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Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders
A journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries, to uncover the fictional personality of Defoe's Moll Flanders.
Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit?
To answer these questions Moll takes its readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; from the English Restoration to Maryland's slave-worked tobacco farms; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century. Siân Rees introduces us to real-life versions of Moll's mother, her amoral 'governess', her many husbands and lovers - and Moll herself. These include Moll thief, receiver, procuress and gangmaster; Mary Moders, known as the 'Kentish Moll' or the 'German Princess', who played a distressed noblewoman to hook rich men; and Moll King, a London thief reprieved from death to be transported as a convict to the Virginian plantations. Combining meticulously researched tales of London's underworld with the little-known story of penal transportation to America, Moll is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.
Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she really inhabit?
To answer these questions Moll takes its readers on a journey of literary and historical detection, across continents, cultures and centuries. Following Moll's tumultuous life, the story moves from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia; from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians; from the English Restoration to Maryland's slave-worked tobacco farms; and from the metropolis of London to the hamlet of Annapolis in the early eighteenth century. Siân Rees introduces us to real-life versions of Moll's mother, her amoral 'governess', her many husbands and lovers - and Moll herself. These include Moll thief, receiver, procuress and gangmaster; Mary Moders, known as the 'Kentish Moll' or the 'German Princess', who played a distressed noblewoman to hook rich men; and Moll King, a London thief reprieved from death to be transported as a convict to the Virginian plantations. Combining meticulously researched tales of London's underworld with the little-known story of penal transportation to America, Moll is as fast-moving and rich in incident as Defoe's great novel.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published July 7, 2011
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68 people want to read
About the author
Siân Rees
23 books26 followersSiân Rees is a British author and historian. She has a degree in history from University of Oxford. She lives in Brighton and is an RLF Fellow at the University of Sussex. She is particularly interested in the social and maritime history of the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 14, 2017
In 1722, Daniel Dafoe created the woman known as Moll Flanders who, over the years, evolved in literature into a bawdy, thieving, prototype feminist. However, in the book Moll: The Life and Time of Moll Flanders, Sian Rees restores Moll to her appropriate setting, the 1600s also known as the Puritan Era, and we see her and women like Moll in a different light.
In writing a biography of this fictional character, Rees bases his research on three women that might have influenced Dafoe's writing of Moll Flanders: Mary Frith, who was called Moll Cut Purse, Mary Carleton and Moll King, a woman who lived on the streets. Through the amalgamation of these three women's lives into the character of Moll Flanders, we are able to learn about the streets of what is now London during the 1600s, life in the "New World," and what it meant to be an unmarried, untitled woman or an orphan during this time. Many of these women were labeled women of the streets, which today means prostitutes, but then meant beggars. If caught they were jailed, sometimes hung, other times sent to work in homes as maids. During this time, too often women and children were sent to "his majesty's plantations," also known as America. Most would die of starvation but Moll's "mother" and later Moll would survive.
In looking at this book, I see less of a biography of a fictional character and more of Rees using that character as a method to paint for his readers a very vivid landscape of life for women in the 1600s. As an historian, I was shocked at the amount of knowledge I gained through this very readable and often entertaining book. In addition, it had me heading back to the original novel to refresh my memory about Dafoe's Moll which always is good.
I highly recommend Moll for those who enjoy classic literature and especially for historians. It's an eclectic look at some old facts.
Thank you to Netgalley and Thistle Publishing for this informative book!
September 30, 2017
I'm very interested in this time period but i never thought that i would enjoy the biography of a fictional character of the era.
The book is original since it mixes the life event of said fictional character with real life events.
Very enjoyable.
*Thanks to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for providing me a free copy of this book for reviewing*
The book is original since it mixes the life event of said fictional character with real life events.
Very enjoyable.
*Thanks to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for providing me a free copy of this book for reviewing*
October 26, 2021
a great bridge between review of defoe's novel and a vivid telling of the history around it. the well-researched tendrils include the constrained life of women (defoe's sympathy impressive); crime and the morally similar sex and marriage markets; and the early days of american colonization.
sian balances her erudition with steady wry humour, writing well and making this for me an enjoyable and memorable read. it is encouraging to note the many social improvements since the 1600s and 1700s. not much is worse since then - baring the environment, whose lack of despoilation must have course been taken for granted then. but a depressing amount also seems to have changed little at all. if defoe could visit 21st century london he would have excellent material for another novel on gender, greed and crime. i would love to read that too.
sian balances her erudition with steady wry humour, writing well and making this for me an enjoyable and memorable read. it is encouraging to note the many social improvements since the 1600s and 1700s. not much is worse since then - baring the environment, whose lack of despoilation must have course been taken for granted then. but a depressing amount also seems to have changed little at all. if defoe could visit 21st century london he would have excellent material for another novel on gender, greed and crime. i would love to read that too.
December 29, 2017
This engaging and well-written book is a happy combination of literary criticism and a study of Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders, a fictional biography of Moll herself, a biography of Defoe and a well-researched work of social history. The writing is clear and accessible, academic enough for the more scholarly reader but not so detailed that the general reader can’t enjoy it as well. It gives the historical background to Moll’s adventures, thus putting her life into its historical context, and makes reading the novel a much more rewarding experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it wholeheartedly, whether your interest is in history, literature or both.
December 9, 2025
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.
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.
September 28, 2017
It's been quite a few years since last I read Moll Flanders; however, I do remember the story pretty well, and that is what prompted me to request this title from NetGalley. It was fascinating to see some of the historical figures and situations that inspired Defoe's tale, looking at the truth behind the legend, as it were. This title will appeal to those who enjoy Defoe's story, but it is also a great resource for historians interested in 17th century criminality during the age of transportation, as well as those who wish to learn more about early colonial life in America. Overall, Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders is an insightful and lovely read.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley.
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August 15, 2016Very interesting book. Having thought that Moll Flanders was just a bit of a lusty romp it was eye opening to find that the story is not so far fetched as may first seem. Sian Rees is a very entertaining writer and the book could have been twice as long and still kept my attention.
March 22, 2023
A really good reappraisal of a very misunderstood character and a lesson in how precarious was the position of most 17th Century women – how so many were forced into prostitution. The book takes us on a fascinating journey from England in the Civil War to Jamestown, Virginia, back to London and finally to Annapolis, Maryland – via riches, utter poverty and desperate crime.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews