The first edition of Moll Flanders was a publishing phenomenon in 1722. Like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the book's style and form distinguish it as a prototype in the English novel tradition. Defoe set his story in the turbulent social and economic conditions of his day, but in the portrayal of Moll herself--one of the finest comic creations in literature--he provides a character whose self-interested and picaresque adventures give her a universal appeal. 'Defoe's excellence it is', observed Coleridge, 'to make me forget my specific class, character and circumstances, and to raise me, while I read him, into the universal man.' The explicit realism of the story, allied with the wider significance of Moll's struggle against sexual and criminal temptation, offers a vivid dramatization of the conflicts and confusions of the time. Moll is an embodiment of the virtues and vices of her contemporaries, and the novel remains one of the best insights into the eighteenth century that is available.