"All the way to Genua there were people who’d been duped, fooled, swindled and cheated by that face. The only thing he hadn’t done was hornswoggle, and that was only because he hadn’t found out how to."
Making Money, Terry Pratchett
Moist von Lipwig will always be included on any Discworld list from me, as he appears in the first Discworld book I ever read. Going Postal was published in 2004 and I bought it with my £1 National Book Token. It was the first fantasy novel I'd read which made me realise speculative fiction could be funny, intelligent, silly and deep all at the same time.
I'd go on to have many other loves. The Truth and Thud are probably my joint-favourite books, and character-wise, Sam Vimes trumps Moist, but Moist will always have a special place in my heart. I now have a signed copy of Going Postal and it's probably one of the most precious things I own.
Moist Von Lipwig
Moist is the champion of the Industrial Revolution series within the Discworld and appears in Going Postal, Making Money and Raising Steam. We meet him Going Postal when he is due to be hanged under the name Albert Spangler.
In fact, he is hanged. But a good hangman knows how much rope to give a person. So Moist, a crook, con-artist and forger, wakes up a few hours later in the office of Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and given the job of Postmaster General.
Believe it or not, Moist thoroughly takes to the job, using his skills at spectacle and manipulation to turn moving the mail into a performance. Along the way, he meets Adora Belle Dearheart, the spikey, dispassionate, golem advocate who smokes like a chimney. He nicknames her Killer, though apparently affectionately. It's an interesting relationship, as Moist falls in love with one of the only people who isn't taken in by his performance in any way.
The Patrician goes on to push the Royal Mint onto Moist too and eventually, the Discworld's first railway. Moist becomes the embodiment of Lord Vetinari's habit of being:
...the political equivalent of the old lady who saves bits of string because you never know when they might come in handy.
Jingo
A Man of Many Hats
The city bleeds, Mr Lipwig, and you are the clot I need. Making Money, Terry Pratchett
As the Postmaster General and Chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, he wears a hat with golden wings. As the Master of the Royal Mint, he wears a bowler hat. Painted gold. And, of course, when he becomes appointed by the Patrician to represent the government in the management of the Discworld's first railway, he wears your traditional train driver cap. Moist knows the importance of wearing the right clothes - after all, everyone remembers the man wearing a golden hat with wings on it.
If you're interested in character alignments, Moist is perhaps the best example of a Chaotic Natural character. It's made clear that Moist doesn't even swindle for the sake of the money. The money is merely a handy way of keeping score of how much smarter he is than everyone else.
Incidentally, I've seen a theory that Vetinari is secretly grooming Moist Von Lipwig to be his successor. I'm not sure I buy it, but it's an interesting thought and frankly, Moist is one of the few people alive who'd be compelled to take that kind of risk.
Inspiration
I am a liar for the purpose of amusement, publicity, trivial oneupmanship, personal profit and the gaiety of nations, but I'm not lying to you now.
Rising Steam, Terry Pratchett
Trickster characters have always been a great love of mine. There's a good reason why he's strongly compared to the Greek god Hermes. Yes, Hermes was the messenger god, but he's also a renowned trickster god.
There's been some speculation over who Moist is based on, but my money is on a mix on a few historical figures. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., known as 'The Great Impostor' and masqueraded as a monk, a doctor and a prison warden. Victor Lustig was a known con-artist in Europe and America during the 1920s. He sold the Eiffel Tower for Scrap. Twice. He also sold 'Money Boxes' which he claimed could duplicate banknotes. They did not.
Moist's reformation of the Ankh-Morpork postal system is heavily based on Rowland Hill's (who I should quickly add was not a con-artist!) creation of the real world postal system. He created stamps, notably the Penny Black which features a black and white portrait of Queen Victoria. This lead to many people making jokes about 'licking Vickey's backside' which we see Pratchett reference in Going Postal. Only, in the Discworld, it's the Patrician's backside.
The Thing in the Basement
Okay, in all fairness, I shouldn't be trying to cram this into a Moist post, but I've been desperate to share it somewhere.
In Making Money, Moist meets the eccentric Hubert Turvy. Hubert has created The Glooper, a machine which can calculate the flow of money through the city and uses it to see the effects raising the tax or a run on the banks. Of course, in typical Pratchett logic, the machine inadvertently becomes able to directly influence the city's economy. This is due to the fact it's built by an Igor, but that's another post altogether.
When I first read this, I thought it was an interesting idea and just a Discworld's equivalent of a computer (even though we already have one of those, called Hex). Then, I went to the Science Museum here in London and, well, allow me to introduce you to MONIAC, created in 1949 by the New Zealand economist Bill Phillips to model the national economic processes of the UK.
Final Thoughts
Unfortunately and pretty disgustingly, I've seen people discount the later books (Making Money, Raising Steam, Snuff, Unseen Academicals) as he wrote these after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Tom Chivers from Buzzfeed even went to far as to describe them as non-canon. A ridiculous argument which I'll be addressing in a post about canons in June.
This means that many people don't appearance the Moist's character as they only give weight to his first appearance. This does the character a massive injustice, in my opinion.
Moving on! Come back on Friday for my final post for the May Weird and Wonderful Discworld character series. I can't believe it's gone so quickly.
"Can I be clear here? You broke the law for a living?" "Mostly I took advantage of other people's greed, Mr Slant. I think there was an element of education, too." Mr Slant shook his head in amazement, causing an earwig to fall, with a keen sense of the appropriate, out of his ear. "Education?" he said. "Yes. A lot of people learned that no one sells a real diamond ring for one-tenth of its value."
Making Money, Terry Pratchett
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