Moll, more than once a mistress (it is for this she calls herself a whore) and more than once a wife, at about halfway through the book has so far never worked the street or in a house of ill fame.
She deplores prostitution and, as she calls it, vice.
And she cannot abide the thought of abortion.
Pregnant and alone once again, she goes to a large house devoted exclusively to lying in, principally for prostitutes but also catering to whores (as she uses the word) and even married women.
There the entrepreneur, a midwife and abortionist, sees to it that babies born alive are taken away so they are not left on the hands of their mothers, but also not charges of the parish.
She intends her own child, not her first, to be handed off in this way.
Born and abandoned in Newgate Prison and put into child labor, once in her teens she never after has done, so far in the book, a lick of work, living usually as the mistress or wife of men wealthy enough to have maids, cooks, and indeed the sort of household staff familiar to viewers of Upstairs, Downstairs, though she is sometimes briefly alone as a boarder.
Reading Moll Flanders.
Update, pg 165, top.
By her own report, about to marry an "innocent man," she is "one that hath lain with two brothers, and has had three children by her own brother! one that was born in Newgate, whose mother was a whore, and is now a transported thief! one that has lain with thirteen men, and has had a child since he saw me!"
She didn't have the least idea he was her brother when she married him.
As soon as she found out she was devastated and, after discussing the matter with him, they agreed to immediately part forever.
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