ABSTRACT

Defoe's novel, originally published in 1722, was a well-known female-rogue narrative, or fictitious criminal autobiography, but like other picaresque fiction of the earlier eighteenth century, it began to fall out of favour with the middle-class reading public by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Originally over 400 pages long, by the mid-eighteenth century it had been converted from first-person to the more usual popular third-person narrative form and cut down to eight pages; this version was reprinted several times published by Pitts, perhaps the most famous or infamous publisher and distributor of street literature in the early nineteenth century. The subject of the following history, is one of the most surprising accounts that ever was wrote of any of the female sex. It is of the one Moll Flanders, whose unhappy parents having abandoned all honour, were committed to Newgate, in the reign of James the First, for breaking open the house of a goldsmith.