In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

[Defoe] is indeed so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue, that there is no enduring him.

—from A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test (1708)

While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and shall continue to do so we trust while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told, that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer—four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. Roxana—Singleton—Moll Flanders—Colonel Jack—are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye, of every one of them! They are in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as romantic; only they want the uninhabited Island, and the charm that has bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation....

—from Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe, by Walter Wilson (1830)

The Story of Moll Flanders, although seriously told, and abounding in just reflections upon the danger of an habitual course of wickedness, is a book after all, that cannot be recommended for indiscriminate perusal. The scenes it unfolds are such as must be always unwelcome to a refined and well-cultivated mind; whilst with respect to others, it is to be feared that those who are pre-disposed to the oblique paths of vice and dishonesty, will be more alive to the facts of the story, than to the moral that is suspended to it. The life of a courtezan, however carefully told, if told faithfully, must contain much matter unfit to be presented to a virtuous mind. Moll Flanders is one of a low description; and gliding into the occupation of a shop-lifter, she became an adept in all the arts of her profession. The first part of her story renders her an object of pity, as the latter part of it does of respect; but the intermediate spaces are filled up by matters of a forbidding nature; and whatever lessons the whole may be calculated to afford to persons in a similar situation, it may be feared that they will weigh less with the obtuse and the profligate, than their dreams of present advantage. Those who take delight in exploring the annals of Newgate, without the moral, may here find the like scenes with the moral pointed. It is to the credit of De Foe, that he nowhere administers to the vicious taste of his reader, but takes every occasion of holding up vice to abhorrence.

—from Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe (1830)

We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world, and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a contamination, is, a priori, the properest person to write novels: it is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’ Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the Devil—Sinners and Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history of Moll Flanders? ...

—from Edinburgh Review (January 1830)

De Foe... may be said to have stumbled almost unconsciously into novel-writing. He was merely aiming at true stories, which happened not to be true. But accidentally, or rather unconsciously, he could not help presenting us with a type of curious interest; for he necessarily described himself and the readers whose tastes he understood and shared so thoroughly.

—from Hours in a Library (1892)

The advocates of women’s rights would hardly care, perhaps, to claim Moll Flanders and Roxana among their patron saints; and yet it is clear that Defoe not only intended them to speak some very modern doctrines upon the subject, but placed them in circumstances where their peculiar hardships are displayed in such a way as to elicit our sympathy. Courage, said Moll Flanders, was what women needed, and the power to “stand their ground”; and at once gave practical demonstration of the benefits that would result.

—from The Common Reader (1925)