obinson 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, and her life is placed quite bare before
the reader. Yet Defoe asserts that the book is designed to teach a good
lesson.[159] "There is not a superlative villain brought upon the
stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a
penitent. There is not an ill thing mentioned, but it is condemned even
in the relation; nor a virtuous, just thing, but it carries its praise
along with it. * * * Upon this foundation the book is recommended to
the reader, as a work from every part of which something may be
learned, and some just and religious inference is drawn." Defoe,
thoroughly a man of his time, thought he could put the coarsest and
most vicious matter before his reader, and