In 1722, as London’s financial markets expanded and Enlightenment ideas began to displace older metaphysical certainties, Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders. The novel is foundational: not just of a literary tradition, but of a distinctly modern worldview, and it deserves to be placed alongside the very greatest English novels. In the preface, Defoe frames the novel as a cautionary tale in a tradition of religious instruction: ‘a history of a wicked life repented of’, presented for the reader’s edification. And yet from its first pages it is clear the narrative moves less by the logic of sin and redemption than by the logic of circumstance. Chance, fear, need and, at points, greed drive the anti-heroine, Moll. She begins life as an orphan. Over time, she becomes a bigamist, prostitute, thief and, finally, a transported criminal who ultimately (supposedly) repents.

The novel was the literary analogue of Enlightenment empiricism, a phenomenon that Ian Watt explored in The Rise of the Novel. The philosopher John Locke defined the mind as a tabula rasa written upon by experience. Defoe created protagonists who are formed by circumstance, temperament and the slow inscription of events upon consciousness. Where earlier narrative traditions drew authority from inherited plots and universal types, Defoe subordinates everything to the depiction of a single life unfolding in time. Moll’s story enacts Locke’s epistemology. The meaning of her existence does not lie in her preordained place in the ‘order of things’. Her character is shaped by events. The knowledge she gains is acquired – generally rather painfully.

In Moll Flanders, Defoe takes the reader from condemning a ‘whore’ (as she calls herself) to understanding her, and even to admiring her resilience, nerve and sheer capacity for survival. He moves us from judging theft as sin to grasping it as necessity. The epic would demand punishment or heroism. The novel shows how a life unfolds, shaped by circumstance and experience.

Defoe, then, establishes the individual as the centre of narrative meaning. He brings into focus a recognisably modern idea of personality. It is empirical rather than metaphysical, calculating rather than heroic, and, above all, prepared to negotiate with necessity. These qualities are embedded in the prose itself. Defoe deliberately writes in what Bishop Sprat called ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking’. His vocabulary is largely Anglo-Saxon in origin. His sentences are plain and documentary, suspicious of ornament, and designed, as Locke put it, ‘to convey the knowledge of things’. In style as in substance, it is unmistakably English.

Moll Flanders was produced in an explosion of creativity in Defoe’s late career. In his sixties, after decades spent working as a merchant, pamphleteer and hack, and occasionally languishing in bankruptcy, he turned to extended prose fiction. Defoe had been imprisoned for debt and lived under the constant threat of financial ruin. Moll’s obsessive accounting, her improvisations for survival, and her terror of Newgate sometimes read like projections of the obsessive anxieties we find in Defoe’s letters. In Roxana (1724), Defoe pushed these anxieties to an even keener pitch through the story of a calculating woman who becomes trapped in the very life she has made and abandons even the formal consolations of repentance. His fictions deal with the kinds of lives – individual, precarious, and recognisably modern – that he himself had lived.

Moll evolves because from the beginning she refuses to accept her fate as a servant and insists on becoming a ‘gentlewoman’. She simply refuses to live as a drudge at the behest of others. This is crucial. For Moll, poverty is not a state of virtue or a path to grace. It is an intolerable condition from which one must escape. ‘Poverty presses’, she says, ‘the soul is made desperate by distress.’ The novel then shows how desperation hardens into habit. Moll steals out of need, is drawn further in by gain, reproaches herself, and then repeats the cycle. Her first experience of love, long before she becomes a ‘whore’, occurs when the elder brother of a family she lodges with gives her money as he woos and sleeps with her, blurring from the start the boundaries between sex and money.

Moll finds herself in courts, under contract, in prison, and eventually transported to the New World: ‘I was carried to Newgate, that horrid Place!’, she writes. Defoe is unsentimental: ‘There are more Thieves and Rogues made by that one Prison of Newgate, than by all the Clubs and Societies of Villains in the Nation,’ Moll’s mother remarks early in the narrative. But he is also astute enough to understand that the same legal order that deals harshly with Moll gives her an opportunity for social mobility. Transportation to Virginia becomes not simply a ‘just desert’ but a second chance. In one of the novel’s great lines, Moll’s mother wryly observes: ‘many a Newgate-Bird becomes a great Man…’ In this emerging England, station and wealth are available to those with the guts to seize them.

Moll is constantly counting her money and taking inventory of her goods. She speaks obsessively of her ‘fortune’ and ‘stock’, saves for times of scarcity with commendable thrift, and keeps accounts with more care than she keeps her conscience. When her Lancashire husband tallies their assets – cash, watches, plate, a plantation yielding ‘a hundred pounds a year’, a cargo ‘worth… twice the money’ – these are the mental grammar of a new kind of commercial society.

Nowhere is this logic starker than in the marriage market. ‘As the Market ran very unhappily on the Men’s side, I found the Women had lost the Privilege of saying No,’ Moll observes. Marriage in Moll Flanders is both highly transactional and structurally unequal. Even a woman with ‘Beauty, Birth, Breeding, Wit, Sense, Manners, Modesty’ is ‘no Body’ without money; ‘the Men play the Game all into their own Hands’. The novel is unsparing on this front. Women must use all the instruments available to them. When Moll becomes a prostitute, her body becomes capital, something to be risked and exchanged. Again, we don’t judge her because we have followed the chain of causes that brought her there: we know she isn’t ‘sinful’, she is simply using what little agency she has.

Moll’s London is the metropolis at the juncture of one of its most explosive transformations. It is the age of the stock market and the South Sea Bubble, of credit and paper wealth, of speculative frenzy, and of a population swollen by trade and empire. It is a place where fortunes are made and lost with equal speed, and where identity is constantly reinvented. Defoe made the novel an urban form, understanding that city life was now as fundamental to the nation as royal courts had once been.

Moll only leaves London for good when she is transported to Virginia after finally, inevitably, being caught stealing. The book closes with her formal gestures of repentance, the preface seemingly fulfilled as intended. And yet its very last sentence – ‘we resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived’ – feels perfunctory, to modern ears almost satirical. In truth, the novel’s emotional and intellectual gravity does not lie in that closing declaration of reform. It resides in what comes just before: the material success of Moll and her husband in the New World, itemised in detail and concluded with unmistakable pride. ‘I think I have married a fortune, and a very good fortune too,’ he declares to her triumphantly. This ledger-like summation of survival-turned-prosperity carries the novel’s true persuasive force.

This is why Moll Flanders is such an ur-text for English literature and the nation alike. It shows what the new form can do: render consciousness, trace the pressure of circumstance, map the operations of law and market, and give narrative authority to a human life. In doing so, it helps to adumbrate a national type, shaped by law, commerce and Protestant ethics, and concerned with the world as it is and not as it should be.