How the Picaresque Became the Novel (Or, The Secret History of Moll Flanders)

While the Picaresque has always been seen as a major influence on the emerging novel, the ways in which it was appropriated and transformed in seventeenth-century Britain remain to be explored. Drawing a historical arc that begins in the 1660s and ends with Moll Flanders, the essay argues that seventeenth-century authors of criminal biographies such as The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith and The Case of Mary Carleton used the conventions of the Picaresque to address the problem of social mobility, raised by the momentous social and ideological changes that marked the period. In doing so, they domesticated and updated the Picaresque, whose characters had traditionally been unable to imagine social mobility. While earlier works used the criminal/picaro as a vehicle to express a problematic desire for personal advancement, later works such as Francis Kirkman’s version of Carleton’s story and his own fictionalized autobiography used the satirical vision of the picaresque to highlight social constraints. This process culminated in Moll Flanders, in which the elderly Moll engages denounces the constraints on young unmarried women and envisions ways to improve their condition. In Moll Flanders, the picaresque is transformed into a new kind of narrative, inflected by the protocols of the public sphere and the values of civil society: a quasi-novelistic narrative whose characters can desire advancement and dream of change.