Who was the pretender?

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Modern Language Association

Moll's use of "honest" is sarcastic. Thief-catchers were in effect fences, who took goods that criminals stole and attempted to sell them back to the people from whom they had been stolen.

An open-air area outside the condemned hold.

That is, he managed to buy her some time, but she still may face execution.

Prisoners were loaded into horse-drawn carts for the ride from Newgate to Tyburn, the place of execution. The distance was about two miles, and took three hours or more; crowds often lined the way. Marble Arch now stands about where Tyburn was located in the eighteenth century.

The chaplain. For many years this post was held by Paul Lorrain, whose accounts of the testimony and final words of convicts were popular reading material.

An annual fair held in Bury St. Edmonds, a town in Suffolk.

Sturbridge Fair was held in Cambridge in September.

These were resort places in the period. The "rumbling time of the Year" would have been the summer, when most of upper class people would have left London for the country.

The "Cloister" were a covered gallery along one side of St. Bartholemew's Church, which was on the edge of the Fair, during which there were various shops and stalls. In this period, that area was notorious for being the Fair's seedy side; if you were looking for a prostitute (as this gentleman seems to have been doing), this is where you would go.

Counterfeiting was considered to be a particularly grievous crime, and could be punished by burning at the stake. Defoe may be alluding obliquely here to the death of Barbara Spencer, who was burned at the stake for counterfeiting in July 1721, the year before the publication of Moll Flanders. **

The Justice of the Peace for Middlesex heard cases at Hicks Hall in the Clerkenwell neighborhood of London.

Crystal lasses made from sand having a high flint content, these were usually of fairly high quality.

Vessels from the north of England that followed the coastal route into the Thames estuary.

That is, a silver watcher that was gilded with gold plate--much less valuable than a solid gold watch.

Bartholomew Fair was a three-day event, beginning August 24, held in and around the Smithfield Market in central London every year. Huge crowds came: there were live performances, puppet shows, games, and various kinds of spectacle, to go along with the kind of trading in cloth and livestock that usually accompanied late-summer harvest fairs.

Moll here is citing Proverbs 7: 22 and 23.

Muffs are designed to cover or protect and keep warm parts of the body, often the hands. A "feather muff" would probably be more decorative than useful.

That is, ended my life.

To "run a Tick" is to go into debt, to receive credit. Moll is playing off the notion that, as she has just said, there are no old crimes on her "Account" at the moment, so she can begin stealing again, thereby running up her "debt" to the law.

That is, she had been "branded" by burning a mark on her hand, like Moll's mother.

"Moll Cut-Purse" was the criminal alias taken by the famous (or notorious) thief Mary Frith, c. 1585-1659. She was the subject of a hit play by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1611), and of a popular biography.

"Plate" was a generic term for valuable household metal, particularly serving dishes made of silver, gold, and pewter. For many families, such items made up a significant part of a household's wealth.

In eighteenth-century usage, "fact" could mean "crime."

wasn't The Libertine a bad Johnny depp movie?

A Welsh clergyman well known for his radical Puritan beliefs.

It's interesting to see how many times, and in how many ways, the narrator uses the word "Account" in this book. We tend to use it as synonymous with "story," but here it really does some like an account-book is at the back of the narrator's mind a lot of the time.