The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed.

When a woman debauched from her youth, nay, even being the offspring of debauchery and vice, comes to give an Account of all her vicious practices, and even to descend to the particular occasions and circumstances by which she ran through in threescore years, an Author must be hard put to it wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his disadvantage.