I was a little unsure about what Siân Rees’s Moll was. At first it appeared to be a biography of the fictional protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, then it seemed to be a group biography of women who inspired her story. In the end, it’s a book that uses Defoe’s novel to structure a wide-ranging look at life in the late seventeenth century, especially looking at the lives of women.
It starts off by saying how all adaptations of Moll Flanders (even my favourite Alex Kingston adaptation) have misunderstood it. Moll Flanders is a historical novel, narrated by a 70 year old Moll in 1683. She’s a seventeenth century gal, not an eighteenth one - she’s not swigging it up amongst the prostitutes of Covent Garden, she’s living through the civil war, the puritan commonwealth and the restoration. What’s more, our vision of her as a happy-go-lucky prostitute is definitely against her desires in the book, in that, all that she wants is a happy, stable life but it takes a long time for events to go her way for long.
We start off with Moll being born in Newgate. When a woman was convicted of a capital crime, she could buy time by claiming to be pregnant. The state gave itself the right to kill a convicted criminal but not an innocent foetus, so making that claim could stretch out the sentencing. When this claim was made a council of ’12 matrons’ had to be assembled, usually by pulling them out of the courtroom and off the street, to verify the claim. They’d invasively prod and poke the woman, looking for ‘quickening’, the foetus moving inside the womb, which was regarded as when a soul entered a child. It could be possible to stack this council with friends to vouch for you, and there was a whole underhand service of turnkeys and inmates providing women prisoners with babies.
Moll is born one of these babies and, after she has weaned, her mother is transported. When Moll is born, transportation is only beginning to be an option and Moll’s fictional mother would have been one of the first people to be given it. However, transportation wasn’t far off a death sentence, there was only a 50% chance of living a few years in the colony, especially as an indentured servant - essentially a slave with a time limit.
Moll is taken in by a family in the puritan town of Colchester, where she becomes a companion to the daughters of a wealthy mercantile household. In many ways she is lucky, most children taken out of Newgate were put into backbreaking jobs as general maids. There was also a growing industry in kidnapping street children and sending them to the colonies.
The next few chapters deal with the thorny issue of respectability in the seventeenth century. While a man (especially one with means) can happily sow his wild oats, a young woman has to remain chaste, or at least seen as chaste, until she marries. The teenage Moll has to be very careful with her dalliances with the ogling older brother and actually is quite lucky in marrying the blander older one. When he dies, she leaves the children behind and sets off for another husband. I think it’s Moll’s habit of just leaving her children behind which strikes the modern reader so strangely.
Her second marriage is to a merchant who lives beyond his means. As a woman, she has no real control over the family finances. What’s more, if she wants to follow convention, and the guidebooks on how to be a good wife, she has to follow the head of the family and allow him to make all the decisions. Because of this, he is bankrupt and feels to France, while she flees to and area called The Mint, south of the river Thames.
The Mint sounds like a wild place. There’s a brothel called Holland’s Leaguer, which is situated in an old moated mansion and even pulled up the drawbridge when it was raided by the authorities. The Mint is skint city, a place where bankrupts gather together and beat up any encroaching debt collectors until they are forced to call themselves rogues. It’s not a place to find a rich husband though and she moves down river to snag a ship’s captain.
The man she ends up with is an American and this allows Rees to talk a little more of how the colonies have been developing. They’ve been growing, fighting wars with the natives and enforcing different religious and moral laws in the territories run by different groups. They’ve discovered the wealth in tobacco, but the intensity of its production has started to create a black, slave underclass. Where there had been black workers who had become landowners, the distinction is becoming racialised, with the children of black slaves also becoming slaves. Of course, things don’t work out for Moll, because she’s inadvertently married her half-brother and so she hops back to England.
As Moll Flanders becomes darker, so does Moll. There’s a grim chapter about baby farming, the profession of being paid to take babies off the parish or secretly from mothers. This children were often starved, worked to death or sold to be shipped off to the colonies, though the colonies are even less welcome to these poor children than they had been. Moll arranges an unwanted child to be looked after, but pays a premium to make sure it is.
There’s a fantastic chapter on Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse, a woman who set up a service to return stolen goods to their owners. Like the later Jonathan Wilde, she also built up the information needed to direct thieves, though she wasn’t one to impeach those who got in her way. In her youth, she’d dressed up like a man and won a bet by riding in men’s clothes through London. To make herself even more noticeable she did it whilst blowing a trumpet and riding a famous performing horse called Marocco.
In modelling this book on Moll Flanders’s fictional life, Rees manages to make a broad and entertaining history that often reads like a novel, yet also ground the novel in properly researched aspects of history. However, I don’t think the casual reader should be blamed for not realising Moll Flanders is set fifty or so years before it was written, Moll’s life is untouched by any of the historical events she witnessed. She doesn’t mention the Civil War or restoration, nor is the story affected by the great plague of 1665 or the great fire of 1666, Defoe didn’t provide the historical context but focussed purely on Moll’s ups and downs. Having read Siân Rees’s Moll, I will approach Defoe’s novel differently when I come to re-read it, and it actually prompted me to read another Defoe novel - though that is a story for another day.
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