1. Moll’s description of Newgate originates from Defoe’s personal experience of the place. He too heard, smelled, and saw “the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it” (p. 249).

2. One of Defoe’s models for Moll was a notorious criminal named Callicoe Sarah. The idea of adapting a name from the material a thief steals was part of the nomenclature of criminality.

3. Ulysses (Random House: New York, 1986), p. 622.

4. According to Defoe in his own commentary on the Robinson Crusoe story, Serious Reflections on the Life of Robinson Crusoe (1720), one can be as alone in the middle of a great metropolis as on a deserted island off the coast of South America. Isolation and its psychological effects are among Defoe’s primary fictional themes.