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. There is not an ill thing mentioned, but it is condemned even in the relation; nor a virtuous, just thing, but it carries its praise along with it. * * * Upon this foundation the book is recommended to the reader, as a work from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious inference is drawn." Defoe, thoroughly a man of his time, thought he could put the coarsest and most vicious matter before his reader, and reasonably expect him to profit by the moral, without being hurt by contact with the vice. "All possible care," he says, "has been taken to give no lewd ideas, no immodest turns in the dressing up of this story. * * * To this purpose some of the vicious part of her life, which could not be modestly told, is quite left out, and several other parts very much shortened. What is left, 'tis hoped will not offend the chastest reader, or the modestest hearer." To any one acquainted with "Moll Flanders" this seems a strange statement. It exhibits the standard of the age. Mrs. Behn said almost the same thing about her novels and plays. To make up for the low, vicious life unrolled before us, it is not enough that Moll at last "grew rich, lived honest, and died penitent."
The aim of "Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress," like that of "Moll Flanders," is to describe the gradual corruption of a woman, who is influenced by some conscientious scruples and misgivings, but the heroine is placed in a higher station of life. We have a curious commentary on the times in comparing the body of the work with the preface. "Roxana" is among the coarsest records of vice in English fiction. But yet it is to impart moral instruction. "In the manner she has told the story it is evident she does not insist upon her justification in any part of it; much less does she recommend her conduct, or, indeed, any part of it, except her repentance, to our imitation. On the contrary, she makes frequent excursions, in a just censuring and condemning her own practice. How often does she reproach herself in the most passionate manner, and guide us to make just reflections in the like cases?" The modern reader is astonished to find "that all imaginable care has been taken to keep clear of indecencies and immodest expressions; and, it is hoped, you will find nothing to prompt a vicious mind, but everywhere much to discourage and expose it."