ABSTRACT
There are, however, considerable differences between the second/third edition and the first edition, most obviously in that the second/third is much shorter. The 424 pages of text and eleven pages of preface of the first edition have been replaced by 366 pages of text and six pages of preface. While some of the changes correct errors in the first edition, many of the alterations are cuts to the text, often achieved at the expense of sense. Epithets have been removed, the sentence structure has been simplified and many descriptive phrases have been eliminated. Over 3,000 word changes between the first and the second/third edition, most of which involve deletions, have been identified by G. A. Starr in his edition of Moll Flanders published in the Oxford English Novels series in 1971 (see his ‘Note on the Text’, pp. xxiii-xxix, and his ‘Textual Notes’, pp. 344-54), and by Edward H. Kelly in his Norton Critical Edition of 1973 (see his ‘Textual Appendix’,
pp. 269-85). Starr and Kelly have argued, convincingly, that these changes are very unlikely to have been carried out by Defoe himself. They were almost certainly the result of the activities of the printer, and were motivated by considerations of economy of production (much of the cost of printing a book was made up of the price of paper). Kelly has constructed a hypothetical scenario in which the first edition of Moll sold reasonably well, but because the original type had been distributed, the book had to be reset, and the printers took the opportunity to save costs by reducing the length, cutting the text and using a smaller font for the preface.
