Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  At about the time she took Franklin as her lodger, Mrs. Holt placed a notice in the press, advertising her entry to the retail trade. The readers were told about an opening on Duke Street, where Mrs. Holt and her daughter were setting up in business. Their Italian warehouse would sell silk and satin, wine and olive oil, and capers and anchovies too—“weight no less than a pound, nor measure less than a pint”—and all to be offered “at the reasonablest rates.”

  Soon enough the two women widened their range of merchandise, to include so much else filled with the warmth of the Mediterranean. They sold violin strings from Rome, soap from Naples, Jesuit treacle—whatever that might be—and sausages from Bologna, not to mention aromatic oil from Tuscany. These were rarities in London, where the Holts had few rivals dealing in Parmesan and Chianti, and so they soon began to thrive. They did so well that in 1727 Mrs. Holt was able to move to the Strand, one of the finest retail pitches in the capital. To promote her new shop, she hired William Hogarth to design the cards she handed out to passersby.

  By that time Franklin was at home again in America, and so he never shared her years of affluence. But of an evening, when he was working for John Watts, and eager to spend as little as possible, he would go to sit with Mrs. Holt in her room at the rear of the warehouse. They would dine modestly on anchovies, a little bread and butter, and a half pint of ale, while she told her stories about the days of yore, when her husband was alive and they mixed with what she called “people of distinction.”

  In choosing to lodge with Mrs. Holt, Franklin showed just how far he had come from the narrow New England of the Mathers. In the Bay Colony where he was born, so deeply ingrained was the hatred of Catholicism and the Irish that in 1732, when it was rumored that a priest was planning to visit Boston on St. Patrick’s Day, the governor ordered the sheriff to scour the area for Papists, with a warrant to break down the door of any house that looked suspicious. Not for another fifty years could the mass be said publicly in the town.

  Things were only a little better in London, and indeed the Sardinian chapel was destroyed in the infamous Gordon Riots of 1780; but Franklin had absorbed the different customs of the Quaker colony, where Catholics could worship more or less as they pleased. The Jesuits were free to visit from their mission on the eastern shore of Maryland; by the mid-1720s there was a Jesuit father ministering up and down the Delaware valley; and in 1734 they created their own church in Philadelphia. Even James Logan, who so detested Jacobites, helped the Penn family in London fight off attempts to curtail the freedoms Catholics enjoyed.4

  Nonetheless their numbers were still very small. There were fewer than two hundred in Philadelphia even in the 1740s. It is unlikely that before he came to London Franklin had ever spoken to a Roman Catholic, let alone spent long evenings in their company. And so yet again his youthful visit to the empire’s capital formed an essential part of his education.

  Fresh from writing the Dissertation, with its derisory message about religious faith, there he was on Duke Street on splendid terms with a woman who prayed the rosary. He and Mrs. Holt got on so well—Franklin was an ideal lodger, sober and self-disciplined—that when he talked about taking cheaper rooms elsewhere, she cut two shillings off his weekly rent. Their friendship was bound to give him second thoughts about the insults heaped on “priestcraft” in the books he had read by John Toland and the like.

  Another engraving by William Hogarth: ca. 1730, a printed card advertising the delicatessen owned by Mrs. Elizabeth Holt. She had been Franklin’s landlady at her earlier premises on Duke Street in 1726.

  Upstairs there lived another elderly woman whose faith and gentility the young man found still more impressive. The garret above the warehouse was occupied by “a maiden lady”: Franklin’s words. The daughter of Catholic gentry, in her youth she had entered one of the convents of English nuns in exile in Belgium and France. Seventy years of age when Franklin knew her, she still lived like a member of an order. So that she could give away as much as possible, even though her income was small, the maiden lady made do with a diet of gruel.

  Every day a priest would take her confession. He would step across the street to the bare little room where she was allowed to dwell rent free, because Mrs. Holt saw her presence as a blessing. Franklin was only permitted to enter the garret on one occasion: but that one visit left an indelible mark on his autobiography. “She was cheerful and polite, and convers’d pleasantly,” he recalled. “The room was clean, but had no other furniture than a mattress, a table with a crucifix and book, a stool, which she gave me to sit on, and a picture over the chimney.” The maiden lady explained that it was Saint Veronica, holding up the veil she had offered to Christ to wipe his brow on the way to crucifixion.5

  In his memoirs, Franklin gives more space to Mrs. Holt and the maiden lady than he does to Cotton Mather or to any other Puritan minister from Boston. He also writes about the two women with affection and respect, which had not been the tone of The New-England Courant. As for the Calvinism of which Mather was a representative, Franklin scarcely writes about it at all: from which we can surely deduce that it meant very little to him. It is fair to say that these two ladies with their faith and generosity did at least as much as any Puritan in Massachusetts to shape the views about religion that Franklin held as an adult. In London he discovered that Catholics were not as dreadful as he had been led to believe; and so again his horizons grew wider.

  Generosity and faith: those were not the virtues he would find in the printing shop of Mr. Watts. It was located a few hundred yards from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in a backstreet called Wild Court. A big and a bustling enterprise, it was full of rough and tumble, drink, and banter, exchanged between artisans working under high pressure. On two floors, John Watts had as many as fifty staff and a dozen presses. No printing works on such an industrial scale would exist in America until after independence; even at the peak of his career, Franklin would never employ more than a handful of journeymen.

  This could hardly be otherwise. Before the Revolution the reading public in the colonies was simply too small—only one third the size of England’s—and too widely dispersed to justify a printing business as extensive as John Watts’s. Even so, Franklin’s exposure to this sort of printing factory gave him a wealth of experience that he could redeploy in Pennsylvania. The technical skills he already had, for the most part. Although he refined them still further while he was with Watts and Palmer, what mattered more was that Franklin saw the different business models followed by the leading printers of the capital. In the 1730s and 1740s, the decades of Poor Richard’s Almanack, he would take what he had learned, adapt it to American conditions, and produce his own formula for colonial success.

  THE CHAPEL AND THE QUAKER

  An excellent printer, John Watts could also show Franklin what it meant to be an entrepreneur. Instead of scrabbling around for small contracts, Watts had formed an alliance with London’s finest literary publishers, the Tonson family, who worked with authors including Alexander Pope. Their list of books featured big, multivolume editions by eminent writers, with long print runs that needed a factory as large and as well equipped as Wild Court. Spotting a gap in the market, they and John Watts repackaged the books in question into a pocket-sized format, the duodecimo, intended to reach the widest audience. They used the Dutch typeface Elsevier, relatively new in London but ideal when the print had to be small but very readable.6

  When Franklin first arrived at Watts’s factory, his new colleagues were just finishing a sixteen-volume set of Addison’s Spectator, which went on sale a few days after Mrs. Holt opened her delicatessen. It would be followed in 1726 by more of the same: more work for the Tonsons, reprints of Addison and Steele, also in duodecimo, small and elegant and perfect for the drawing room, the bedside table, or the coaching inn. As yet, it was not the kind of product an American printer could turn out, because the economics would not have made sense; but f
ifteen years later, a moment would come when Franklin could do something of the kind in Philadelphia.

  For Watts’s factory hands, including Franklin, books such as these meant hard, repetitive labor, done to meet tight deadlines. With so much capital employed—the presses, the ink, the paper, the type, and the premises—Watts had to move on swiftly from one big contract to the next. As for the quality, it had to be high, to satisfy the Tonsons and authors as demanding as Mr. Pope. In return, the printers could earn excellent wages from books turned out in such large numbers.

  Franklin chose to work at the coalface, tending one of Watts’s presses on the lower floor, rather than sitting quietly upstairs as a compositor. Too much sedentary stuff at Mr. Palmer’s had made him long for exercise of the kind he was accustomed to in Philadelphia. Among the Londoners, he counted as an oddity. His accent, his size, and his muscles, they were all so unusual; but strangest of all to a cockney was his avoidance of strong drink. The rest of the pressmen were “great guzzlers of beer,” Franklin recalled, and they had a boy from the alehouse who kept them supplied at the machines. Soon they took to calling Franklin “the Water American.” It was a nickname that came to be tinged with respect, when they saw Franklin running up and down the staircase, carrying in each hand one of the wooden trays filled with lead type.

  Working the press was a task less cerebral than the compositor’s, but still very demanding. Seen today in a demonstration in a museum, the process of eighteenth-century printing looks simple and even sedate. If it has a quaint appearance, that is because what is absent is the commercial imperative. In the London Franklin knew, there was nothing relaxed about the printing trade. Because the pressmen were paid by the piece, they had to get the work done very rapidly, while still making no mistakes.

  The pressmen were known as “horses,” because the work was so hard and because they worked in pairs. Each press required two operators: the “puller,” who did the heavy labor, and the “beater,” who prepared the ink ball, a greasy wad of leather, and applied it to the rows of lead type, set in a frame on top of the marble slab that formed the bed of the press. As many as four times a minute, the puller would draw a wooden carriage, containing the paper, over the frame. As the carriage passed through the machine, he would heave on an iron bar, attached to a screw and a spindle that drove down a weighted wooden block that made the paper connect with the ink. Then they would withdraw the carriage, remove the paper and insert another sheet, and the process would begin again: all of which had to be done in fifteen seconds, without any slips or hiccups that might lead to blurs or smears or damage to the paper. They kept this up for sixty minutes at a time, until the beater and the puller took a break and swapped over.7

  Again it was the speed and the consistency that counted. As the best technical manual put it, the men at the press, beater and puller alike, had to maintain “a constant and methodical posture and gesture in every action.” If one of the two companions were weak or slapdash, or if he failed to turn up in the morning, the other one would suffer financially as their output fell away. Franklin saw how annoying it could be to have a heavy drinker as his partner, a man who would be prone to slack and break the rhythm.8

  His companion drank six pints of beer a day, from breakfast until supper time. “A detestable custom,” thought Franklin, who tried to use his science to convince his partner to stay away from alcohol. A pint of beer is no more than water and fermented grain, he pointed out. So why not follow the recommendations of Thomas Tryon, and simply eat a loaf of bread instead? Sound advice though this was, his partner went on drinking what Franklin called his “muddling liquor.” On Saturday night, when the tally for the week was totted up, his companion had to give a quarter of his wages to pay for his beer.

  “And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography. His dislike of drinking was never a matter of rigid principle; he had no religious objection to alcohol; and in time he came to relish his ale and his wine. What troubled Franklin was the money it absorbed, the risk that in drink people would do things they regretted, and the insidious way that liquor could destroy a life or a career. He would see this many times in Philadelphia.

  Soon John Watts came to his rescue. Feeling that Franklin was wasted where he was, he sent the young man up to the composing room, where he promptly ran into another kind of problem with beer. In a printing works, the journeymen had to stick together, to negotiate the best rates per page from the master and to make sure that everybody pulled his weight. Because of all this, and because they took pride in their work, in every printing shop in London the journeymen had a labor union, the Chapel, with elaborate rules and customs, Chapel dues, and fines for anyone who stepped out of line.

  Swearing, fighting, or untidiness, leaving a candle burning unattended, using another man’s tools, or bringing a stranger into the works: all of these were forbidden. When rules were broken, the fines were paid into a fund, the Chapel Money, to be spent on beer at a weekly ritual known as the Chapel Drink, held on a Saturday night, when the oldest man—the “Father of the Chapel”—always took the first glass. And this was how Benjamin Franklin came to quarrel with his colleagues.9

  His future lay in being an employer, a colonial John Watts. In London the printers had a maxim, “The Chapel cannot err,” that did not sit well with the young Socrates, so keen to be his own master with his own set of rules. According to the Chapel regulations, every new arrival had to pay a fee called a benvenue, set at five shillings, to be put toward the drinking fund. When he joined the pressmen on the floor below, Franklin had already paid his benvenue, and he refused to do so a second time. Mr. Watts intervened on his behalf. This only made things worse, as the affair became a battle between capital and labor.

  If a man refused to pay, standard procedure in London was for the Chapel to punish the offender by bending him over another marble slab and beating him eleven times on the buttocks with a wooden board. For some reason—perhaps the obvious one, that Franklin the boxer was a dangerous man to wrestle with—in his case the Chapel opted for a different tactic: a campaign of low-level sabotage. When Franklin’s back was turned, they would swap around the type in his cases, transpose his paragraphs and pages, and “accidentally” break the galleys he had labored to create. All of this they blamed on a poltergeist, the Chapel Ghost who haunted any outsider who strayed into the composing room.

  For a few weeks Franklin put up with this; then he surrendered, having learned that sometimes compromise made sense, especially for Americans in London. He paid the benvenue and set about to make himself more popular. With his satirical sense of humor, honed to perfection on the Courant, he kept his colleagues entertained. In time they came to trust him as well. Franklin was the man they and Mr. Watts could rely upon, quick on the job, never hungover, never late for work, and careful with his money and with theirs. When the compositors ran up too long a tab at the alehouse, they turned for help to the big colonial, who had the credit to keep them all in beer until payday. They even began to copy his eating habits. Some of them gave up their pint of beer at breakfast time, their cheese, and their bread, and made do with the Franklin diet of water gruel and pepper.

  And so the months went by. Franklin might easily have settled into life in London as a printer of ingenuity, secure and highly paid, well thought of by Mr. Watts or by so many other bosses who would have been keen to hire him. But he chose not to do so. He was “grown tired” of the city, as he puts it in his autobiography. Once again ambition intervened, as it so often did with the Franklins, and sent the young man back to Philadelphia in the hope of making a fortune of his own.

  He had kept in touch with his Quaker friend Mr. Denham, whose influence was decisive. In England, Denham had settled all his old debts with his creditors. He set about to develop a transatlantic business as a ship’s chandler, importing rope and nails and so on to America with a view to fittin
g out ships in the Delaware. In the spring or early summer of 1726, he made Franklin an offer he could not refuse. With England, France, and Spain at peace, largely as a consequence of Walpole’s wise diplomacy, the Atlantic trade had excellent prospects. Pennsylvania was going to thrive, by virtue of the rich resources of its hinterland; and Denham offered Franklin a chance to be part of the unfolding story.10

  They would sail home, Mr. Denham suggested, taking with them a stock of goods from London, and open a store on the Philadelphia waterfront. Franklin would tend the store and keep the books. When the time was right he would go down to Jamaica or Barbados to market grain and flour to the slave plantations in exchange for sugar and molasses. In the meantime, Denham would pay Franklin a salary of £50 a year in the paper money issued by Sir William Keith: about half of what he made as a printer in London, but enough to tide him over. It was the kind of career that Robinson Crusoe had made for himself when he returned to England from his desert island, and Franklin saw the logic of the deal. He said yes.

  In time, Franklin would come to see that a merchant’s life was not for him: a wise decision, because although Denham’s plan might have sounded attractive, in fact this sort of business—trading by sea in commodities—was inherently volatile and fraught with risk. Carried out at long distance, and subject to all kinds of hazards, it was a species of commerce that would always keep a man awake at night. It would never have given Franklin the peace and quiet and the leisure hours that he required for his science. Although the printing trade had perils of its own, it was still a better bet for Franklin; and during his time in London with Watts he had seen how well a printing business could be managed.