Crime, Justice, and Defoe: Law Enforcement Reported and Imagined in Eighteenth-Century England

Having filched a little white bundle from under the noses of an apothecary’s apprentice and his maid in London’s Leadenhall Street, Defoe’s Moll Flanders is sure that she will be "taken next time and be carry’d to Newgate and be Try’d for my Life". The likelihood of being arrested, tried and executed runs like an electric current through Moll’s accounts of the many successful getaways that follow, and of how she negotiates her way out of the hands of her victims and would—be prosecutors, co...