The
criminal classes occupied the public mind in the first half of the
eighteenth century to a remarkable degree, and Defoe was not mistaken
in thinking that novels concerning those classes would interest and
sell. He knew that the public taste was low, and his business was to
cater to public taste. He said, in "More Reformation":[158]
Let this describe the nation's character.
One man reads Milton, forty Rochester;
The cause is plain, the temper of the time.
One wrote the lewd, the other the sublime.
To satisfy the forty who read Rochester, Defoe described the lives and
occupations of pirates, pickpockets, highwaymen, and women of abandoned
character. The title-pages of some of these novels cannot with decency
be quoted, and the novels themselves are filled with criminal and
licentious scenes. But the reforming inclination of Defoe himself, and
that which we find in the general literature of the time, induced him
to turn these scenes into a moral account. Moll Flanders is a low,
cunning, thoroughly bad woman, and her life is placed quite bare before
the reader. Yet Defoe asserts that the book is designed to teach a good
lesson.[159] "There is not a superlative villain brought upon the
stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a
penitent.
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