Moll Flanders

Designed for classroom use but well suited to the needs of anyone looking for an inexpensive but readable text, this edition of Moll Flanders, published in the admirable Broadview Editions series, provides an introduction, separate outlines of the life of Defoe and of the events of Defoe’s time, a reliable first-edition text and annotations, a select bibliography of critical writings, and three appendices of accounts by Defoe and by others that appear to bear upon the text. The arrangement in general, which is similar in pattern to that of the Norton editions, is commendable, but the execution is not always as careful as it should be.

The difficulty begins with the Defoe canon and the vexing question of what Defoe actually wrote. Since the publication of F.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens’s The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe in 1981, serious doubt has been thrown upon the attribution to Defoe of a large number of books and pamphlets, made over two-and-a-half centuries by various authors and enshrined in John Robert Moore’s A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1960; 2nd ed. 1971). In their subsequent Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s Checklist (1994), Furbank and Owens provided a list of 252 items (of Moore’s 547 items) they considered suspect and offered careful reasons for their doubts. Defoe scholars need not always accept Furbank and Owens’s de-attributions, but they have to be fully cognizant of the now considerable skepticism among Defoe scholars about these items in Moore’s Checklist. Unfortunately, on the first pages of the introduction to Moll Flanders we are told that in pamphlets “such as Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers (1726)” Defoe “proposed ways to control crime” and that he wrote accounts of “the lives of some of the famous criminals of the 1720s” (9-10) including John Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. Some Considerations upon Street-Walkers (Moore’s no. 485) is among the works de-attributed by Furbanks and Owens, as are A Brief Historical Account of the Lives of the Six Notorious Street-Robbers, Street-Robberies, Consider’d, and An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street-Robberies (nos. 478, 504, 516), along with two accounts of John Sheppard (nos. 466, 468) and of Jonathan Wild (nos. 471, 473). No hint is given that many serious scholars of Defoe would now hesitate to ascribe these writings to Defoe or to cite them as evidence of Defoe’s views without a caveat. Nor is Defoe De-Attributions included in Scanlon’s select bibliography.

In the first appendix, “Related Writing by Defoe,” moreover, Scanlon reprints four pages from Street-Robberies, Consider’d, albeit with a note suggesting there “is some uncertainty concerning Defoe’s authorship of this work” (386) and citing Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life, which came out in 1989. Scanlon blithely ignores Defoe De-attributions, which came out five years later, and which not only provides much more evidence for being suspicious of Defoe’s authorship, but also “firmly endorse[d] the opinion of Clinton S. Bond, in ‘Street-Robberies, Consider’d and the Canon of Daniel Defoe’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 13 (1971), 431-45, that this is an implausible attribution” (146). Scanlon also reprints more than seven pages from Applebee’s Journal, a work—or much of it—ascribed to Defoe by William Lee in 1869. Furbank and Owens believe that the Defoe-Applebee connection was essentially a figment of Lee’s imagination, and they cite passages such as the letter from Moll Flanders’s niece, “Betty Blueskin,” reprinted by Scanlon, as instances of the “cheap facetiousness” which Defoe was particularly unlikely to have written (Defoe De-Attributions xxiv). The problem here springs not from quoting from the accounts of street-robbers or from Applebee’s Journal. Maximillian Novak has defended these as Defoe’s works, and he and others will want to retain them as part of the traditional Defoe canon. Rather, Scanlon seems largely unaware of the controversy that surrounds such works, and he fails to mention the uncertainty that must now be attached to them as writings by Defoe.

The rest of the pieces in the appendices are not always judiciously chosen. Several provide the sort of background detail that may help the reader understand Moll’s world. The passages from Colonel Jack on transportation and from Conjugal Lewdness on marrying for the wrong reason do just that. But other extracts do not add enough context to be helpful in this way, and the third appendix—eighteenth-century comments on Defoe and Moll Flanders drawn largely from the Scriblerians—merely adds to the bulk of the book. On the whole, Albert Rivero’s selection of seven passages for his “Contexts” section of the Norton Moll Flanders provides more useful material than the thirty-nine pieces that Scanlon has assembled.

Scanlon has rightly chosen the first (over the third) edition as copy text, but his “Note on the Text” surprisingly makes no mention of a two-paragraph passage that should probably have been cancelled in the first edition. The existence of two, mutually inconsistent, accounts of Jemy’s being brought on board ship was first pointed out by Paul Hunter, who in his edition for Crowell Press (1970) dropped the second of these accounts. Two years later Rodney M. Baine argued that it is the first version that should be rejected because the second “conforms completely” with the rest of the novel (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 66 [1972], 55-8). In my own edition for Penguin Books I retained both passages, partly because the matter had not been settled and partly because Moll’s rather rambling idiom permits a degree of inconsistency. Scanlon has similarly retained both accounts as they appeared in the first edition, but offers no explanation for this decision nor draws the attention of the reader to the textual problem.

The standard scholarly edition of Moll Flanders remains G.A.Starr’s fine edition for Oxford University Press (1971). However, Starr’s citation of dozens of works by Defoe and his contemporaries as well as by many more modern commentators—his list of abbreviations alone runs to four pages—can appear overwhelming to undergraduates or to the ordinary reader. Scanlon, like a number of other modern editors, has decided to restrict his notes to elucidating references that might trip up a modern reader. Unfortunately, the casualness that too often mars the scholarly probity of this edition is at its most obvious in the annotations, where Scanlon has used the notes in the Penguin edition as a crib. Inevitably a thing of shreds and patches, all annotations will draw upon the labors of earlier editors, so no set of notes in a modern edition of a classic novel can be cut from whole cloth. But anyone who cares to compare the Penguin and the Broadview edition will soon see that Scanlon follows my edition very closely indeed. And, once again, there is no acknowledgment of his procedure.