Moll’s lower-class 17th century English dialect is apparent in her narration throughout the novel. The following passage—which occurs after Moll realizes her husband the Plantation Owner is her half-brother and stops being intimate with him—demonstrates several different aspects of her dialect:
He took my Carriage very ill, and indeed he might well do so, for at last I refus’d to Bed with him, and carrying on the Breach upon all occasions to extremity he told me once he thought I was Mad, and if I did not alter my Conduct, he would put me under Cure; that is to say, into a Madhouse: I told him he should find I was far enough from Mad, and that it was not in his power, or any other Villains to Murther me.
Here Moll uses a few different region-specific phrases or idioms demonstrative of her particular dialect. For example, in stating that her husband “took [her] Carriage very ill,” she is saying that he began to treat her badly. When she explains how, because of her conduct, he considered putting her “under Cure,” she means he thought about locking her up in a psychiatric institution. (He would legally be allowed to do this as men had full power over their wives, and could easily institutionalize them for things like not wanting to have sex with them or seeking divorce.)
Moll’s dialect also comes across in certain spellings of words, such as “refus’d” for “refused” and “Murther” for “murder.” The first spelling is meant to capture the informal way in which she speaks, while the latter was an acceptable spelling of “murder” at the time.
