower-class life could be then than it is said to be now. According to the OED, the name Moll was a 17th-century version of Mary but came to mean "a gangster's companion", "a prostitute".
Rees is an assiduous researcher with a perceptive and unflinching eye for the sordid and outrageous minutiae of 17th-century English low life. Defoe’s Moll Flanders starts off as low as possible, born in London’s notorious Newgate Prison, at the time when the gap between the rich and the poor was even greater than it is today. For many prisoners, Newgate was only a place to wait for execution or, if sufficient bribery funds were available, for penal transportation across the Atlantic.
As an infant, Moll is comparatively lucky: at the age of three she is dumped in Colchester, where she grows up to become an “upper servant” in a middle-class family. The elder of two sons seduces her. When he becomes bored, she allows his besotted young brother to marry her. He dies, leaving her, at the age of 23, with two children, whom her in-laws adopt. In the course of the novel, she has 10 children by various men. Three of the children die as babies; she places the others in foster homes. When she finds herself pregnant without support, she is helped by “an experienced old lady” able “to procure a midwife and a nurse, to satisfy all inquiries”. As Rees comments, “the bearing of children out of wedlock required a sure and delicate touch”. She records curious details about primitive midwifery and how to avoid the need for it. In a passage on abortifacients, she tells of a girl who was recommended a potion of mercury, oil and steel filings.
In between husbands and lovers, Moll blames “the diligent Devil” for driving her to commit all sorts of crimes, particularly picking pockets. Rees provides an instructive diversion on “thieves’ cant”, explaining the meanings of words such as dab, sharper, beak and punk. The term shoplifting is 400 years old.
Defoe's knowledge of the London underworld and the rigours of indentured labour in the colonies makes Moll Flandersfascinating. But the pioneer novelist's plotting depended on preposterous coincidences. For example, an American planter marries Moll in England and takes her back to Virginia, where she discovers that his mother is the mother who abandoned her in Newgate. How can Moll tell her husband that he is her brother? In spite of absurdities, Defoe's novel is a compulsive page-turner, and so is this latest work of Siân Rees.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels and books for children
