If the author of “Robinson Crusoe” could realize so thoroughly the difficulties and expedients of a man living on a desert island, he could deal yet more easily with the adventures and shifts of thieves and abandoned women which formed the subject of his other tales.  In these minor works, now little known, Defoe displayed equal talents, but did not attain equal results.  The enduring interest which must ever attach to the central idea of “Robinson Crusoe” the complete isolation of the man—­gave that work a very exceptional claim to the attention of posterity.  But it had other merits, which are not apparent in the same perfection in Defoe’s lesser novels.  Its design was single and concentrated, its chief character natural and strongly marked, its plot coherent and complete.  Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack are indeed well-drawn and real persons, and the design of the works which bear their names is clear, but in both cases the plot is merely a series of independent adventures, and the characters themselves could not, from their nature, long attract the attention of readers.  “Colonel Jack,” “Captain Singleton,” “Moll Flanders,” and “Roxana,” have been surpassed, and are neglected.  “Robinson Crusoe” is, of its kind, perfect, and therefore enduring.

But the works of Defoe have a historical, almost equal to their literary, interest.  Whoever would attain a correct idea of the condition of the lower classes in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, should consult “Moll Flanders” and “Colonel Jack,” as much as the “Newgate Calendar,” and histories of crime and labor.  What the author has described, he had seen.

Defoe was throughout his life a reformer; a large proportion of the many pamphlets and occasional writings which fell from his pen have for their object the reformation or exposure of some abuse.  Yet a large number of his fictitious characters are thieves and harlots.  The criminal classes occupied the public mind in the first half of the eighteenth century to a remarkable degree, and Defoe was not mistaken in thinking that novels concerning those classes would interest and sell.  He knew that the public taste was low, and his business was to cater to public taste.  He said, in “More Reformation":[158]

      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,