SOURCE: "Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill: A Comparison," in Ball State University Forum, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring 1968, pp. 76-80.

In the following essay, Taube compares Cleland's whore biography with Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, considering Cleland's novel more successful as pornography because it is less engaged with the realities of eighteenth-century life and presents scenes of idealized sexual fantasy.

Lionel Stevenson has pointed out that one ancestor of Fanny Hill is Richardson's Pamela, and that the pornography of Fanny Hill derives from what Coleridge called the "so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent" parts of Richardson's mind.¹ But Fanny Hill has even closer relations to the criminal literature of the early eighteenth century, particularly Defoe's Moll Flanders. Fanny and Moll are both orphaned young—Moll in childhood, Fanny in adolescence; both come to London to make their fortunes; both are seduced early; both are prostitutes who aspire to gentility...