Daniel Defoe is overt in his critique of society in Moll Flanders, a book that is quite self-conscious about the learning experiences of his protagonist and about the social forces shaping her and those she meets. The novel embodies the economic and social problems in Britain in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Moll herself dramatizes the particular difficulties of women, but she is not alone in finding it difficult in making a living. Of her numerous husbands, one goes broke, another loses the money he loaned dying in despair, and yet another has to leave the country.
The novel begins in Essex, but most of the story takes place in the City of London. Essex is a region of rich farmland, but for Defoe, London was the great city in England and the place he loved. At the same time, London offered anonymity to the individual while also creating the loneliness, alienation, and individuality that are so important to Defoe's themes.
This is a novel that is intended to teach a moral lesson, and the nature of the main character as a "fallen woman" suggests that the reader is to be morally informed by the mistakes Moll makes. This is evident in the preface, written by a supposed editor of Moll's story:
The pen employed in finishing her story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak language fit to be read. When a woman debauched from her youth, nay, even being the offspring of debauchery and vice, comes to give an account of all her vicious practices, and even to descend to the particular occasions and circumstances by which she ran through in threescore years, an author must be hard put to it wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his disadvantage (Defoe).
Although Moll is from a questionable social class, she shows class consciousness herself, as when she calls for a husb...