by Nick Bunker
Grim though they were, these early products of the Franklin press showed that James knew his trade: the design was clear, the type set immaculately, and the white space was just right. But this was not the stuff of fame and fortune. If James were to thrive, he could not rely forever on the circle of middle-aged worthies who surrounded the Old South. He had to find something more lively to print, and in England he had seen how he might do so.
On his trip to London, James had carried with him a letter from Judge Sewall, addressed to the judge’s cousin, Samuel Storke, a merchant who dealt in whale oil, pelts, tobacco, and sugar. A keen Presbyterian, he belonged to one of the chapels at the eastern end of the city, where Benjamin Senior had lived for ten years or so. And so in meeting Mr. Storke, James Franklin reentered the London his uncle had inhabited, the city of Defoe, with its dissenting preachers, and its pious merchants: the city that had done so much to shape his family’s view of the world. It remained a town politically divided, between parties and factions who feuded in the pages of the press.9
During James’s spell in the capital, Defoe was just starting to write Robinson Crusoe—the first edition would appear early in 1719—but he was also a columnist for a startling imprint owned by one Nathaniel Mist. It went by the name of the Weekly Journal. Mist was a Tory and a Jacobite, but he did not let his politics stand in the way of good writing. Although Defoe was a Whig, Mist hired him nonetheless, because he needed the very best of journalists. His newspaper belonged to a new breed of weekly paper, published on Saturdays, that fought each other hard for circulation.
With six pages to fill, the weeklies had lots of space. They crammed it with news and comment, poems, essays, jokes, and puns, and tales of highwaymen and adventures at sea. The first journal of the kind had gone on sale in 1714, but when Mist launched his paper he swiftly came to be the market leader. Mist catered, said one of his rivals, to “the lower class of readers”: which was another way of saying that his paper was great fun. At every opportunity, Nathaniel Mist attacked the Whigs in the government with satire or with allegations of corruption. Time and again, he went to prison for seditious libel, but he knew that politics alone would not sell papers. While James Franklin was in London, Mist ran a column describing what he offered every week: “an agreeable miscellany of subjects, out of which every person may pick something to entertain themselves.”10
This was the model James would adopt when, at only twenty-four, he founded The New-England Courant. We can be sure that he knew Mist’s paper and the other London weeklies, because later James plundered their columns for material. Having seen this kind of journalism, he could not devote his Boston career to setting up in type the platitudes of dreary Harvard men. He had to do something equally outrageous, even at the risk of going to jail himself. And if that meant offending the obvious target, the Puritan clergy of Massachusetts, then offended they would have to be.
However, the time would need to be right for the Courant to make its debut. James would need to have a running story, some troublesome controversy in Boston that would give his paper a theme. He would also need a team of writers with enough imagination to make the Courant sparkle every week. And this was where his brother Benjamin would come in, with his precocious love of books and his talent with his pen.
BOYHOOD HEROES
In his spare time away from the Mill Pond, the candles, and the soap, the boy had consumed Josiah’s small library. Most of the books had to do with divinity, but the young Benjamin, who could not stop reading, was done with that before the age of twelve. Having learned the lesson of the whistle, he spent his pocket money on the works of Bunyan, which he loved; but soon he had finished those as well. He traded them in for popular history: forty or fifty cheap, pocket-sized books by an English writer, who gave himself the pseudonym Robert Burton.
Actually, the author was Nathaniel Crouch, an English bookseller who had built his business with anti-Stuart propaganda. Whig and sensational, filled with xenophobia, his vast output consisted of stories “filled with wonders, rarities and curiosities,” in the words of his obituary. His were patriotic books in which the heroes were always Protestant—Drake, Raleigh, Cromwell, and so on—while the villains were traitors and Papists, in league with the atrocious kings of Spain and France.
It was the kind of writing that Franklin had to absorb sooner or later, because the attitudes that motivated Crouch were deeply ingrained in the culture of New England. If the boy was going to be a journalist, he would have to switch back and forth between the language of the street, the chapel, the law courts, and the drawing room. Variety was one of Franklin’s hallmarks—like Defoe, or Dickens, or James Joyce, he could write in a multitude of voices—but it could only come from experience. He would have to listen hard, to people from many different walks of life. He would also have to read cheap throwaway stuff as well as the classics; and few books were more throwaway than those of Mr. Crouch.
Fortunately, soon he found something more sublime. Apart from Bunyan and Defoe, the author Franklin recalled with most affection from his boyhood was a writer from the classical world: Plutarch, the Greek biographer, whose accounts of ancient heroes were also in Josiah’s collection. “I still think that time spent to great advantage,” said Franklin in his memoirs about the hours he devoted to Plutarch’s Lives, a book that helped to shape his politics as well as his prose.
At the Old South, Mr. Pemberton would quote from Plutarch when he wished to conjure up examples of justice, courage, and humility, or to explain how a town should be governed. Here was another kind of patriotism, very different from the ideology of Crouch. In the stories of Solon, who gave laws to Athens, of Brutus the slayer of a tyrant or Cicero the orator, a reader could find a definition of virtue that went beyond the narrow notions of a bigot. Thirty years later, when in 1749 he wrote the syllabus for what became the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin urged the students to study Greek and Roman history. It would teach them many things—not least how to govern a republic, a new Athens on the Delaware—but most of all it would teach them morality. In Plutarch, Livy, and the rest, the college men would find “the causes of rise and fall of any man’s character…the advantages of temperance, order, frugality, industry, perseverance.”
It was much the same list as Pemberton had given from the pulpit; but Plutarch had something that the pastor lacked, a flair for energetic prose. The only complete translation of the Lives was the one coauthored in the 1680s by the poet and playwright John Dryden. This is the one Franklin must have read. Dryden’s prose was superb: learned but informal, sprightly and vivid—or, as it would be described by Samuel Johnson, “airy, animated, and vigorous”—with the main verb dropped into the sentence in just the right place to keep the reader moving forward with vigor.
If Franklin could master not only this kind of prose but also the narrative style of Defoe, then add the authenticity of speech from the waterfront, he would become a writer who could keep his audience in touch with any subject. But as yet, he was too young to be a journalist. Instead, like Robinson Crusoe, the boy still yearned to be a sailor; and just like Crusoe’s father, Mr. Franklin was appalled by the idea.
In 1716 Josiah Junior had briefly returned to Boston, then left again and vanished forever, lost it was thought on a voyage to Asia. His father had been furious when the young man first went to sea, and he had no intention of allowing Benjamin to disappear in the same fashion. Another of his sons, John Franklin, trained as a tallow chandler, had recently married and begun making soap and candles in Newport, Rhode Island. This left the young Benjamin as the obvious successor in the family business at the Blue Ball. But he so clearly loathed the craft that his father knew he had to find him an alternative. It was at this point, in about 1717, when the boy was eleven, that Josiah took the boy around the town to watch artisans at work, in the hope that one of their trades might appeal.
Eventually Josiah settled for the ob
vious solution, by putting Benjamin out to be apprenticed to his cousin, Samuel the cutler. He did a spell as a sort of intern in Samuel’s workshop, helping to make cutting tools, but Samuel demanded the usual London payment of a hefty fee for taking him on. Josiah refused, and Benjamin came back to the house on Union and Hanover. Then James arrived home from England, to find his youngest brother still without a trade, and still longing for the ocean. The boy liked the thought of printing rather better than the prospect of a life boiling soap. Even so he had to be coaxed or cajoled into becoming James’s assistant.
Sixty years after the first of his uncles swore his indentures as a dyer in London, Benjamin Franklin became yet another apprentice, signing up to work for his brother. James insisted on nine years of service, rather than the usual seven, and eight of those would be unpaid. Benjamin’s reward would come by way of literature.
Chapter Six
FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS
The perils of the ocean were all too plain to see in the fall of 1718, a season of storms and piracy. Eight miles out from Boston, on a slice of rock above the sandbanks, George Worthylake and his family tended the lighthouse that marked the way into the harbor. They were pious souls. On the first Sabbath day of November, they came into town to hear their pastor preach, only to capsize on their journey home. It was, said The Boston News-Letter, “an awful, lamentable Providence,” the loss of six people by drowning, but the accident caught the journalistic eye of James Franklin.
His youngest brother had been writing verses since his infancy. So James set Benjamin to work to tell the lighthouse story in a ballad—“wretched stuff,” Franklin recalled, but good enough to make some money—and then sent him out to hawk the printed version in the street. The ballad sold very well; and in March of 1719, the brothers tried to do the same again. Off the Carolina coast, two sloops of the Royal Navy had caught up at last with Blackbeard the pirate. With swords and pistols, they fought it out, killed Blackbeard, sliced off his head, and carried it home to claim their reward. When the news reached Boston, here was another story too good to miss.
Benjamin wrote a sea shanty about the incident, and it was printed too. But neither this nor the grievous tale of the Worthylakes met with his father’s approval. At the time, the devout Josiah was hoping to be chosen as a deacon at the Old South—the ballot was in April, when he lost by a mile, polling only ten votes out of forty-one—and he did not care to see his youngest son indulge in vanity. Poetry was a waste of time, and men who followed that calling were usually beggars, Josiah told the boy. Doubtless he had in mind the tiresome old poet Uncle Benjamin, who was still intruding on his hospitality. However that may be, this was the moment—when he had just turned thirteen—at which young Franklin turned his back on a poetic career, after heeding his father’s advice. Or so he claimed in his autobiography.
As so often with his streamlined version of events, Franklin’s memoirs make things sound rather simpler than they were. He never shared his father’s contempt for poetry. Far into his thirties he remained an avid consumer of the best of English verse. It was only when electricity became his passion that he ceased to keep up with the latest poems from London. Although he did not hope to be a professional maker of rhymes, until then in his hours away from the printing press he would turn for relaxation to Milton, Pope, and Dryden and their followers.
Because nobody reads their work today, except when forced to do so for a college grade or seminar, it is hard to conceive how much these poets meant to Americans in the eighteenth century. Not only were they seen as masters of rhythm, meter, and the purity of diction; they were also regarded as fountains of wisdom and enlightenment. In Milton, his readers beheld a poet who had clung to his vocation, even when laid low by poverty and blindness. And so women and men in the colonies, including Franklin, would make extracts from Paradise Lost or better still Pope’s An Essay on Man, when it appeared in the 1730s, and compile them to form a personal philosophy, sometimes as a substitute for the Bible.
This kind of thing became a habit with Franklin, almost from the moment that he entered his teens. He began to live a double life, on the waterfront and in a small room lit by the candles his family had fashioned. By day, he was the printer’s boy or the athlete, swimming in the Mill Pond and learning how to box. By night he was a scholar. Making friends with the bookstore apprentices, he could borrow what he wanted, so long as he returned the books by store opening time.
Ashamed of his poor start with sums at school, he pored over the standard English textbook, Edward Cocker’s Arithmetic, and rapidly absorbed what it contained. Still in love with the sea, he studied books of navigation, picking up some geometry but never fully mastering its puzzles. Meanwhile, at the printing shop on Queen Street, between a schoolhouse and the Boston jail, James Franklin had assembled a coterie of friends who included a tanner by the name of Matthew Adams. Another member of the church in Brattle Square, Adams loved books, and he shared them with his protégé, the young Benjamin.
From his reading, from Mr. Pemberton’s sermons, and from the talk around Josiah’s supper table, the boy picked up the Boston habit of controversy. He also acquired a new acquaintance, John Collins, talkative, eloquent, and especially good at mathematics. Together they pondered the lofty questions that fascinate boys at puberty. Was it right that women and girls should be given an education? As their curiosity deepened about the females who surrounded them, the two boys debated the issue with enthusiasm. Girls were incapable of study, said Collins, and so sending them to school was wasteful and improper. Franklin argued the opposite; and as a way to hone his arguments, he wrote them down.
Like warring academics, he and Collins exchanged letters seeking to demolish each other’s reasoning. Josiah read one of his son’s, and he offered a critique of its prose. As a printer, Benjamin could spell and punctuate to perfection—throughout his life even his briefest, most casual notes were never slovenly—but he had yet to master the finer points of style. Franklin recalled that his father told him that he “fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity.”
If these were Josiah’s exact words, they were highly revealing. These were the very qualities—“perspicuity,” and “method”—that Pastor Colman had singled out for praise in his eulogy of Mr. Pemberton. The Franklins had clearly been listening carefully. Josiah had intended his son for the church, and if he could not go to Harvard and become a minister at least he could speak or write like one. Here was the point that Josiah intended to make: that style, correct and orderly, could serve as an emblem of gentility. At Ecton and Banbury, the Franklins had yearned to be gentlemen, and—briefly, before the death of Thomas Junior—they had attained their goal. In America, they hoped to do the same: to be rightfully seen as the gentlemen they were, with their cleverness and their powers of application. And just at this moment, the young Benjamin Franklin discovered an author who could show him precisely what it meant to be polite.
Somehow—presumably, by way of Matthew Adams—he came upon the writings of Joseph Addison, some of whose essays Franklin knew almost by heart. There was a time, which persisted until the age of Little Women, when every schoolchild in America was supposed to know the work of Addison, because he was regarded as a model of good taste. You could not do better, or so it was thought, than the style of The Spectator, where Addison displayed his skills at their finest. It began as a daily magazine, founded in 1711 by Addison and his friend Sir Richard Steele, but soon their articles were bundled up into bound volumes, one of which Franklin read in Boston.
Franklin adored The Spectator. In its pages the boy discovered a flexible style that could lift him out of provincial life and make him an elegant man of letters and wisdom. Although it was a London paper, The Spectator had little else in common with the buccaneer journalism that James Franklin had seen in the empire’s capital. While Nathaniel Mist and his weekly rivals were fiercely partisan, slugging away at each ot
her with satire and invective, The Spectator posed as a journal of intelligent neutrality. As the title suggested, Addison and Steele pretended to rise above the din of party strife. Like people with the best seats in a theater—Addison also wrote for the stage—they surveyed the foibles of mankind from a vantage point of calm, good-humored objectivity. The Spectator claimed to be the voice of reason. It aspired to be urbane and civilized, always up-to-date with the latest affairs but never once succumbing to fads and foolishness.
Of course, the pose struck by The Spectator contained an element of make-believe. Far from being neutral, Addison belonged entirely to the Whigs; indeed, in 1716 the king appointed him as one of the realm’s two secretaries of state. His politics were those the Franklins shared. Addison owed his political career to the Junto, the club of Whig grandees led by Charles Montagu, the Lord Halifax who had been the patron of Franklin’s uncle Thomas. Later, in Philadelphia, the young Benjamin would borrow the name of Montagu’s cabal and apply it to his own Junto, the club he founded for ambitious tradesmen.1
However, Addison’s politics were not the thing that most appealed to the boy. What Franklin admired was his style, his method, and his metropolitan tone of skepticism and cool self-assurance. “There is nothing,” wrote Addison, in the volume that Franklin read, “in which men more deceive themselves than in what the world calls Zeal.” A man who was born to be a newspaper columnist, Addison could take an idea such as this—not very new, and really quite banal—and make it sound like the deepest of philosophy.