Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Under arrest on a blasphemy charge, Lyons spent twelve weeks in Newgate Prison. There he was harassed by his fellow inmates, or so he claimed as he begged for his release, because he was a Whig while they were Tories. “Barbarous abuses, insults, and assaults I have met with from the enemies of the government,” he wrote to Walpole’s officials. But Mr. Lyons had some influential friends, who helped him post the money for his bail. In a fourth edition of his book, he thanked the man to whom he owed the most: the city’s most famous physician, Dr. Richard Mead, a fellow of the Royal Society and a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton.

  By making Lyons’s acquaintance, Franklin met someone who could introduce him to some of London’s finest intellects. It must be said that John Lyons led a double life. He was also a hack journalist, writing propaganda for Walpole and the Whigs, and as a reward he was given a job collecting excise duties. In the 1730s he acted as one of Walpole’s paid informants, with the task of sniffing out any Jacobites who lingered in the capital. In all likelihood Franklin had no inkling of this side of Lyons’s character. The Mr. Lyons he counted as a friend was the surgeon who took him down to Cornhill, ten minutes’ walk away, where Dr. Mead dispensed his wisdom from a seat in Batson’s coffeehouse.

  We do not know if Franklin ever spoke to Dr. Mead. He must have known his name—Richard Mead had been mentioned in the Courant, during the smallpox controversy—but Franklin never refers to him in his memoirs. However, Lyons certainly introduced the young man to another friend of Mead’s who was also close to Newton. At Batson’s, Franklin met the scientist Henry Pemberton: only thirty-one years old but already a master of Newton’s calculus and much else besides, he was another medical doctor and also a member of the Royal Society.

  At this very moment, Pemberton was preparing the third edition of Sir Isaac’s masterpiece, the Principia Mathematica, and so he and Newton were continually in touch. By all accounts Pemberton was an absentminded but a friendly soul—“of a mild temper, and very free and easy in company,” in the words of his earliest biographer—and he promised to take Franklin to see the great man. The meeting never occurred, much to Franklin’s disappointment. Perhaps this was just as well. By now Sir Isaac was eighty-two, his health was poor, and he was famously impatient with lesser human beings. Even so, Franklin’s exposure to Pemberton and the people around him was another turning point in his career.

  Hitherto, although Franklin had a passing acquaintance with Newton’s ideas, his interests had chiefly been literary and metaphysical. Of course in Boston he had met some physicians—how could he not, when the Courant was so obsessed with smallpox?—but they were very small fry by comparison with Mead or Pemberton. Early in 1724, Mead had produced a handsome edition of a textbook on the muscles of the human body, Cowper’s Myotomia, for which Pemberton wrote the introduction. A bold attempt to use Newtonian physics to explain how muscles did their work, Pemberton’s essay failed in what it set out to do. Even so it was immensely important for Franklin to mingle with people who were doing this kind of research.

  If Franklin had never met John Lyons, he might have continued forever to dabble in metaphysics. He might have written more stuff like the first part of the Dissertation: clever but inconsequential, the spinning of words but not the making of fertile discoveries about the phenomena of nature. In the shape of Henry Pemberton, for the first time Franklin met the sort of experimental scientist that he would eventually become. The Franklins had always been highly skilled with tools and machines, with heat and with materials. So was Henry Pemberton. As his biographer put it, the amiable Mr. Pemberton “early discovered a talent for mechanics, readily performing any manual operation, as making of fire-works, and effecting other contrivances not unbecoming an active and ingenious youth.”17

  The same had been true of the Franklins, in the forge at Ecton and then dyeing silk. But what Pemberton also possessed—like Archdeacon Palmer—was a talent for theory. And although Franklin was never truly a mathematician, in the 1730s he did devote long hours to the reading of the latest scientific treatises from Europe. Put the two together, the mechanical skill of the artisan and the abstract ingenuity of the theoretician, and you had most of the ingredients for Franklin’s achievements with electricity. Most, but not all: one more thing that Franklin had to have was Pennsylvania, with its ironworks, its civil liberties, and its open frontier.

  From Batson’s coffeehouse, it was only a few hundred yards to Cheapside and an alehouse called the Horns. Lyons took the young man to the tavern, where they sat down with their fellow Whig, Mr. Mandeville. Most likely, Franklin knew his work already. In the Dissertation, there are phrases that closely resemble lines from The Fable of the Bees. It appears that he rather liked Bernard Mandeville, who had a little coterie at the Horns, because Franklin describes him as “a most facetious entertaining companion.” But that was all: it seems that Mandeville did not really meet his expectations. Franklin was about to encounter someone far more worth his while.

  In the scientific pantheon of London, Newton reigned supreme. But on the second rung of fame there stood the founder of the British Museum. At the age of sixty-five, Sir Hans Sloane was also the secretary of the Royal Society, a man who had traveled in the New World and written a model of scientific travelogue, his Voyage to the Islands, with a superb account of the plants and animals of Jamaica. Somehow—at Batson’s, probably—Franklin must have heard about Sloane’s latest enterprise: a survey of the botany of the Carolinas. For the previous two years, the explorer Mark Catesby had been based in Charleston, gathering samples to be sent home to be studied by Sir Hans. So on June 2, Franklin picked up his pen and wrote to the scientist, offering Sloane his little purse made from asbestos, together with a slice of wood of a kind known to Americans as Salamander Cotton. “As you are noted to be a lover of curiosities,” Franklin wrote—a phrase that was an apt description of himself—“I have inform’d you of these; and if you have any inclination to purchase them or see ’em, let me know your pleasure.”

  What happened next is not entirely clear. In his autobiography, Franklin claimed that it was Sloane who made the first move, and came to visit him at his lodgings at the Golden Fan, having heard of the purse. This is clearly false—the letter is proof of that—another reminder that Franklin’s memoirs cannot always be taken at face value. But Franklin’s purse is still in London today, preserved in Sloane’s collection in the Natural History Museum. So they must have met and money must have been forthcoming. And this in itself was remarkable.

  Sloane’s papers survive in their entirety. They contain only one other example in the mid-1720s of somebody writing unintroduced to offer him a curiosity such as this. And so what Franklin did was daring and unusual. It was chutzpah again, but very productive: because Franklin would soon create his own brilliant journal of a voyage, almost certainly inspired by Sloane’s descriptions of the Caribbean.

  In the meantime, at their lodgings in Little Britain, he and Ralph had made a new acquaintance, whose arrival in their lives would give rise to some unpleasantness. “In our house there lodged a young woman, a milliner, who I think had a shop in the cloisters,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography. “She had been genteelly bred, was sensible and lively, and of most pleasing conversation.” In the sorry tale that ensued, we find Ralph and Franklin behaving like some of the obnoxious characters from London that Hogarth brought to life in his pictures.

  THE MILLINER’S TALE

  Among the early works of William Hogarth, one of the most disturbing is his cycle of paintings A Harlot’s Progress, completed in 1731. A wagon from the country pitches up in Cheapside, not far from the Horns, setting down a pretty young woman by the name of Moll Hackabout. Her pincushion and her scissors show that she is a seamstress or a milliner. From the moment she arrives, the city conspires to bring about her ruin. Moll Hackabout falls victim to a procuress, and wicked men exploit her, dragging her down into prostitution until
she dies a painful death from syphilis.

  The story caught the public’s imagination, so that when Hogarth turned the paintings into printed engravings they sold immensely well. As always with Hogarth, the pictures were full of ambiguity. They told a moral tale, and yet they also made it ironic; but at their simplest level these were works of intense realism, based on stories taken from the daily life that Hogarth observed. His mother and sister were among the milliners in Smithfield, and nearby in the cloisters at St. Bartholomew’s they had a competitor, a young woman who also suffered at the hands of men: less tragically, perhaps, than Moll Hackabout, but even so her story was a sad one. Ralph and Franklin were the men who took advantage of her situation.18

  The woman they abused was a milliner whom we know only as Mrs. T. This is what Franklin calls her in his memoirs. It seems, from a document that survives in London, that the milliner’s true identity may have been Jenny Wilkins; but whatever her real name, Mrs. T was the young woman “sensible and lively…with pleasing conversation,” who also roomed at the Golden Fan. Of an evening, she would read plays with James Ralph. Mrs. T fell for the poet, and they moved to new lodgings elsewhere, along with a child that Mrs. T had borne. It is not clear from Franklin’s text whether Ralph was the father or if she had been in another relationship before. Even now Ralph failed to secure a paying job, and so he lived off the milliner’s money until it ran short. At last he hit upon another of his plans: he would find a village school where he would be the master, teaching the three Rs by day and writing poetry by night.

  James Ralph knew some members of the clergy, Presbyterian ministers who found him a post in a village in Berkshire, sixty miles west of the capital. There he taught ten or twelve boys, making no more than five shillings a week, a fraction of Franklin’s earnings as a printer. As for his verse, like so many poets at the time Ralph aspired to write an English epic, a modern equivalent of Virgil or Homer. By mail he bombarded his friend with drafts of the poem, seeking his comments. Franklin pleaded with Ralph to desist, on the same old grounds—it was no way to make a living—but still the drafts kept coming. To add insult to irritation, Ralph had decided that when he became famous, he would not wish it to be known that he had plied a trade as menial as teaching school. And so in Berkshire he called himself “Mr. Franklin.”

  And then there was the matter of Mrs. T. On leaving the capital, Ralph had entrusted her to Franklin, but she had fallen on hard times. Because of Mrs. T’s liaison with the poet, her business collapsed and her other friends fell away. Although Franklin had already lent so much money to Ralph, with little hope of repayment, he helped the milliner as well. And then, like the horrid old lechers that Hogarth portrayed, he made a clumsy attempt to seduce her. Or, as Franklin puts it in his autobiography, in the euphemistic diction of the eighteenth century: “Being at this time under no religious restraints, and presuming on my importance to her, I attempted familiarities.” Deeply offended, Mrs. T did what she should: the milliner pushed Franklin away.

  It was only the latest and the most shameful episode of a sequence of errors that Franklin had committed. He makes a rueful list of his mistakes in his memoirs. Fifty years on, he still found their recollection painful. Running away from his apprenticeship with James and then spending Vernon’s money, breaking off with Deborah Read, writing the Dissertation, and now this: it was not the path of goodness that Franklin had read about in books. Soon Ralph reappeared from Berkshire, still penniless. Outraged by Franklin’s behavior, Mrs. T had written to her lover, telling him everything; and that was the end of Franklin’s friendship with the poet. He told Franklin that he could whistle for his money.

  Not once but twice—first John Collins, now James Ralph—the young Franklin had lost a friend to whom he had lent money. He had led them astray, or so he feared, with all his clever talk about philosophy. Under his influence, Ralph and Collins had become skeptics themselves, abandoning what they thought of as the obsolete conventions of morality. Ralph was certainly an avid reader of The Fable of the Bees; and the traces that he left in British archives suggest that he and Franklin both went with Lyons on his guided tour of the coffeehouses, meeting Mandeville and his scurrilous friends.

  Was there a connection? Was it the case that skeptical ideas—or, worse still, downright atheism of the kind that Franklin had adopted—would always lead a youth astray? It was still rather early in Franklin’s life for him to reach such a stark conclusion. Many freethinkers—Spinoza for one, and Anthony Collins for another—had been models of industry or public service. But the question went on hanging in the air. Franklin began to worry that something was wrong. He could never return to Josiah’s form of piety—that was impossible, and he never did—but as a guide to life, he did need something better than the findings of his Dissertation.

  Not that Franklin cared about the milliner. We will probably never know what became of Mrs. T, or Jenny Wilkins if so she really was. In 1726, she was still with James Ralph, but he had already abandoned a wife and child in America. In time Ralph deserted Mrs. T as well—that we can establish—and later still he became a bigamist by marrying again in London. But for all Franklin’s rhetoric of virtue and benevolence, Mrs. T did not matter enough to the sage of Philadelphia for him to record whatever destiny befell her. He might have found out, because when he came back to London in the 1750s he and James Ralph were reconciled. Ralph must have known where she was or how she died; but Franklin tells us nothing more about Mrs. T.19

  His career was a subject he found more absorbing. To repay Samuel Vernon and then perhaps to start a business of his own, he would need some capital, and with Ralph no longer a burden perhaps at last he had a chance of doing so. In search of still higher wages, in the late autumn of 1725 he moved to a new employer, John Watts, a businessman far more successful than Samuel Palmer. Watts had his printing workshop a mile to the west of Little Britain in the newer, more fashionable district surrounding the garden square and the theater at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a long way from Smithfield to Holborn, as the neighborhood was known; and so Franklin looked for lodgings nearer at hand.

  He chose to room on Duke Street, next to the square, at the same rent as he paid at the Golden Fan, but with a widow whose way of life would have horrified his family in New England. At times he had mixed in outrageous company; but in the eyes of a Bostonian, none could be worse than his new landlady. Her name was Elizabeth Holt, and she was a member of a minority viewed with fear and loathing by Sir Robert Walpole and his countrymen. The widow Holt belonged to the wicked Church of Rome. Beneath her roof the young American would enlarge his horizons yet again.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE PAPISTS OF DUKE STREET

  In the days when the Franklins were busy with their forge at Ecton, a developer had come to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and seen that it had potential. He bought the land to the west, and soon more investors followed suit until, by the 1640s, the square was overlooked by two long terraces made up of houses very different from those of Little Britain. Built for the rich, they were miniature palaces, put up in the latest Palladian style, like a shaft of light from Paris or the Veneto suddenly revealed amid the fog of London. At the corner where the terraces met, one of the houses stood over an archway with a dark passage beneath it. The passage led to Duke Street, where Franklin came to dwell. Because the house above it was especially grand, it served as a home for envoys from Europe.1

  Early in the 1720s the embassy of Sardinia moved in to occupy the house above the arch. They were Roman Catholics, of course. And so, behind the embassy and opposite Franklin’s new home, they had a chapel to say mass. They also had a secret corridor where they could hide a priest or holy relics if a mob of Whigs threatened to attack. Because outsiders could attend the services, Duke Street became a focal point for Catholics, poor and rich; although by now a wealthy Catholic in London was almost as rare as a rattlesnake in Boston.

  Protec
ted by diplomatic immunity, the embassy chapels—this one, and those of Austria, Portugal, and so on—were the only places in the capital where Catholics could gather legally. This was an era when the arrogance of state deprived them of all their other civil liberties. In England they could not vote or hold public office. Catholic priests could be arrested at any time; and although few prosecutions actually occurred, the faith of Rome remained officially despised. In an effort to suppress the Jacobites, Walpole had imposed a tax on Catholics, hoping to raise £100,000 with a levy on Papists who would not swear allegiance to the king.

  The Sardinian chapel offered them a rare space of freedom, drawing in a congregation as diverse as could be. They included laborers and seamen, Irish mostly, but also shopkeepers, actors, musicians, and singers. With Handel close at hand, writing his operas in Italian, the stage had become a nest of foreigners and Papists. Besides the many aliens who prayed at the chapel—the cooks, the hairdressers, and the dancing masters—there were printers from Farringdon Without, together with a few of the old Catholic gentry. Sightseers came as well, curious to hear the tinkling bells and the mass said in Latin. Among the worshippers they saw was Franklin’s landlady, Elizabeth Holt. Talkative and funny, she was fond of telling anecdotes, and she was a martyr to the gout. It left Mrs. Holt very lame at the knees.2

  In 1718, she had featured on a list of Papists who refused to swear the oath of loyalty. Three quarters of the names on the list were female. That was another feature of Catholicism in the capital: it was a faith that women kept alive. Since they were mostly widows and spinsters, the women on the list had to find an income, but Elizabeth Holt was a woman of enterprise. In the latter part of 1725 she and her daughter, Elizabeth Junior—“spinster of the same”—discovered a splendid way to make ends meet.3