The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

I was not fixed indeed; 'tis impossible to describe the terror of my

mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all

the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on myself as lost, and that

I had nothing to think of but of going out of the world, and that with

the utmost infamy: the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and

clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of

afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place

seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.

Now I reproached myself with the many hints I had had, as I have

mentioned above, from my own reason, from the sense of my good

circumstances, and of the many dangers I had escaped, to leave off

while I was well, and how I had withstood them all, and hardened my

thoughts against all fear. It seemed to me that I was hurried on by an

inevitable and unseen fate to this day of misery, and that now I was to

expiate all my offences at the gallows; that I was now to give

satisfaction to justice with my blood, and that I was come to the last

hour of my life and of my wickedness together. These things poured

themselves in upon my thoughts in a confused manner, and left me

overwhelmed with melancholy and despair.

Them I repented heartily of all my life past, but that repentance

yielded me no satisfaction, no peace, no, not in the least, because, as

I said to myself, it was repenting after the power of further sinning

was taken away. I seemed not to mourn that I had committed such

crimes, and for the fact as it was an offence against God and my

neighbour, but I mourned that I was to be punished for it. I was a

penitent, as I thought, not that I had sinned, but that I was to

suffer, and this took away all the comfort, and even the hope of my

repentance in my own thoughts.

I got no sleep for several nights or days after I came into that

wretched place, and glad I would have been for some time to have died

there, though I did not consider dying as it ought to be considered

neither; indeed, nothing could be filled with more horror to my

imagination than the very place, nothing was more odious to me than the

company that was there. Oh! if I had but been sent to any place in

the world, and not to Newgate, I should have thought myself happy.