Moll Flanders Characters

Meet the Cast

Moll Flanders

Moll Flanders is the ultimate trickster. We spend four hundred pages with her and learn a bunch of intimate details about her life, including her romantic relationships, her sex life, and the statu...

Husband: The Lancashire Man

Code name alert: Even though Moll at one point tells us that this guy's name is James, that moment is so brief that we blinked and missed it. So, to keep things simple, we're going to go ahead and...

The Midwife

The midwife is, to put it simply, Moll's hero. This woman seems to show up and help Moll whenever times are really tough. Unfortunately, though, we don't ever get to know her all that well. Neverth...

Husband: Robin (The Younger Brother)

Poor Robin (who is sometimes called Robert) sure gets the short end of the stick, huh? He falls in love with Moll early on in the book, when she's still in the first blossoming stages of the beauty...

Husband: The Captain/Her Brother

At first Moll's relationship with this guy starts out really well. She says that "he was the best-humoured, merry sort of a fellow that I ever met with" (297), which sounds like a pretty promising...

Husband: The Banker

The banker is probably the most stand-up guy Moll gets involved with. She really toys with the guy for quite a while, but he's and he's patient enough to wait until she's available so he can snap h...

Moll's Mother

Moll's real mother is less character, more plot device. She comes and goes so quickly that we hardly have the chance to get to know here. And neither does Moll for that matter. Nevertheless, it's t...

The Elder Brother

This guy's a real prize. Okay, okay, course we're being sarcastic, because by any standard, the elder brother with whom Moll has an ill-advised fling is a big fat Jerk. Did you notice the capital J...

Boyfriend in Bath

Although this man and Moll seem to have a fairly nice relationship and he supports her for several years, they never marry. When they first meet, Moll says he sounds like a pretty nice guy: He was...

Husband: The Linen-Draper

Moll's marriage to this fool doesn't last too long. He's dishonest and, unlike Lancashire, the ways in which he's dishonest don't seem to match up with the ways in which Moll is dishonest. Some of...

Moll's Son: Humphrey

As with Moll's mother, we don't know much about her son out in Virginia. We do know that, despite the fact his mother abandoned him, he seems ready and willing to take her back into his life toward...

The Nurse

Moll moves in with this woman as a small child and stays with the nurse through her early adolescence. The woman is kind and neat, and easily moved by the young Moll's passionate wish to stay in he...

Assorted Petty Criminals

London must have been a pretty dangerous place back then because the way Moll describes it, there were criminals around every corner. In fact, she names almost as many criminals as she does the vic...

Victims of Crimes

These are the many, many people Moll totally hoses by stealing from them. Some, like the victims of the house fire, are in truly dire straits already when Moll goes and makes things worse. Come on,...