Historical Fiction Notes: Moll Flanders

Flanders edging made at Kantcentrum in Bruges, Belgium. (source)

Reading Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities as background for the Harriman project was a nice start, if nothing else for the inspiration of exposing myself to a master storyteller.

But as I mentioned, Dickens was writing quite anachronistically to Georgian London, and so for my next book, I wanted to tackle something that wasn't written long after the time period, but perhaps could give me a more direct account of how people lived in the Eighteenth Century.

I could have gone directly for something written in the 1770s-1790s, but for reasons I will elaborate, I decided instead to tackle the reading of Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. This book, rather being written long after the Georgian era, was written well before it, in the early Eighteenth Century (during the so-called Augustan era), and was set over many decades in the Seventeenth Century, in rural England, London, and colonial America.

It seemed like a good balance to leap backwards before the era I was concerned with. Moreover, I already had an old paperback copy of Moll Flanders. It is among my few books that have traveled with me over the last four years, even while I was driving around the country in the Bimmer. I have been intending to read it all this time., and there is something quite satisfying in finally getting around to reading a book that has been in your possession and on your list for such a long time.

The copy I possess, a Signet classics edition, bears the attached price label of Sven and Ole's Bookshop in New Ulm, Minnesota, which is where I acquired it for a paltry dollar or two in the second week of July 2012.

It was brutally hot day. An enormous heat wave had engulfed the Middle West for the last ten days. I had just driven from New York to Omaha to attend the wedding of my friends Greg and Caitlin at th end of June. The heat wave had struck right as left my friend Adam and Marie's place in Brooklyn, and I wound up blowing my radiator in the Bronx and being laid up for three days in New Jersey getting it fixed. As it was I had to make a mad dash across the country just to reach Nebraska in time. The heat was so intense that when I stopped in Iowa City to tour the campus there, as is my habit, I went from the refuge of one air conditioned building to another, as if island hopping. I pulled up at the restaurant in Omaha right in time for the end of the rehearsal dinner, and devoured the remnants of the meal that my host had set aside for me.

After the wedding in Omaha, I was released from the pleasant social obligation and had leisure again. I had decided to enjoy the height of summer by meandering slowly north up into the lake country of South Dakota and into Minnesota. The heat gave an extra vibrancy to the trip, especially without air conditioning in the Bimmer. Everywhere I went in daylight hours, I had to make sure to park in a shaded area so that my steering wheel would not be too hot to touch when I returned.

That day in New Ulm, which is a nice little town with a charming main street, I found sheltered parking and made a tour of the downtown. I was happy to find the air conditioned bookshop as a chance to duck in from the heat.

At the time, I was in the midst of finishing reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I had come to greatly enjoy, to say the least, It had been slow going reading it at first, making my way through his antiquated prose, but somehow towards the middle of the book I became engrossed it and could barely put it down. At night in my various campsites, when the dishes of the meal would cleaned and JetBoil stove put away, I would look forward to the nightly ritual of taking out my contact lenses, settling down into my cheap green Wal-Mart folding chair, and reading a chapter or two until the light grew too dark.

Of course the well-known subject matter of the story greatly resonated with me, as I was in the midst of a long era of years of wandering around the country on my own, and feeling a bit like a castaway at times while I was camping. I even wound up going off onto my own wilderness island, with a camping excursion on Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior, completed isolated from civilization for several days and sitting alone a deserted rocky beach.

As I approached the end of the book, I had gotten used to the style of prose and, hooked on the story, my reading pace quickened drastically. I began to mourn the approaching end, as one days, even the story grew more compelling during Crusoe's return to England. I remember turning the last page while seated in that chair at my campsite at the state park next to Lake Bemidji, near the source of the Mississippi River, and feeling a sense of ecstasy of the moment, in both time and place.

It was all so beautiful, and one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life.  Thus I had eagerly sought Moll Flanders in that bookstore in Minnesota with the intention of picking up with Defoe's other famous work. Eager to keep my momentum, I had begun reading it right away after finishing Robinson Crusoe, 

I got about fifty pages into the story, and was enjoying it, but circumstances of my own voyage at the time interrupted my reading, and with the momentum broken, the book wound up languishing in my possessions, even as I traveled further around the country in my car, to Burning Man, sthen pending a winter in California, and going up to Oregon again, where I wound up staying.

When we moved into the apartment on East Burnside in early 2015, it found a place in the growing stack of my books there as well, almost taunting me in my failed attempt to read it, as books do. Then just last month, when we moved out of that apartment, it got packed up again, this time sealed with tape in cardboard box, and put into the ReloCube with our other possessions, bound for a new destination a thousand miles away.

The next week, after I got back from my family vacation in Colorado, it got unpacked in our near home down here in Arizona, our house in the hills overlooking the Verde River valley. Here at least, there was finally a proper bookcase to put it on, and it found a temporary resting place next to my other accumulated paperbacks on the top shelf of the plywood set that was left in the garage of her house.

But it didn't stay there for long, Even as I was finishing A Tale of Two Cities, I knew what my next book would be, and I marched right over to the shelf in the corner of my office room and pulled down the copy I bought in New Ulm in 2012. I knew approximately where in the story I had left off, with the protagonist still a teenage girl in the country home where she was raised, being wooed by two brothers simultaneously. But I chose to start from the fresh beginning.

As in the case with Robinson Crusoe, it was slow going at first, as I took time getting used to Defoe's Augustan prose. Among other things, there are no chapters in his books. The story is told without formal breaks in one long narrative.

And the story is thick. The narrative follows the title character's life from her earliest memories up to the point of her "writing the story" when she is well advanced in age, at least sixty years old. The book was actually published as being the real memoirs of a notorious woman under a pseudonym.

Characters come and go rather quickly. Just when you get used to a particular locale, you are whisked elsewhere, and all the troubles and pleasures of one era of her life fade into memory. Among them are many husbands and even children, most of which she loses track of. The modern reader would be struck by how little importance is given the account of offspring in that era. Then I had a couple children by by husband. One died, etc.

Of course I was reading the book not only for the pure experience, but with research in mind about the time period. Specifically I became fascinated in several issues, among them were descriptions of:

1. the houses she was in (result: they weren't a lot of details at all)
2. the clothes people wore (result: very few details here as well)
3. what people ate (result: very few details here as well)
4. how people traveled about (here the story yielded some fruit, in the manner of describing certain conveyances).

Overall, as in the case with Dickens, I found it amazing how little of certain details were furnished by the author, and how much that it doesn't really matter, since so much is actually created and filled in by the imagination of the reader based soley on the narrative of the characters. 

This was especially true in the early part of the story, but curiously in the latter part of the book, when the title character, having advanced beyond her prime marrying years, and having no husband, is reduced to becoming a petty criminal in London. Here we begin to find more elaborate descriptions of specific locales, with street names. As in Dickens, we get a description of Old Bailey, which will definitely be of the locales in the Harriman narrative (given that we have William Harriman's actual words of testimony spoken there).

We learn that gentlemen carried periwigs, snuffboxes, and swords (and might be robbed of them). We learn how much they cost. We learn that pocket watches were very common among people of all classes at the time.

We learn that the Mall in St. James Park was, like a now, a place people strolled on Sunday.  We learn that it was possible for people to hire carriages for a week long tour of the country, and we even learn how much it cost.

The information about how much things cost, and what amounted to a good income, and good savings, was highly valuable. Of course the story takes place a century before the Harriman narrative picks up, but unlike our era of paper fiat money, prices back then were extremely stable over the course of time.

We learn about the process of transportation of criminals to the New World, a sentence that bestowed on one of the men who stole property from William Harriman. A little further research on the web while I was reading the book revealed that the sentence of "transportation" was very common. It was mostly to Virginia and Maryland (and sometimes to other colonies such as Pennsylvania and the Carolinas). It was continued right up to the Revolution. One source I found on the web discussed it as one of the great overlooked features of American history, greatly underplayed in magnitude, even at the time, out of shame, by writers such as Jefferson. Most Americans now associate this historical phenomenon with Australia, but this is historically inaccurate, overall. A lot of forgotten history in there, but in Defoe it is front and center in importance.

I found myself looking up many specific terms to get background to the story, for example,  Flemish lace (highly prized contraband during the Dutch wars of the Seventeenth Century).  Towards the latter part of the book, the gold mine of such little random details seemed to get richer and richer, right as I found myself accelerating my pace of reading, just as I had with Robinson Crusoe. I was devouring details of research while absorbing the story for pleasure. Can there be a richer experience of reading literature than this?

I made a point of reading some of the last few pages of the book while sitting in the same green folding chair that I used while camping across the country. As I write this, the chair is sitting out on the back patio by our pool, and affords a splendid view out towards Mount McDowell. After many years of wandering, I feel like I am finally at rest. And the copy of Moll Flanders is back on the bookshelf in my office, but now it has the place of honor that a finished classic piece of literature has in my mind, when I see the spine.

Defoe, by the way, was fascinating individual. He was highly involved in politics of his time, and was a supporter of the Glorious Revolution, among other things. He didn't really start writing until his Fifties. Now that's information I can really use!