Journal of the Plague Year

I have abandoned this book out of boredom and irritation at the narrator's annoying, though entirely believable and appropriate to the time and place, rather Calvinist Protestant Christian piety.

I have turned to a volume of Dickens, whose books, Pickwick Papers aside, have never bored me and whose first person narrators have never displayed annoying forms of piety.

Strong and weak fatalism

A Journal of the Plague Years.

Weak fatalism is only the idea that future contingents all have truth values.

Strong fatalism is the idea that, if X is fated, then X will happen no matter what happens between now and then.

Within the first few pages, Defoe attributes strong fatalism to Islam.

In the guise of an idea found in Cicero, that the sick need no doctors because if they are to succumb medicine is useless and if they are to live it is unnecessary.

Note that the co-fatality defense amounts to rejection of strong fatalism in favor of weak.

The Middle Station in life

Defoe's paen in the first chapter of Robinson Crusoe makes me wonder at the difference between the American Democrats, who claim to be the party of our middle class, and the social democrats and socialists and even communists of Europe, who claim to be parties of the working class.

It is very clear that his middle class is not the working class, but also is certainly not "the ruling class," the plutocracy, the absolute elite.

Reading Robinson Crusoe, 1719.

Moll's conversion

About to be hanged, she coverts.

Converted, she pleases a minister who arranges transportation to Virginia instead of death.

She goes, but not before reuniting with her Lancashire husband who has had a 25 year career as a highwayman.

Both go to the colonies, each with a significant nestegg of ill-gotten gains of a lifetime of crime.

In the colonies, rich already, they set up as planters and are rolling in dough.

God smiles on them, and every year their fortunes rise.

Ten years later, grandees, they return to finish their lives in splendor in England.

Who says crime doesn't pay, or religion is inconsistent with profiting vastly by it?

Moll Flanders.

Coming to the end

From 18 to 60 she has led a life of crime, one way and another.

Condemned to death for theft, she gets religion.

Sure, she does.

Reading Moll Flanders.

Dexter

Binge watched 8 seasons on Netflix.

Empathy never did anybody any good, and the lack thereof does nothing to explain serial killers or mass murderers.

And, seeing how the world goes, empathy allegedly felt by others towards us rarely helps much.

Thoughts occasioned reading Moll Flanders, whose terror of hanging, now she is in Newgate 50 pages from the end of the book, incites thoughts of repentance.

All the same, she might have been right choosing a career of crime, though wrong refusing to quit when ahead.

And such a choice is perfectly consistent with genuine support for stable, well policed, democratic capitalism, as O calls it.

Who would live on the milk of a dry cow?

And even the criminal does not wish to be robbed.

But not too well policed.

What would a world with too much empathy for private property in the means of production look like?

Evolution didn't go there.

Not by a very far piece.

Who works to feed starving Hatians?

Who builds a business or an industry to feed the teeming poor of Asia?

Not Asians.

Nor anyone else.

As for serial killers, mass murderers, and sadists of all types, well, nature regularly throws up monsters.

Some types more than others.

Consider pederasts.

Sometimes they seem common as dirt.

Counterfeiters

Moll refuses to be the one to strike false coinage for fear of being burnt at the stake.

Moll Flanders.

Onward and downward

At the end of Part 1, Moll actually steals for the first time.

Widowed and alone, watching her limited savings quickly dwindle, she is in deadly fear of poverty.

Prompted, as she says, by the devil, she steals a small, unattended bag in the street, and this puts her in terror of being caught next time and tried for her life.

But there is a next time, all the same.

For her second theft she steals a gold necklace from an unattended child whom she is tempted to kill, but does not.

So ends Part 1.

At the beginning of Part 2, Moll is past 50.

At no time in her adult life has she so far even considered working, and now she rejects again the street and the house of ill fame, this time because she is too old for the job, and rejects work as a seamstress in favor of the life of a full time petty thief.

Having rejected domestic service as a child, she has never again given it a thought.

Her quondam midwife/abortionist is now a pawnbroker and fence, and Moll moves into her house to live there with many others, all thieves of one sort or another.

The fence provides a trainer who schools her in shoplifting and picking pockets.

During the narrative Moll repeatedly says she might have earned a good living as a seamstress but prefers crime.

She does well and, given the penalty if she is caught would likely be hanging or, at best, transportation for life, she thinks she will quit when she has saved enough to retire and live an easy life the rest of her days, about 500 pounds.

But she reaches and passes that and keeps on, becoming famous in the London underworld under the assumed name of "Moll Flanders," like a gambler unable to quit while ahead, though many acquaintances and partners in crime are caught and hanged, and though they are unable to save themselves by ratting her out only because they don't know her real name and have no idea where she lives or what haunts she frequents.

She keeps on.

Reading Moll Flanders.

Pregnant again

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.

The confidence trickster tricked

Moll has become a fortune hunter led to ruin by a man himself a fortune hunter.

But they can't all have been con artists in this or any age.

Why is this so interesting to Defoe?

Reading Moll Flanders.

Why imprison?

Fitzstephan asks the Continental Op what good does it do, putting people in prison.

He replies it relieves congestion.

Driving in traffic would be much worse without it.

Reading Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse, 1928.

A propos of Defoe's view of the same subject in his Moll Flanders, 1722.

So just skip it?

According to the editor of the current B&N edition of Moll Flanders, Defoe personally holds that Newgate Prison and English law enforcement of the time actually caused more crime than they deterred.

If that is so, simply refusing to do anything at all to enforce the law, utter anarchy, would have resulted in less crime than actually beset the English society of the time.

Could he have really believed so foolish a thing?

Moll Flanders

Of course, nearly all of the time, hers is a struggle to live without working.

Of which more anon.

Reading Defoe.

The story takes place during the English Civil War, sayeth the notes, but you would never know it reading this book.

Not a word about it so far, and I am 100 pages into a 308 page edition.

For all we have seen, the whole country could have been at peace, all along.

Moll and everyone around her are oblivious.

The condition of the female class in England

Moll Flanders

Remarkable novel.

If indeed Defoe did write it, what possessed him to do so?

I suppose it counts as a picaresque novel and a novel of manners, but it's also a feminist tract before its time.

I think.

The narrative is continuous except for a division into two parts, which makes it inconvenient to put the book down to go do something else once you have started reading.

Interesting reading.