Moll Flanders at 300
Tomorrow, the 27th January, sees the anniversary of the publication of Daniel Defoe's classic Moll Flanders. James Joyce called Defoe the father of the English novel: “The first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works,... to devise for himself an artistic form which is perhaps without precedent...” and Defoe's position as the creator of English Realism remains unchallenged.
Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders – a tale originally published - despite the garbled date given in the imprint - on 27 January 1722. Two more editions followed in the same year. It was initially published as an autobiography and only attributed to Defoe posthumously (he died in 1731). As a result, first editions of Moll Flanders are considered one of the great rarities of English literature, often missing from many significant collections. Peter Harrington's latest catalogue is currently offering a first edition Moll Flanders for £97,500.
Moll Flanders (1722) was Defoe's first novel with a female protagonist. As with Robinson Crusoe, the novel is narrated in the first person, which gives the book a sense of vitality and immediacy. Defoe took some realistic details for the narrative from the life of Moll King, a London criminal whom he met while visiting Newgate Prison. Defoe is well known for what is generally considered to be the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719 and the prototype of realist fiction.
We have asked Adam Douglas, senior specialist in rare books at Peter Harrington, a faculty member of the York Antiquarian Book Seminars and a regular contributor to Literary Review, who worked on this catalogue to share some of his thoughts on Moll Flanders and Daniel Defoe.
1. Defoe is deemed the father of the English novel, please tell us a little bit more about why he stands out and which other authors were inspired by him.
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is generally considered to be the first English novel and being the prototype of realist fiction. Defoe would stand out for that alone, but he also happens to have remained readable in ways that few other early novelists are.
In Moll Flanders and Roxana, heroine of The Fortunate Mistress, Defoe created two of the strongest female characters in the genre. Although Defoe and his immediate successors Richardson and Fielding were men, the majority of 18th-century novels would be written by women, and probably read by them too. As Nancy Armstrong remarks, for the first time in history women's lore, taste, judgement, feeling, and words became the fit matter for literature. In that, Moll Flanders is a harbinger of things to come.
2. Please share with us some of the origins of English Realism.
Realist fiction eschews heightened genre or style to attempt to tell a story that, although fictional, could take place in the world as we know it. The focus is on representing things truthfully, without romanticization or artistic flourishes. Defoe’s plain home-spun prose does this perfectly. There were “novels” before Defoe, of course – especially the novella of Italian and French writers like Boccaccio and Bandello, some of which provide plots for playwrights like Shakespeare – but they tended to focus on incidents, and lacked the psychological depth that Defoe introduced.
3. Defoe created two famous fictional characters - Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders - but he based both on real life characters and their exploits. How much is fiction and how did he research his characters/find out about their life story?
Everybody knows, or think they know, that Defoe's principal model for Robinson Crusoe was Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish privateer who had spent over four years marooned at his own request on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. Selkirk's story was widely publicised, and Defoe took some details from it. But Crusoe was shipwrecked, not marooned, in the Caribbean not the Pacific, and was emphatically not a pirate. Selkirk wasn't his sole inspiration. Defoe had other models, like Robert Knox, who was shipwrecked on Ceylon and held captive for 20 years (closer to the amount of time that Crusoe spent on an island). Knox showed the same kind of entrepreneurial vigour as Crusoe by starting his own small corn business and made his own hats. Defoe knew Knox personally.
Defoe was not simply aping real-life characters but mixing details from various sources in the pursuit of the illusion of realism. That’s recognisably the same procedure that most novelists have used ever since.
Moll Flanders is Defoe's first novel with a female protagonist. As with Robinson Crusoe, the novel is narrated in the first person, which gives the book a sense of vitality and immediacy. Defoe took some realistic details for the narrative from the life of Moll King, a London criminal whom he met while visiting Newgate Prison, but again he added details from other sources and from his own invention.
4. Please share your thoughts on Defoe's collectability and what factors have an impact.
Defoe’s career is a game of two halves as far as collectors are concerned. His novels stand at the head of English prose literature, while his writings on trade and commerce are sought after by collectors of economics.
His novels were published at a time when they had no stature as works of great literature, so they were not particularly cared for. They were likely to be read and quickly discarded, so that increases rarity.
5. Which are the most collectable titles and details of note?
As far as Defoe’s novels go, the big three are Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and The Fortunate Mistress. To that, you could add Colonel Jack, published within a year of Moll Flanders. Those four novels would make a small but focussed collection of Defoe’s key fiction.
Robinson Crusoe is the most complicated of these, because it was published in three parts in April 1719, August 1719, and 1720, although modern readers probably won't recognise the contents of the second two parts - especially the third volume, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World, which is not narrative fiction, but a series of essays on various subjects.