Family is the ground against which the defining features of Defoe’s protagonists come into focus. But it is the failure of the domestic realm to offer the requisite intellectual, emotional, or (sometimes) physical nourishment that proves decisive to the autonomous self who emerges either through necessity or an act of will. Robinson Crusoe and Roxana provide relatively detailed accounts of their protagonists’ youthful circumstances, in both instances distinctly comfortable ones. While the intervening Capt. Singleton, Moll Flanders, and Col. Jacque are as indebted as Crusoe and Roxana to travel narratives, spiritual autobiography, picaresque, and economic and political treatises for their rendering of adult experience, they withhold the information about family lineages that Defoe’s first and last novels provide, information that later eighteenth-century interpretations of character, real or imagined, make crucial. In all three of the middle novels, the few facts that exist are conveyed orally and by hearsay rather than by written report, a significant factor given the first-person narrators’ subsequent stress on the importance of recording their adventures: Singleton hears that he was stolen from his nursemaid and bought by the “Woman, whom I was taught to call Mother … for Twelve Shillings of another Woman”; Moll is born in Newgate and thus “had no Parish to have Recourse to for my Nourishment in my Infancy,” but “as I have been told, some Relation of my Mothers took me for a while as a Nurse” before selling her (presumably) to the gypsies by whom she is subsequently abandoned; Jack learns from “oral Tradition” that his “Mother was a Gentlewoman, [and] that my Father was a Man of Quality.” Untended by birth parents and made articles of trade, these characters are denied the social advantages that Crusoe enjoys and then has the luxury of rejecting when he boards ship “without asking God’s Blessing, or my Father’s, without any Consideration of Circumstances or Consequences.”