At Home in England, or Projecting Liberal Citizenship in "Moll Flanders" Author(s): Amit Yahav-Brown Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol.

35, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 24-45 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346042 . Accessed: 11/04/2011 21:26
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At

Home

England, or Citizenship in Moll

in

Projecting
Flanders

Liberal

AMIT YAHAV-BROWN In 1957, Ian Watt suggested in The Rise of the Novel that Protestantism and capitalism are the informing logics behind novelistic representations of society. Defoe's novels, inaugurating the new genre in Watt's account, represent communities that privilege individual pursuit of economic possession and manifest the strife and alienation that inevitably plague an order founded on such an ethic. The society envisioned in these novels, Watt points out, resembles the one theorized in the political philosophy of John Locke. Following C.B. Macpherson, we have come to identify this political philosophy as the origins of modem liberalism and to label it "possessive individualism." On such an account, rights-based politics are designed to protect private property, and the autonomy of individuals necessarily comes at the expense of social commitment. As Watt puts it, "[t]he hypostasis of the economic motive logically entails a devaluation of other modes of thought, feeling and action: the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality-all are weakened" (64). Thus, in the novelistic vision of "possessive individualism," characters are essentially isolated accumulators of property; Defoe's characters, as Watt describes them, are all "an embodiment of economic individualism" (63), and they, essentially, "all belong on Crusoe's island" (112). More recently, critics have challenged the notion that Defoe's vision of modem society is one of tenuously linked, alienated outcasts. For example, John Bender, in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), argues that Defoe represents the formation of a society whose bond is based on a homogenizing norm inculcated by social institutions, for which the penitentiary is a paradigm. In the same manner in which Foucault suggests that the rise of liberal individualism is accompanied by the rise of the penitentiary, Bender argues that the highly individualized personalities of Defoe's characters are a product of the disciplining of consciousness to conform with hegemonic norms. Political cohesion, in this model, is derived from the internalization of ideology and the subjectivization of consciousness, a feat achieved through the very architecture of modem cities and through the social institutions that organize daily life. In the "possessive individualism" model assumed by Watt, persons are first and foremost autonomous economic agents who become rightful citizens only after they have become owners; they voluntarily surrender some of their natural freedoms to the state in exchange for its power to protect their property rights. The political bond, on this account, is a chosen and precarious alliance of
I'd like to thank Frances Ferguson for her inspiring and generous advice throughout, Amanda Anderson for her invaluable suggestions at crucial moments, Ronald Paulson for bringing An Essay upon Projects to my attention, and Irene Tucker, Rachel Cole, and Galia Sartiel for their illuminating comments on early drafts.

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economic convenience. In the recent critique of this model of liberalism assumed by Bender, individuals are first and foremost embodiments of ideology, and they become rightful citizens only insofar as they conform to the norms into which they have been disciplined. In this model, the choices of individuals are significantly predetermined by the social institutions that surround them and shape their consciousness from birth. The political bond, on this account, rests not so much on the action of choice as on the content of one's choices, as it is determined by institutional structures. Neither of these models seems to me to explain adequately the social organization represented in Defoe's novels. Defoe's heroes are, indeed, extraordinarily mobile, and his plots do incessantly repeat the rags-to-riches myth of highly resourceful men and women. However, his heroes also invariably gravitate back to England throughout their lives, even though they make most of their money outside their native country. And England seems to wield this unchosen and economically disadvantageous power in Defoe's plots despite the fact that the social institutions that are supposed to inculcate hegemonic norms are so obviously defective in these stories of disobedient sons, petty criminals, and whores. What, then, is the logic behind Defoe's vision of social organization? I argue that in Moll Flanders (1722) Defoe projects a rudimentary version of a rightsbased, non-economic, and non-ideological liberal citizenship. Such citizenship is intended to guarantee inalienable access to resources to anyone born under a state's jurisdiction and to do so solely on the basis of their deliberative capacities. And it imagines that the political bond is a strong one, not because citizens are disciplined to conform to hegemonic norms but because the benefits of citizenship make cooperation advantageous for people trying to pursue their interests in a reality of scarce resources. We might identify such citizenship as fundamentally resembling the model John Rawls has recently offered in his Political Liberalism(1993). Rawls's model stipulates rights on deliberative capacities-defining personhood through two fundamental moral characteristics: the reasonable and the rational-and specifies the content of rights as the state's obligation to secure access to primary goods for all citizens. The following discussion is divided into three sections. The first, "The Citizen," considers the ways in which Defoe represents and emphasizes Moll's deliberative capacities. The second, "State Institutions," focuses on Defoe's welfare proposals in An Essay upon Projects (1697) and suggests that in the Essay and in Moll Flanders he makes the case for the state's obligation to all its citizens-regardless of their class status or economic profiles. In The Second Treatise of Government (1698), Locke argues that political membership is a function of express consent, suggesting that people become citizens well after they become proprietors. Once citizenship depends on express consent, the state is only obligated towards those who have previously demonstrated their commitment to the social contract. "'Tis plain then, by the Practice of Governments themselves, as well as by the Law of right Reason, that a Child is born a Subject of no Country or Government" (347), Locke writes. While Defoe would have agreed that this is the practice of his English government, his projection of state institutions is precisely designed to

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refute the claim that it is right.1 In the social organization Defoe envisions, citizenship represents the political community's obligation to guarantee for all members, throughout their lives and regardless of their economic and social profiles, a set of inalienable benefits. Unlike the social organization theorized by Locke in The Second Treatise,Defoe's state makes economic success the outcome, rather than the origin, of citizenship. The third and last section of this discussion, "Citizenship and Institutions," considers the representation of penal transportation in Moll Flandersand suggests that Defoe uses it to emphasize the value of home implied by his paradigm of citizenship. Defoe's representation idealizes the historical penal apparatus and turns transportation into the means by which England finally recognizes the rights of a population that hitherto had been beneath its radar. I conclude the discussion with a brief comparison between the representation of transportation in Moll Flanders and in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations(1860-61) in order to suggest both the sources and consequences of Defoe's idealistic projection. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when England's institutions were relatively weak and decentralized, Defoe projects liberal citizenship as a "new contrivance"-to use the language of the Essay-and as a possible achievement.2 By the mid-nineteenth century, England had already become thoroughly bureaucratized, but in a way that is inadequate when viewed from the perspective of Defoe's liberal citizenship. Thus, when Dickens takes up transportation, he uses Defoe's ideal primarily as a measure of missed opportunities. I. The Citizen If Crusoe's ingenuity lies in his mechanical inventiveness, Moll's ingenuity lies in her deliberative capacities. Her actions, though seeming to be nothing more than common-sensical, always involve elaborate calculations. Which of her suitors to favor, how to behave in an incestuous marriage, what to do with an inconvenient pregnancy, how to take a bundle that does not belong to her-all these questions turn into "situations" for Moll, cases that need to be weighed and considered, never just simply resolved. Moll's "situations" evoke a Hobbesian model of deliberation, representing a process of ranking coextensive desires and aversions that leads to willing and then to action. For the purposes of Moll Flanders, the force of this model is twofold: first, in locating the distance between sensation

1Many critics have read Moll as a class-climber. On such accounts, whatever political benefits Moll manages to achieve are a function of her ability to disentangle herself single-handedly from her original destitution. For a survey of Marxist and economic-centered liberal readings other than Watt's, see the introduction to Chaber's Marxist-feminist account. Recently, James Thompson has read Defoe as only partially committed to economic models. He argues that Defoe's novels represent the narrative of capitalism right before it has consolidated into the discourse of political economy and separated from novelistic discourse, which defines itself against it.
2

For accounts that focus on the ways in which Defoe's writings dramatize already-available precepts of political philosophy (rather than "new contrivances"), see Novak's Defoe and the Nature of Man and Schonhorn.

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and action in the comparative analysis of sensation itself, it allows for the least abstract of calculations to be understood as deliberation. It thus recognizes the most basic actions as the outcome of the individual's will and takes these actions to be articulations of interest. When Moll, for example, responds to a situation by feeling nauseated-as when she discovers that her second husband is also her brother-such a visceral reaction can be regarded as part of the process of deliberation and as an articulation of her will. Second, since the deliberative process is grounded in individual sensory experience, judgments of appropriate behavior-that is, judgments as to whether actions are good or evil-are entirely subjective. And indeed Moll-who is hardly competing for a title of virtue-is never engaged in deliberation for the purpose of discovering the true or the good in any absolute or transcendent sense. Moreover, it is even difficult to tell whether her preferences are those that, in the final analysis, have served her best interest, since it is difficult to imagine what "the best" interest might be when it is defined solely by the individual's will. Insofar as Moll produces her own judgments through her own experience, and insofar as the novel doesn't offer a standard that is independent of Moll's own assessments, we have no alternative measure to which we might compare her preferences and judge them as better or worse.3 Many critics have noticed that Defoe doesn't represent a free-standing or coherent standard of value in his novels, but it has often been assumed that this is a result of a kind of primitivism in his craftsmanship. It has been argued that Defoe, pioneering in the invention of a new literary form and doing it in a hurry, failed to develop a mechanism for presenting an objective perspective, one that would allow the reader to confidently identify the judgment that he intends to pass on his characters.4 In Moll Flanders, however, the absence of a self-evident narrative norm constitutes the necessary background for emphasizing Moll's deliberative capacities. Insofar as nothing in Moll's world unequivocally determines what her choices should be, her actions can be understood as products of her lengthy deliberative processes. And it is the activity of deliberation, rather than the judgment of its end, that is privileged in Moll's story, not so much what her deliberation yields as the fact that she is deliberating rather than acting on an impulse.

3
4

See Hobbes's Leviathan 120, 127-28. Kay offers an extensive discussion of how Defoe's novels illustrate features of Hobbes's political theory. See Watt 99-101 and 115-18. Those who disagree with the initial claim about the absence of coherent moral order in the novels also tend to disagree among themselves regarding the nature of the judgment that is implied. For example, Zimmerman finds Moll guilty of degeneration from natural purity to the corruption of social expediency; Richetti, by contrast, commends her for successfully transcending the ideology of possessive individualism that governs her society. The presence or absence of an objective perspective that allows for judgment is also the pivotal issue in the debate about irony in Defoe's novels. For a good explanation of the stakes of the debate and a survey of its early phase, see Watt, "The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders."In a more recent discussion, Novak makes the case for irony by an analysis of Defoe's use of innuendo and his command of the two different temporalities of Moll's narrative (the present of her narration and the past of her actions).

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G.A. Starr has drawn attention to this deliberative process and has accounted for it as Defoe's innovative use of traditional casuistic forms.5 But while Starr recognizes that the deliberative, or casuistical, form of Moll's narrative prevents the reader from passing rigorous judgment over her actions, he attributes the difficulties of judgment less to the nature of the action than to the quality of Moll's narration. Starr consistently presupposes that Moll's actions are indeed morally reprehensible, but that Moll makes use of the deliberative process as a strategy to elicit the reader's sympathy. Moreover, in relying on the forms of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century casuistry, Starr's account implicitly suggests that Moll's deliberations attempt to reconcile discrete situations with equally identifiable rules of conduct. Although these early modern casuistic forms emphasize ostensible contradictions between actual cases and abstract rules, as well as between different available rules, they assume that the cases and the rules-the materials of deliberation-are already available in usable form. The early modem casuistic case, then, always takes the form of a synchronic sorting out of details and principles. But Moll, by contrast, usually doesn't quite know what she is coming up against or what might be her alternative solutions until she is well into the process of deliberation. For this reason, Defoe places much emphasis on the temporal process of Moll's learning-the process of Moll's figuring out-what the details of her situation are and what the plausible modes of response might be. Thus, underlying the difference between Starr's understanding of the deliberative process in Moll Flanders and my own is a different ascription of the temporal quality of narrative, which leads to a different understanding of the very stakes of deliberation. While Starr locates the temporal quality in retroactive narration, I locate it in the represented action itself. And while Starr understands deliberation as the adjudication of circumstances and principles within a pre-established value system, I understand it as in itself a valueconstructing activity.6 Insofar as Moll's situations often span conspicuously long periods of time, Defoe asks us to ascribe the temporal dimension-and, with it, the difficulties of judgment or valuation-to the deliberative process itself rather than to its retroactive narration. The incest episode, for example, runs for eight years, with Moll aware of the true nature of her affiliation with her partner for at least five years (but possibly more). During no less than three years, Moll is occupied with individual deliberation, trying to figure out how she feels about incest and what she can do to respond to it. If she reveals her knowledge of incest, she might lose the financial and social status of her married life, since, as she thinks, her husband "was too nice and too honest a Man to have continued my Husband after he had known I had been his Sister" (70). But keeping their consanguinity a secret turns
5
6

See Starr's Defoe and Casuistry. My understanding of casuistry relies not only on Starr's but also on Chandler's in England in 1819, chapter 4. Chandler suggests that casuistry instantiates the very form of deliberation as value-constructing activity, and he explains its historical evolution from the classical Jesuit activity to English Romanticism. Romanticism transformed casuistry, according to Chandler, from the adjudication of discrete cases and independent rules to the adjudication of cases and rules that are mutually constitutive.

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out to be an impractical solution; under the weight of her knowledge, Moll develops an aversion to her husband: "I liv'd therefore in open avowed Incest and Whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest Wife; and tho' I was not much touched with the Crime of it, yet the Action had something in it shocking to Nature, and made my Husband, as he thought himself even nauseous to me" (71). Her husband, in turn, grows impatient and even violent with her. "We had many Family quarrels," Moll explains, "and they began (in time) to grow up to a dangerous Height" (73; emphasis added). Even after Moll lears how she feels about incest, she needs time to figure out what to do next: the violent quarrels bring Moll "to a Resolution, whatevercame of it to lay open [her] whole Case; but which way to do it, or to whom, was an inextricable Difficulty, and took me up many Months to Resolve" (73). When Moll finally confides in her mother, individual deliberation doesn't give way to instantaneous solution, but, instead, a process of social deliberation begins. The mother believes that the secret should be kept between the two of them and family life should be maintained as is. "In this directly opposite Opinion to one another my Mother and I continued a long time, and it was impossible to reconcile our Judgments," Moll explains and adds, "many Disputes we had about it, but we could never either of us yield our own, or bring over the other" (78). To break the tie, Moll finally involves her husband/brother, using an elaborate quasi-legal negotiation process by which she tries to secure his opinion to her side. But her husband, just like Moll and her mother before him, at first thinks that ignoring the secret is the best solution, and it takes him several months to realize that he, too, cannot live with its burden. The man becomes depressed, tries to kill himself twice, falls "into a long ling'ring Consumption" (82), and finally agrees with Moll that the best way to solve their problems would be to let her return to England on her own. The difficulty that Moll faces here-the reason why the family has to go through such a lengthy and painful deliberation process-stems from a conflict between social circumstances and the narrative's more general concern in securing Moll's status as a deliberating agent. In Moll's world, once a marriage is discovered to be illegal (as it would if husband and wife are siblings), it is immediately dissolved, and wife and children are left with very few legal rights. Thus, Moll explains, if her husband/brother "should take the Advantage the Law would give him, he might put me away with disdain, and leave me to Sue for the little Portion that I had, and perhaps waste it all in the Suit, and then be a Beggar; the Children would be ruin'd too, having no legal Claim to any of his Effects" (76). Moll and her children would have no rights to property-not even an unquestionable entitlement to the (little) wealth that Moll brought with her into the marriage; the only right that Moll would retain is the right to sue. But without money or property, Moll might be very well reduced to necessity, the luxury of deliberation in court necessarily given up for the more urgent claims of survival. Thus, revealing the secret to her husband/brother could make Moll's deliberative capacities vulnerable in the extreme: the risk that Moll runs is less a matter of losing the chance of satisfying her will in this particular situation, than a matter of losing access altogether to the conditions that make it possible for her to deliberate. In keeping her husband out of the picture for as long as she can and

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then taking great care in how she involves him, Moll not only prolongs the process of this particular deliberation, but also attempts to ensure her ability to remain party to any such processes in the future. Yet the incestuous alliance not only endangers Moll's material ability to follow through with future deliberative processes; it also conceptually jeopardizes Moll's status as a deliberating agent. As Claude Levi-Strauss explains in The Savage Mind, what distinguishes the logic of endogamous and exogamous marriages is that while the first is a strictly biological relationship, the second also serves as a site for the construction of social value. The guiding principle behind their endogamous marriages is the sexual capacities of the partners-what physical organs make them-while the one defining the logic of exogamous marriages is their social characteristics-the identity of the persons beyond their sex. The added social difference in exogamous marriages makes it possible to conceptualize the alliance between husband and wife not as a sexual neceslike the call of nature-but rather as a deliberative alliance.7 sity-something And, indeed, marriage in Moll Flanders is always a contract negotiated between Moll and her future husbands; it is one of the primary activities through which Moll exercises her deliberative capacities. When Moll first tells her family that she wants to leave, her brother accuses her of being an "unnatural Mother" for prioritizing her own interests over those of her children (72). This accusation emphasizes the double bind that the endogamous marriage puts Moll in, as far as the conventional take on "nature" goes: living in incest, as Moll considers it, is "shocking to Nature" (71), while abandoning children is also "unnatural." These conflicting versions of what a woman should do in order to be considered "natural" only underscore the fact that what is at stake here isn't defending the true value of nature, or, for that matter, the natural value of virtue. For, whatever course of action Moll might have resolved to take, she would have been condemned as "unnatural." Thus, when Moll argues that dissolving the incestuous marriage is the thing to do, she is entirely bypassing the question of naturalness in order to defend her own ability to participate in the production of evaluative criteria. Her preference for exogamy amounts to a commitment to the logical presuppositions that make it possible for her society to recognize her as more than a biological resource. In dissolving the endogamous marriage, Moll protects her status as a deliberating agent-as a person who is more than what her physical organs make her and as one who can participate in the process of evaluation.8
7

Levi-Strauss argues that the totem system (in which exogamy is practiced and which is opposed to the caste system, whose marriage practices are governed by endogamy) stands as the conceptual basis of modern individualism. Such "social individualism" can also be understood as an alternative model to Watt's "possessive individualism." For an account of the incest episode that relies on a similar theoretical apparatus but arrives at an antithetical conclusion, see Ellen Pollak. Pollak notes the centrality of this episode to Moll's mastery of her political life, but she identifies its significance as Moll's failure: "the Virginia episode has the effect of both organizing and ultimately neutralizing the subversive force of Moll's subsequent transgressions against institutional authority" (6). If Moll would have adhered to endogamy, Pollak argues, she would have subverted the last and most oppressive institution of patriarchy. Pollak picks up on the fact that in the initial form of the totem system

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Defoe emphasizes Moll's commitment to maintain her deliberative capacities not just in the incest episode but throughout the novel. Participating in the deliberative processes through which her actions are evaluated is among Moll's earliest concerns. At the age of eight, she is determined to avoid becoming a servant and insists that earning one's bread by wages is being a gentlewoman (9-10). Moll's claims raise condescending laughs in both her nurse and the gentlewomen of Colchester, a reaction that indicates their perplexity: though they all agree that to work is Moll's duty, it never occurred to them that it might actually be her right. But it is precisely the right to earn, as opposed to the duty to serve, that Moll is asserting-"all I understood by being a Gentlewoman, was to be able to Workformyself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible Bug-bear going to Service" (11-12, first emphasis added)-and, in spite of the novelty of her demand, she is successful in having things go her way. Moll's preference "to work for [her]self" is not simply an assertion of her right to her labor, that is, her ownership of her body, for a servant is already guaranteed this right. This is what distinguishes the servant from the slave. Neither is she imagining that she can survive simply by accumulating the products of her labor. If she were shipwrecked on a desert island that might have been possible, but she's not. What must be at stake in working for herself, then, is Moll's right to take part in the process of valuation itself, her status as a deliberating agent who participates in constructing the norms through which her actions and their products are evaluated. Throughout Moll Flanders, Moll is specifically concerned with ensuring her ability to deliberate her way to luxury, an activity that is distinct from the ability to labor for wealth or to have luxury conferred on her as a gift. Labor isn't at stake because England is by no means in a state of nature-or, as Locke defines it, a state of plenitude-as, for example, Crusoe's island is. If Robinson Crusoe is about the capacity of making good use of raw abundance, Moll Flanders is about the right to resources in conditions of scarcity. And gifts aren't at stake because, unlike Roxana, who often characterizes herself as a passive source of pleasure, Moll insists that her achievements are deliberate. If Roxana accumulates her wealth through the will of her lovers, who lavish her with gifts that she, pointedly, never asks for, Moll gains her wealth by figuring out what it is she wants and how she might collaborate with others to achieve it.o1
women were in fact treated as objects of, rather than parties to, the marriage alliance. However, endogamy, as I have tried to explain, puts women at an even further remove from achieving the status of deliberative agent and thus of political rights; exogamy, at least in principle, attributes to women capacities beyond their sex. Moreover, in Moll Flanders as in his other writings (for example, Conjugal Lewdness), Defoe conceptualizes marriage as a mutual agreement between husband and wife, not as an agreement between a husband and a wife's family. 9 When her nurse dies, Moll is technically taken into service by the Colchester family into which she later marries, but she is treated there as more than a servant, benefiting from "all the Advantages for my Education that could be imagin'd" (15).

10 Roxana emphasizes many times that she never asks her prince for anything: "I crav'd nothing of him; I never ask'd him for any thing in my Life," she says. "[H]is Bounty always prevented me in the first, and my strict concealing myself, in the last" (82-83).

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II. State Institutions To characterize Moll through her deliberative capacities is one thing, but to suggest that society is responsible for making sure she can sustain them is quite another. In fact, the ostensible paradox of Moll Flanders-the predicament of Moll's life-is that Moll has to deliberate in order to secure her own deliberative capacities. Thus, we find Moll at the age of three improbably negotiating her own entry into English society: she tells us that she chose to leave the Gypsies who have been caring for her for the past two years and to charm the Colchester functionaries into taking her into their parish. This improbability underscores the impossible circumstances in which England puts its poor orphans. To begin with, Moll finds herself outside English society only because its government failed to guarantee her basic needs during the first three years of her life. Moll is left an orphan because her mother is transported to America, and, as Moll explains, while in France orphans such as herself are "immediately taken into the Care of the Government," in England she is left "a poor desolate Girl without Friends, without Cloaths, without Help or Helper in the World" (7). In Defoe's England, poverty was considered a public nuisance, and welfare administration was left to individual parishes. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their monumental English Local Government, label the logic of the Old Poor Law a "framework of repression" (407), indicating a reality in which the destitute were either incarcerated or forced into vagrancy by a system that was geared to avoid poor relief more than it was designed to administer it. Each parish was financially responsible for its own poor, yet parish officers-being accountable only to the rate-payers, who were property owners in the community-often exercised the cheapest way of "poor relief" by driving the destitute, and sometimes those who were only potentially destitute, beyond parish borders. This practice received legal sanction in The Law of Settlement and Removal of 1662, by which parishes were entitled to remove to her original parish anyone who could might become chargeable. (Essentially, anyone who couldn't provide security to the overseers of her financial independence at present as well as in the future might have been removed.) Although this law was intended to sedentarize the propertyless population of England, it in fact only exacerbated mobility. Moreover, this law catalyzed the breakdown of the poor-relief administration because it gave rise to incessant inter-parochial litigation; while the destitute could not sue against their removal, the parish of destination could sue against their reception, and determining the parish of origin was notoriously difficult in what was, in fact, an increasingly mobile society.l1 In his An Essay upon Projects, Defoe makes an extensive argument for a different management of poor-relief. There, Defoe proposes, among other projects, reforms for poor-relief institutions. He suggests instituting a state-wide system that would care for those who no longer are able, or may never be able, to care for themselves. Two features make these projected reforms remarkably innovative: first, Defoe argues that the national system can be supported exclusively by
For a detailed account of the effects of sedentarizing legislation on the condition and regulation of the poor in the eighteenth century, see Webb, chapters 5 and 6. Also see Dorothy Marshall.

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taxation of earnings. In this sense, the welfare projects of the Essay are designed for a state of earners, not of owners: both in its economic base and in its purposes, it targets a population of job-holders rather than one of property holders. Second, Defoe presents the obligation to provide welfare as a matter of right, rather than as a matter of charity. He suggests that people who can't work because of deficient capacities are entitled to welfare, which is different from suggesting that people who are well-to-do should take the poor's condition to heart. The first makes welfare a collective responsibility, the second leaves it up to individual compassion; the first casts welfare as the right of all citizens, the second as an ethical obligation of the more fortunate. Within the logic laid out by An Essay upon Projects, England's failure to provide material sustenance for the infant Moll amounts to a positive infringement of this child's rights. Among the various national projects sketched in the Essay, Defoe proposes nationally administered pension-offices to replace the existing parish system. While the parish system drew its funding from poor-rates and from donations and gave full responsibility for procuring funds as well as administrative autonomy to each parish-community, Defoe proposes a uniform system that draws its funds from the income of earners. Each earner would regularly contribute a certain portion of her earnings, and when she is incapable of working (as a result of injury, disease, or old age), she would receive either complete care, including health and board, or a pension whose amount is determined in relation to the incurred loss in productivity. Any person who works is required to contribute, and any person who has contributed is eligible for compensation (Essay 57-67). Defoe here designs an association for people who need each other's help to raise money, are capable of realizing this need, and are therefore willing to cooperate for this particular purpose. Thus the plan is for a state of earners-it aspires to turn all persons into earners and to cater to persons' needs as such. But this plan also gestures toward a more generalized welfare system-one that doesn't rely on the prior contribution of the compensated individuals-when Defoe goes on to consider what is to be done when a person is incapable, and never has been capable, of realizing her needs. He projects for such people in the chapter "Of Fools." Fools are "depriv'd of Reason to act for themselves" (69)-they are precluded from membership in the pension office because their deliberative capacities are disabled and they will never be able to earn. How, then, should their needs be taken care of? At first, Defoe uses the more conventional charity logic, suggesting that those who received abundant reason have a moral responsibility to contribute from the fortune that they earn by means of this good fortune: If I were to be ask'd, Who ought in particular to be charg'd with this Work?I would answer in general, Those who have a Portion of Understanding Not that I would lay a Tax upon any man's Brains, or discourage extraordinary: Wit, by appointing Wise Men to maintain Fools: But some Tribute is due to God's Goodnessfor bestowing extraordinaryGifts;and who can it be betterpaid to, that such as sufferfor want of the same Bounty?

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For the providing therefore some Subsistenceforsuch, that Natural Defects may not be expos'd: It is Propos'd, That a Fool-House be Erected,either by Publick Authority, or by the City, or by an Act of Parliament;into which, all that are Naturals, or born Fools, without Respectof Distinction, should be admittedand maintain'd. For the Maintenanceof this a small stated Contribution,settl'd by the Authority of an Act of Parliament, without any Damage to the Persons paying the same, might be very easily rais'd, by a Tax upon Learning, to be paid by the Authors of Books.(71) But if at first Defoe seems a little naive about the percentage of those endowed with extraordinary reason, he soon adds to the book tax another source for funding fools: revenues from a lottery inaugurated especially for the purpose. With the lottery, he writes, we shall "maintain Fools out of our own Folly" (72). Defoe's insistence on a kind of poetic justice in the allocation of resources for fools is more than elegant or witty. Its profundity lies in the fact that it coordinates the resources of the pension-office with those of the fool-house, and thus it shifts the responsibility of caring for the needy away from fortunate individuals and over to the social organization as a whole. All earners will eventually contribute to the maintenance of those who can't take care of themselves: those who have too much reason to think that gambling serves their interest will be taxed on their income; those who are reasonable enough to earn, but every now and then can't resist superstition, will be taxed on their occasional lapses. Thus, with the pension-office project and the fool-house project, the state as an association of earners begins to look as though it is obligated towards anyone who has been born under its jurisdiction. It becomes the state's responsibility to distribute resources among those who can take care of themselves, as well as among those who can't.12 Until now, though, Defoe has mandated social fairness as a "Tribute due to God's Goodness," and it still might be mistaken as another version of charity. But at the end of the most famous chapter of the Essay, "Of Academies," Defoe makes an argument for formal equality which squarely positions social fairness not as a private matter-a charity that might be more efficiently administered by the state-but, rather, as a public matter that involves the rights of each and every individual: I believe it might be defended,if I should say, That I do suppose God has given to all Mankind equal Gifts and Capacities, in that he has given them all Souls equally capable;and that the whole difference in Mankind proceeds either from Accidental Differencein the Make of their Bodies, orfrom the foolish Difference of Education.(114)

12

Locke, by contrast, relegates sole responsibility for fools to their families. Since for Locke citizenship requires the express consent of the individual, the state cannot be held responsible for either children or fools (see 308).

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Defoe's direct goal in making this claim is to defend his project for a women's academy; but he does invoke "all Mankind," which makes it possible to infer the more general principle that informs his calls for social reform throughout the Essay. The fool-house passage might have suggested that we should be taxed for our individual indulgence in God's bounty as a way of thanksgiving for our individual fortune. But if we use the Academies passage to gloss the earlier foolhouse passage, then it becomes possible to infer that we should be taxed for our individual indulgence because God hasn't bestowed his bounty on us as individuals at all. The goodness of reason is one that we receive as a species-"God has given to all Mankind," the later passage asserts-and, therefore, our tribute to God must take the form of ensuring that it indeed benefits all members of our species. Reason is bestowed as a collective resource, and therefore, the task of social action is to compensate for all that contradicts reason (or, we might say, all that is irrational): the purpose of social action is to correct "accidental Difference" and to eradicate "foolish Difference." Compensation for disadvantage, by this logic, is the entitlement of the needy, since they are part of God's scheme of equality. Read in this way, An Essay upon Projects turns welfare from a matter of charity to a matter of right.13 Defoe's innovative double move to a state of earners that considers welfare as the right of all citizens is important for my reading of Moll Flanders because it solves the ostensible paradox of Moll's having to deliberate in order to secure her own deliberative capacities. The Essay assumes that deliberative capacities are the origin of wealth-since earning is privileged over serving and owning-but it shifts the responsibility for securing the capacities of individuals from the individual herself to the collective association. No person should have to endure the paradoxical predicament of deliberating for her own deliberative capacities, Defoe suggests, and this can be ensured if welfare is treated as an inalienable legal right.14
13

For my larger claim regarding the similarity between Defoe's projections of citizenship and ideal liberal citizenship, it doesn't matter whether the commitment to fairness is derived from the belief that God has created us equal, or from the belief that nature has created us equal, or, for that matter, from any other theory of origins. It doesn't matter why we choose to believe in equality as long as we accept that the belief in equality logically entails that if we are in principle equal then we are in principle eligible to equal access to resources. Both the Webbs and Marshall assign to Defoe a conservative and illiberal stance on poor relief based on his 1704 pamphlet Giving Alms no Charity and Employing the Poor. The Webbs and Marshall are correct to notice Defoe's complete impatience with non-industrious poor and to be indignant at Defoe's suggestion that England's unemployed men suffer exclusively from a characterological problem. But I think they overlook Defoe's strong and consistent a than penal-policies, commitment to government intervention through positive-rather commitment that is evident even in this pamphlet. Giving Alms no Charity was designed to stall legislation promoting the establishment of parish-owned wool manufactures in which the poor would be forced to work (for context, see Webb 114-16). In their stead, Defoe suggests that government should promote policies that would guarantee employment within the private market-i.e., regulate consumption, circulation and production, so as to increase them in this than as part of a penal mechanism. He is thus promoting government order-rather intervention for the improvement of the lives of the employed over and against the coercion of the unemployed. Giving Alms no Charity is also especially keen on maintaining nation-wide

14

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Insofar as the logic of charity depends on individual disposition, few were compassionate enough to care for the sons and daughters of Newgate; as Moll explains, "as I was born in such an unhappy Place, I had no Parish to have Recourse to for my Nourishment" (8).15Thus, the existing charity system does not ensure Moll's access to basic material resources-those resources that she needs in order to develop into a fully functioning, deliberating human being, a contributing member of the would-be community of earners. This initial deprivation forces Moll out of English society, and she is taken up by a band of Gypsies who look after her until she develops some minimal capacities that allow her to re-enter English society. She then lingers around Colchester telling the parish officers that "I came into the Town with the Gypsies, but that I would not go any farther with them" (8). She is "not a Parish Charge upon this or that part of the Town by Law," and she is still "too young to do any Work" (8-9); but Moll already has enough command of her deliberative capacities to successfully mobilize the charity of the functionaries of Colchester: "Compassion mov'd the Magistrates of the Town to order some Care to be taken of me, and I became one of their own, as much as if I had been born in the Place" (9). Thus, with some luck, her own agency, and other people's compassion, but without institutional guarantees of a right to welfare, Moll survives her first years in the world. A similar scenario of individual agency and luck, which emphasizes the failure of institutions to actualize Moll's rights, characterizes Moll's survival throughout her narrative. With very limited forms of earning open to women, Moll is forced to put herself back on the marriage market each time her present marriage dissolves. In order to ensure her ability to earn a living, she must relocate, abandon her children, and deny her previous marriages-all this in order to secure her marketability as a wife. Because of a faulty welfare system, then, Moll is forced into reconstituting herself as an earner over and over again-each time almost entirely from scratch-and, in so doing, to transgress both propriety and law. Moll turns into a whore and a thief primarily because her society consistently deprives her of straightforward access to the material resources she needs in order to deliberate her way through the world. Moll cannot really earn an honest or respectable living, since her society does not guarantee the welfare of Newgate-bor orphan girls and of young women who do not have wealthy family or friends. Thus, Moll must figure out on her own-through lengthy deliberative processes-not simply what she can do in order to survive, but what she can get away with in order to earn a living in a society that does not recognize her rights. By showing that Moll often has to earn her keep by transgressing her community's laws and manners, Defoe points out the shortcomings of a social organization that does not recognize the rights of persons such as Moll. Insofar as England fails to secure Moll's basic material needs, its institutions are much
circulation of goods, indicating a commitment to constructing England as a collaborative national economy as opposed to a system of independent parishes. 15 Blewett emphasizes that children born in Newgate usually did not receive parish support not because Newgate was outside any parish but because it was fairly simple for the parishes of St. Sepulcher, Holbor, and Christchurch, Newgate Street to avoid their responsibilities in these cases (430n8).

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more conducive to the production of whores and thieves than to the breeding of law-abiding and respectable citizens. III. Citizenship and Transportation After five marriages and a thriving criminal career, Moll is finally called by her society to account for the disparities between her own rules and theirs. She is caught, suggestively, attempting to steal silver spoons, thrown into Newgate, tried as an old offender, and sentenced to death. But, while in Newgate, Moll repents, and, with the help of a minister, she receives a reprieve that transports her to America in lieu of the final trip to Tyburn. This symbolic selfreconstitution-at the site of her birth and under the same predicament of transportation as that of her mother, which also constitutes Moll's original misfortune-finally lasts: following her transportation, Moll settles into the enduring identity of a penitent and wealthy wife and mother. Yet the concluding detail of Moll Flanders isn't Moll's conversion but her return to England. After "having perform'd much more than the limited Terms of [her] Transportation" (268), Moll returns to the country of her birth to write her autobiography from there, indicating that adequate closure for this novel is, specifically, political repatriation, rather than economic and spiritual rehabilitation. When a state treats some of its residents as undesirable, eliminating them by way of exile, it effectively suggests the irrelevance of citizenship to their case. Thus, when Defoe brings Moll back to England, he underscores the significance of the rights-bearing status of political membership for anyone born under English jurisdiction-be they poor, female, or felons. Moreover, had the novel ended with Moll's good fortune in the New World, Moll's citizenship would have become irrelevant to her welfare. In such a scenario, Moll's spiritual conversion in Newgate prior to her transportation would have authorized her prosperity, and the novel's critique of England's institutions would have been superfluous. But Defoe doesn't seem to be particularly interested in the state of Moll's spirit; indeed, many critics have doubted the authenticity of Moll's conversion, even though her narrative conforms to the formal structure of spiritual autobiography, as G.A. Starr has shown.16 Instead of staking Moll's welfare on the state of her consciousness, Defoe stakes it on the state of her citizenship, and he uses transportation as a way of finally activating the benefits that Moll's political status should have entitled her to all along. Defoe was an outspoken supporter of transportation, and it has been suggested that Moll Flanders served as propaganda for the Transportation Act of 1718.17 Defoe's support of transportation might be explained by the fact that this penal apparatus was, in part, foundational to constituting citizenship as a function of the capacity to earn. However, transportation also constituted citizenship as revocable, and it is significant that in its representation in Moll Flanders this
16 17

See Starr's Defoeand SpiritualAutobiography. In a letter to Applebee's Original WeeklyJournal, Defoe passionately presents the advantages of transportation. Backscheider suggests that the novel is propaganda for the Transportation Act.

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aspect is revised. Penal transportation, as it was actually instituted in England, was designed to fulfill four different purposes. First, as J.M. Beattie has argued, it was intended to modernize England's previously immoderate and highly ineffective penal code into a more gradual system, thus making it better suited to address an increasing variety of offences. Second, it was imagined as a more humane punishment, one that gave offenders a chance for a fresh start in a new community. Third, it was designed to supply cheap labor to the colonies. A.G.L. Shaw emphasizes these purposes in his study of transportation to Australia. Finally, transportation was a way of "ridding England of her undesirables" (Shaw 49). From the beginning of its official practice after James I's commission to the Privy Council of 1614-15 through to its cancellation in 1867, transportation was intended to eliminate an unwanted population of destitute delinquents by way of exile.18 In sentencing convicts to limited terms of indentured labor, transportation turned earning into the focal activity through which political rights and obligations are worked out, and thus, it implicitly recognized the status of convicts as citizens. Because transportation turns convicts into indentured servants, thus temporarily subordinating the criminal's capacity to earn to the interests of another person, it might seem like the perfect penalty for the state of earners. If the state's responsibility towards its citizens is grounded in a principle of right rather than a principle of charity, and if this principle of right is grounded in people's capacity to earn, then fairness entails that the price of transgression should be the loss of one's right to one's earnings.19 However, at the same time that transportation recognized convicts as potential earners, it exiled this population, thus also revoking convicts' citizenship. In practice, transportation revoked citizenship insofar as it was designed to restrict convicts' ability to return to England even after their terms expired. The Magna Carta (1215) protects all English subjects from punishment that is not in accordance with law and judgment, which includes the prolongation of punishment beyond sentence duration. The Magna Carta also secures the rights of English subjects to free mobility within England as well as across its borders.0 Transportation, thus, revoked two well-recognized

18

For a similar formulation, see Beattie 600. For Beattie's account of transportation, see his chapter 9 and especially 474-75 and 512-13. Transported convicts were sentenced to limited terms of servitude during which they were expected to labor for a variety of purposes and authorities. In America, convicts were sold to private plantation owners as indentured servants. In some phases of the Australian system, convicts were organized as a kind of public workforce in charge of building the colony's infrastructure; in other phases, they were hired out to private landowners in an attempt to repeat the benefits of the American system, which isolated the criminals from one another and, it was imagined, increased the chances of their rehabilitation by incorporating them into lawabiding families. For the Australian system, see Shaw; for the American, see Smith; for both, see Bentham, "Panopticon versus New South Wales." Magna Carta, clauses 39 and 42. For a discussion of transportation's violation of the English constitution, see Bentham's "A Plea for the Constitution"; he discusses the violation of the Magna Carta on 278. As a restriction on the mobility of the poor, the 1662 Law of Settlement and Removal, to which I referred in the previous section, also constituted a breach of the

19

20

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rights of English subjects, stripping ex-convicts of the substantive benefits of their citizenship.21 Such revocation seems inappropriate when viewed from the perspective of Defoe's An Essay upon Projects.If, as the Essay suggests, rights are a collective entitlement of humans as a rational species, then an individual's misuse of her rational capacities cannot serve as grounds for the loss of citizenship. In fact, if the ground of citizenship is that human beings-as a species-are fool, or criminal-can ever potential earners, then no human being-child, lose membership in the community of earners. Thus, while a person legitimately might be granted only partial rights as a sign of diminished obligations-because she is not yet an adult, or has been engaged in criminal activity, or is mentally handicapped, etc.-she cannot be entirely stripped of her citizenship. So while transportation recognized the status of convicts as earners, it was not so much designed to encourage them to be better English citizens as it was designed to give them a chance to become new citizens of a new community. It is fair, then, to describe it as a procedure that recognized the potential citizenship of all persons at the same time as it revoked the actual citizenship of the population it targeted. Given the faulty institutional organization of welfare, for many of England's poor the only brush with citizenship would occur precisely at the time when that citizenship was revoked. In concluding Moll Flanders with Moll's repatriation, Defoe revises this grim reality, idealistically projecting citizenship as an inalienable status. But this gesture of closure doesn't suggest that transportation is a privileged site in the formation of political identity within Defoe's logic of citizenship. In the context of the rest of the novel's plot, it suggests that transportation is the default site for the activation of citizenship in the institutional reality of eighteenth-century England. In the absence of such institutions as national orphanages and pensionoffices, transportation becomes the first and only occasion for recognizing a person as a citizen. Had Moll been granted her rights since childhood-had there been institutions to guarantee her basic needs, as well as to hold her accountable for her actions-she still might have become a felon (though, as I suggested earlier, the likelihood of this would have significantly decreased), but by that time she would have already been a recognized citizen. Thus, my emphasis on Moll's collision with state institutions differs from Bender's; he argues that the penitentiary is the original site of the production of moder consciousness and reads Moll's imprisonment as the foundation of her autobiographical narrative. As I have indicated in the introduction, for Bender, the prison is a paradigmatic
Magna Carta. Transportation, thus, can be read as an extension of the logic that England practiced more generally in its treatment of the poor.
21

We have unreliable information about return rates from America, but it is clear that as transportation became increasingly institutionalized, and especially after the inception of the penal colony in New South Wales, official policy intended to bar the return of expirees to England. The length and high expense of the voyage ensured that very few of those whose sentences expired would be able to afford it. Moreover, throughout the years, the government imposed a variety of administrative requirements that made return additionally difficult. These included prohibiting ship owners to carry expirees back to England, as well as stipulating return on a procedure of certification that was not conducted automatically at the convict's completion of his sentence. See Shaw and Bentham, "A Plea," especially 272-76.

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institution in a political system whose purpose is to shape consciousness. In my understanding of Defoe's projection of citizenship, the penal apparatus is only a default institution in a political system whose purpose is to facilitate deliberative action. Bender's emphasis on the penitentiary and his understanding of citizenship as a tool for the production of consciousness seem more applicable to Dickens's representation of citizens and institutions than to Defoe's. But Dickens's account, I would like briefly to suggest by way of conclusion, rather than challenging Defoe's projected ideal, comments on the actual evolution of England's institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this time, penal reform was vigorous; transportation and, later, the police force and the prisons were centralized.2 Welfare reform, however, was slow and ineffective. The New Poor Law of 1834 was a preliminary, mostly failed, attempt at centralizing poor relief administration, but within it the destitute were still treated as a rightless population: relief was stipulated on incarceration in the workhouses.23 Thus, the institutionalization of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increased infringement on the poor's freedom to exercise their deliberative capacities, while still not providing resources for the development and maintenance of the ability to earn. Within such a reality, transportation brings the inadequacy of England's political order into much sharper relief, and the injustice of transportation's own premises also becomes more clearly visible. If in 1722 Defoe assimilated transportation into a progressive and optimistic projection of liberal citizenship, by 1860, Charles Dickens made it the crux of a scathing critique of the grim realities of his contemporary England. Great Expectations (1860-61) follows Moll Flanders's liberal logic, but it focuses on the extent to which England is far from recognizing the rights of those among her citizens who are not property owners. Occupied with "the long chain of iron or gold" (72) that binds people to their past, Great Expectationsdevotes much attention to the drama of the exile's return. But if Pip's attachment to home is represented in the vocabulary of affect and the nightmares that the injunction "'DON'T GO HOME"' imagination-recall evokes (366-67)-the transported Magwitch's attachment is manifest primarily in the vocabulary of the penal institutions that schooled him. If Moll enjoys a long criminal career, uninterrupted by state institutions, Magwitch spends his entire life-from his very early childhood until his death-in and out of prison. Unlike
22

A professional police force was established in London in the mid-eighteenth century, though it was formally recognized by Parliament only in 1828; prison reform began with the Penitentiary Act of 1779 and intensified with the Prison Acts of 1835 and 1839. Before the reforms, prisoners were financially responsible for their upkeep-for room and board as well as for the profits of their jailers (see Bender 11-25 and 144-45). For poor relief during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Webb, vols. 8 and 9, and Rose. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, England began to legislate systematically for the provision of health, education, and employment for its poor, but only in 1945 was a national welfare system instituted to which all citizens, regardless of class, contribute and from which they are all entitled to benefit.

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the world of Moll Flanders, the world of Great Expectationshas a well-functioning police and a publicly operated prison system, and thus offenders have continuous criminal records. These records make it increasingly difficult to escape the circle of delinquency, and Magwitch's entire existence is gradually subsumed into his representations within penal institutions. As his record grows, his sentences become increasingly severe, and as his contact with the law increases, more of his actions are rendered criminal. This logic reaches its climax with Magwitch's transportation: he is exiled for life, and, on his return, a death sentence is imminent. While Great Expectations represents political identity as equivalent to criminal records, it isn't suggesting that citizenship is in principle a product of the penal apparatus. In this novel, as in Moll Flanders, the function of penal institutions is juxtaposed with a critique of a faulty welfare system. While Magwitch's world already has the institutional means of efficiently and continuously registering his offenses, it still doesn't have the welfare institutions that would have enabled it to recognize his existence through the actualization of his rights. And the novel severely criticizes this omission: when there isn't "a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him up" (346), and, as Magwitch complains, when penal reformers give the juvenile delinquent tracts about the devil instead of a job, it is practically impossible for a destitute orphan to develop any political profile other than that of a felon's. Part of Dickens's concern here, no doubt, is to demonstrate the pain and injustice that bureaucracies breed when law and regulation are executed merely as mechanical forms without the support of humanistic commitments. But if Dickens doesn't imagine institutionalization as the road to utopia, this is at least in part because of the way England's institutional history has evolved in the century-and-a-half since Defoe's Essay upon Projects. For while the penal apparatus has been systematized and consolidated on various levels, mid-nineteenthcentury England was far from being a community of earners that actualized the inalienable rights of all its members. Such uneven development meant that the destitute orphan's basic needs were still far from being secured, but that his ability to survive by getting away with violations of law and propriety was significantly curtailed. Thus Magwitch's deliberative capacities matter much less than Moll's-for his chances of successfully utilizing them, in an environment that not only neglects his rights but is actively hostile to them, are very small. That rights were still the privilege of owners is represented through Magwitch's aspirations for social recognition. Since Magwitch's consciousness is in many ways shaped by the profile that his citizenship gave him, he imagines experiencing social worthiness through the same values that his institutional reality privileges-that is, through owning a London gentleman. As he explains to

Pip:
"The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a bettergentleman nor ever you'll be!' Whenone of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, afew year ago, and

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is a ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?' This way I kep myselfa going." (321) Of course, because Magwitch's consciousness is shaped by faulty institutions, his account of his reward is imperfect. What redeems Magwitch by the standards of the novel is not the "fixed idea" (343), as Herbert Pocket calls it, of owning a London gentleman, but the intentions behind it and the industriousness manifest in its actualization. Magwitch isn't exactly invested in owning a gentleman; rather, he is devoted to earning in order to improve the expectations oi another human being. Magwitch's reform consists in his ability successfully to deliberate his way to wealth (which he is effectively denied in England, but which he can achieve in Australia), as well as in his choice of an orphaned blacksmith-to-be as the beneficiary of his work. His project in Australia demonstrates both his deliberative capacities and sound humanistic sentiments. He proves thus his ability to determine his own interests and to pursue these in cooperation with others, as well as his understanding of the equal worth of all persons. In exile, Magwitch has become an ideal liberal citizen, fit to participate fully in a Defoean state of earners. But just as England's institutions do not recognize Magwitch's rights during his childhood, they don't recognize them once he is a reformed adult. The court interprets his return to England not as a rightful actualization of his citizenship, but as a depraved "yielding to those propensities and passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to society" (457). Following this misinterpretation of Magwitch's insistence on his right of repatriation, the court sentences him to death and confiscates all of his property. Thus the judge implicitly admits that even after completing the sentence of transportation the expiree was never exactly a free man, his right of mobility denied and his earnings forever subordinated to the tyrannical will of the crown. By focusing on the limitations on Magwitch's political status under English law, Great Expectationsemphasizes that transportation effectively revoked citizenship from convicts, depriving them of the basic rights secured to Englishmen by the Magna Carta. If transportation takes on a grim and thoroughly realistic image in Great Expectations, this is because Dickens emphasizes the fact that England did not recognize its working citizens when they were honest and would not function as their political home even though its penal institutions had previously determined that it was. In contrast with Moll Flanders, transportation arrives in Great Expectationslong after Magwitch's citizenship has been activated, which is why the chain that links Magwitch to his political home is much more visible than the one that links Moll. And, because Magwitch's citizenship has been activated much earlier than Moll's, but in just as faulty a manner, no "inventive contrivance"-no projection of which even a novelist is capable-could plausibly transform this chain from iron to gold. The century and a half that passed between Defoe and Dickens had turned liberal citizenship from an achievable ideal into one that can only measure reality's

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deficiency. Great Expectations retains faith in the value of the liberal ideal, but it strips it from any pretensions to documentary realism and recasts it as solely a principle of critique. This is not to suggest that Dickens's Great Expectationsconstitutes a sobering antidote to what might be understood as Defoe's naively idealizing Moll Flanders. Rather, it is to point, first, to the political values that Dickens and Defoe share and, second, to the way in which different social conditions determine the different uses of similar ideals. In the early eighteenth century, when England's institutions were only rudimentary, Defoe projects liberal citizenship as a means of making the originally destitute at home in England. In the mid-nineteenth century, when England's institutional organization had extensively developed but from the liberal perspective in inadequate ways, Dickens projects liberal citizenship as a means of demonstrating England's failure to be a genuine home to all its citizens. Works Cited Paula.MollFlanders: Making a Criminal The Mind.Boston:Twayne, 1990. Backscheider, of in 1660-1800. PrincetonUP, 1986. and Princeton: Beattie,J.M.Crime theCourts England, the Bender,John.Imagining Penitentiary. Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1987. Bentham, Jeremy. "Panopticon versus New South Wales." 1802. The Worksof Jeremy ThoemmesP, 1995.173-248. Bentham. 4. Bristol: Vol. Bentham. 4. 249-84. Vol. . "A Plea for the Constitution." 1803.TheWorks Jeremy of Blewett,David, ed. MollFlanders. Daniel Defoe. London:Penguin, 1989. By PMLA97 (1982): Women and Capitalin MollFlanders." Mirror: Chaber,Lois. "Matriarchal 212-26. in Chandler,James.England 1819.Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1998. 1697. Ed. Joyce D. Kennedy, Michael Seidel, and Defoe, Daniel. An Essay UponProjects. MaximillianE. Novak. New York:AMSPress, 1999. and the GivingAlmsno charity Employing Poor.London,1704. 1722.Ed. EdwardH. Kelly.New York:W.W.Norton, 1973. MollFlanders. . Letter.Applebee's 26 Journal Jan. 1723.Rpt. in Selected Poetryand OriginalWeekly Proseof DanielDefoe.Ed. MichaelF. Shugrue. New York:Holt, Rinehartand Winston, 1968.214-17.
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1860-61.Ed. CharlotteMitchell. London: Penguin, Dickens, Charles. GreatExpectations. 1996. 1651.Ed. C.B.Macpherson. London:Penguin, 1985. Hobbes,Thomas.Leviathan. Constructions: and to Hume, Kay, Carol.Political Defoe,Richardson, Sternein Relation Hobbes, andBurke. Ithaca:CornelUP, 1988. Mind.1962.Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1966. Claude. TheSavage Levi-Strauss, the Extentand Endof CivilGovernment. The Locke,John.An EssayConcerning TrueOriginal, Second Treatise Government. Treatises Government. PeterLaslett.Cambridge: Two Ed. of of CambridgeUP, 1988. Individualism: Hobbes Locke. to Oxford: Macpherson,C.B. ThePoliticalTheory Possessive of OxfordUP, 1962. Poorin theEighteenth London:Routledge & Kegan Marshall,Dorothy. TheEnglish Century. Paul Ltd., 1926. and Novak, MaximillianE. Defoe theNatureofMan.London:OxfordUP, 1963. -"'Unweary'd Traveller'and 'IndifferentMonitor':Openness and Complexity in Moll Fiction.Lincoln:U of NebraskaP, 1983. Flanders." Realism, Myth,andHistoryin Defoe's The of Pollak,Ellen. "MollFlanders, Incest,and the Structure Exchange." Eighteenth Century 30 (1989): 3-21. Liberalism. New York:ColumbiaUP, 1993. Rawls,John.Political Narratives: and Situations Structures. Oxford:Clarendon,1975. Richetti,John.Defoe's PoorLaw,1780-1930. New York:Barnesand Noble, 1971. Rose, MichaelE. TheEnglish and Robinson Crusoe. Power,Kingship, Schonhorn, Manuel. Defoe'sPolitics:Parliament, Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1991. and London:Faberand Faber,1966. Shaw, A.G.L.Convicts theColonies. and in in WhiteServitude ConvictLabor America, Smith, Abbot Emerson. Colonists Bondage: PeterSmith,1965. 1607-1776. Gloucester,Mass.: and Princeton: PrincetonUP, 1971. Starr,G.A. Defoe Casuistry. . Defoe Spiritual and Princeton: PrincetonUP, 1965. Autobiography.

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PoliticalEconomyand the Novel. Thompson, James. Modelsof Value:Eighteenth-Century Durham:Duke UP, 1996. Studies1 Watt, Ian. "The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders." Eighteenth-Century (1967):109-26. . The Rise of the Novel:Studiesin Defoe,Richardson, Fielding.Berkeley:U of and CaliforniaP, 1957. Vol. Webb, Beatrice,and Sidney Webb. EnglishLocalGovernment. 7. London: Longmans, Greenand Co., Ltd., 1927. U Zimmerman,Everett.DefoeandtheNovel.Berkeley: of CaliforniaP, 1975.