ge, London_
Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Beverly J. Onley, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Frances M. Reed, _University of California, Los Angeles_

INTRODUCTION

For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's
_Moll Flanders_ (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man
who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her
day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent
fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a
secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe)
wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert
attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that
he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests
his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.

After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is
to us a novel kind of dialogue:

One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the glass
of the sash in my chamber this line:

You I love and you alone.

I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under
it thus:

And so in love says every one.

He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:

Virtue alone is an estate.

I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it:

But money's virtue, gold is fate.[1]

After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort,
Moll and her lover come to terms and are married.

[Footnote 1: Daniel Defoe, _Moll Flanders_ (New York: New American
Library, 1964), pp. 71-72.]

The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of
serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and
historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of
both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental
health and political stability of specific populations.[2] Although most
of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us
have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls
of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely,
before encountering this scene in _Moll Flanders_, to have ever before
come into contact with graffiti produced with such an e