The Prosecution and Trial of Moll Flanders

This essay describes the journey of Daniel Defoe’s first fictional thief through the “interconnected spheres” of the criminal justice system of her time, following her route along what Peter King describes as the “corridor of connected rooms or stage sets,” from the moment of her arrest, through committal to prison by a Justice of the Peace, to a Grand Jury hearing, arraignment, trial, sentencing and beyond. In each of these rooms, Moll Flanders has to negotiate with men and women from various social backgrounds, each of them empowered to make “deeply discretionary choices,” and she will make repeated attempts to escape, now through doors offering officially accepted ways out, now through “illegal tunnels,” only to find herself thrust on up the corridor towards “criminalization, conviction and punishment.” The route is not always clearly posted, and the “judicial spaces” Moll passes through, besides being contested among those who populate them, are governed by ground rules very different from those that apply in the spaces that make up the English system of justice as it has evolved since the early nineteenth century, so that this journey is often more bewildering to the modern reader than it is to Moll herself. In my attempt to illuminate her way I have drawn heavily on the work of social historians,i but also, for closer focus on the experience of people like Moll, on reports of trials for shoplifting celebrated at the Old Bailey during the two years leading up to the publication of Moll Flanders in January 1722.