Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders by Siân Rees – review

, But chances are you've got a pretty good idea what it's about. Moll – her person, her story – has come to stand as a cipher for the bump and grind of historical sex, poxy but tremendous fun. Thanks to screen adaptations, including the luscious 1996 TV outing with Alex Kingston, Moll is lodged in the public imagination as a good-time girl with a big heart, loose morals and a saucy wink as she picks a pocket or leads a punter up a dark alley. More specifically, Moll comes clothed in 18th-century costume, all heaving cleavage and dragging petticoats, as she hurries through streets that bear more than a passing resemblance to Hogarth's Gin Lane

Wrong, all wrong, as Siân Rees reveals in this detailed investigation into the real life and times of Moll Flanders. The backdrop to Moll's story is not Hanoverian raunchiness but Cromwellian prudery, not the hectic South Sea Bubble but the settled austerity of the Protectorate. To drive home the sheer ancientness of the book's setting, Rees reminds us that Moll's mother is actually an Elizabethan, born into a time when the smart new things are not coffee and chocolate but potatoes and tobacco.

This last point is important since, above all, Moll Flanders is a story about economic imperialism, that first century of expansion into the New World when the English planted flags on the south-eastern seaboard of America and claimed it as their own. Yet Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas are not simply places of economic possibility, but dumping grounds too. It is to Virginia that Moll's mother is sent in penal servitude, shortly after giving birth to Moll in Newgate. And it is here too that Moll herself will live for eight years in middle age as a prosperous planter's wife, using slave labour to accrue a nice little fortune from tobacco. Perhaps, most importantly, Virginia hangs over the novel as a place apart where characters take time out from the domestic narrative to reinvent themselves. Here on the Chesapeake Bay thieves become gentleman farmers, whores mutate into respectable matrons and, most worryingly for Moll, husbands turn out to be long-lost brothers.

A careful reader could get all this information from Defoe's novel, but what Rees does in this engaging book is to give us the extra historical information we need to create a richer context for Moll's story. So, for instance, Rees adds ballast to the colonial part of the book by telling us about the experiences of real historical adventurers, including the Jesuit priest Andrew White who made a white-knuckle crossing to Maryland in 1634 complete with lashing storms and the threat of pirates. She also makes us see why the discovery that Moll's husband Humphrey is actually her long-lost brother is not just a psychological shock but a potential death sentence. If things are a little preachy back in England, they are ardently biblical in the new territories: there's a fierce tariff of punishments for even the most fleeting of sins.

Pretty Pirate Princess Costume - News


'Embarrassing dad' waves son off to school in costume
'Embarrassing dad' waves son off to school in costume

Dale Price, of American Forks, Utah, donned a pirate outfit complete with eye patch and peg leg (he actually has a prosthetic leg), pistol and sword to wave goodbye to his mortified 16-year-old son. Perhaps the most embarrassing dad of all time,



Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders by Siân Rees – review
Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders by Siân Rees – review

More specifically, Moll comes clothed in 18th-century costume, all heaving cleavage and dragging petticoats, as she hurries through streets that bear more than a passing resemblance to Hogarth's Gin Lane. by Siân Rees Wrong, all wrong,



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Frommer's Walt Disney World and Orlando 2011

Frommer's Walt Disney World and Orlando 2011

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Costume design in the movies, an illustrated guide to the work of 157 great designers

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The London and Paris observer or, Chronicle of literature, science, and the fine arts

There were many very pretty women, particularly the Princess Ourous-off, ... of the house and some pretty children, their friends, eir costume du p.iys. ...

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The selection was picked over, with very few costumes left in their size. Kendall finally decided on a pretty pink princess costume, and Kyle chose a pirate ...

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