Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (review)

G.A. Starr’s introduction to the previous Oxford University Press edition of Moll Flanders was a product of its time, focusing on the then popular “question of Defoe’s artistic control” (vii). In the era of New Historicism, critics are less concerned with the novel’s “artistry” than with how it engages with and is a product of its cultural moment (vii). It was therefore high time for a new edition of Moll Flanders, and Linda Bree provides a very useful one that is more in tune with current scholarly concerns.

One of the main strengths of Bree’s introduction is an account of the rise of the novel genre during the period. The question that she poses about the novel’s aesthetics is a deeply historical one: Can Defoe’s fictions “be regarded as novels in the way we have come to understand them”? (xiii). Bree provides no answer here, instead tracing the various historical developments that could help students arrive at their own answers. Consistent with studies of the novel genre by the likes of J. Paul Hunter and Lennard Davis, Bree situates Moll Flanders within trends in popular literature such as travel narratives and criminal biography, noting how Defoe’s novels share their ambivalence towards the fact/fiction dichotomy that has become common sense for modern readers. Bree further defamiliarizes her readers’ sense of novelistic form by drawing their attention to the looseness of Defoe’s plotting, which lacks the emphasis on cause and effect that characterizes later novels. Throughout these accounts, Bree makes insightful connections between the novel’s form and its content, such as when she notes that Moll’s success as a criminal depends upon the same attention to circumstantial detail that characterizes Defoe’s writing.

Perhaps the most enlightening section of the introduction is its history of the public reception of and reaction to Moll Flanders. Bree traces how reproductions in abridged and chapbook versions linked Moll Flanders to the lower class—an association that informed later assessments by figures such as Walter Scott and Charles Lamb. She also explores how eighteenth-century readers were no less comfortable with the fluid nature of Moll’s identity than readers are today, as illustrated by the numerous retellings that try to fix that identity by exposing her real name or clarifying her ambiguous repentance. Bree therefore offers a valuable case study of the politics of reception and how they influenced the novel’s place in the literary canon. This attention to reception extends to the “Note on the Text,” where Bree introduces the differences between the first and second editions of Moll Flanders by examining how editors of Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman associated the “verbose and circumlocutory” nature of his prose with the “trade of writing” (xxviii). She suggests that either Defoe or his editors attempted to address this concern by cutting ten thousand words from the second edition. This shortening is particularly interesting in light of Moll’s frequent claims to omit stories that would make her account overly long or digressive. Bree’s account of the history of Moll Flanders could therefore shed light on the literary politics within the novel genre as well.

Bree also places the novel within several important political contexts, such as the increasing poverty and crime of urban London and the complexities of women’s lives during the period. The footnotes reinforce this sense of historicity by making deft use of primary source material to show how particular passages of Moll Flanders resonate with cultural concerns expressed in the ephemeral literature of the day. Here, rather than summarizing such materials, Bree often provides long quotations that an instructor could use to teach students how to read historically. For example, when a midwife obscurely refers to the parish officers while advising Moll how to dispose of her child, Bree provides an extended passage from one “Mary K” that complains of the...