by Nick Bunker
Among the printers of his own age that Franklin met in London, two were especially important. One was a very close friend, the other an acquaintance and then a business contact. The friend was John Wygate, “an ingenious young man,” as Franklin describes him, twenty years old, a lover of books with some knowledge of French and Latin, whose life would end in yet another episode of ruin. The acquaintance was Charles Ackers, who would become a printer even more successful than Watts. His career and Franklin’s would unfold in parallel, as on their different sides of the Atlantic they strove to become men of quality, printers but also public servants held in high esteem.11
SWIMMING WITH THE TIDE
A gentleman but only barely so, John Wygate’s father had come up to London from a village near Bristol where he failed to make his mark. After settling close to Little Britain, he passed away, leaving his widow to seek openings for her children. She bought John an apprenticeship with a Tory printer who worked as a team with the fearless Jacobite, Nathaniel Mist. John Wygate never finished his indentures, but by 1726 he was employed alongside Franklin at Wild Court.12
Somehow Franklin conceived the notion that the Wygates had wealthy relations. This was not true; but his new friend certainly knew how to come across as a man of quality. One Sunday, with some gentlemen up from the country, Wygate and Franklin took a boat along the Thames to Chelsea, where Sir Hans Sloane’s specimens from America could be seen in a botanical garden owned by the Society of Apothecaries.
Then as now, Chelsea was the place to go to cut a dash. The most elegant locale in the western approaches to London, the neighborhood sprang up around the Royal Hospital, erected by Charles II to house the aged veterans of war. Nearby some developers had created the chic little suburb of Cheyne Walk. Among its attractions was a coffeehouse, owned by James Salter, yet another of Franklin’s eccentrics. “Don Saltero,” as he came to be called, had been for many years the factotum of Sir Hans, from whom he had acquired a taste for curiosities. He also made a wicked bowl of punch.
On Mr. Salter’s premises, the customers could gaze at his collection of exotica: mummified cats, an embryo in a bottle, a whip used by a nun to scourge herself (allegedly), a coronation sword, and much else, a mixture of the grisly and the picturesque. There were also bits and pieces from the colonies. Tomahawks, wampum, bows and arrows, and even another fragment of asbestos: just the kind of curiosities that Franklin loved to examine. So he and his friend joined the throng in Cheyne Walk.13
And then, on the way home in another boat, an idea occurred to John Wygate. He suggested that Franklin should jump into the Thames. Raised as he was by the Mill Pond in Boston, of course he was an excellent swimmer. Being Franklin, he had also studied the textbooks, learning the strokes recommended by a Frenchman who had written the best available. He had even taught Wygate and a friend how to swim. What better way to end the day but this—an exhibition of colonial aquatics? It would be almost as amusing as a petrified fetus.
So Franklin stripped off his clothes and dived in, displaying his accomplishments to the good people of London. Off he swam, ducking and diving, followed by applause, the Water American in his element. The Thames is a dangerous river at this point, tidal and the prey of powerful currents, so that today the Metropolitan Police issue strict warnings against this kind of escapade; and in 1726 the water was also filthy and foul-smelling, heavy with the drift of human sewage. But Franklin made it as far as Blackfriars, coming ashore on the mud beneath the dome of St. Paul’s.
It was one way to become a celebrity. John Wygate was utterly thrilled. Seeing how ingenious his friend had proved to be, he came up with a new suggestion. Should they not cross the English Channel, and take their talents on a tour of Europe? They could pay their way as printers or as masters of the art of swimming. Franklin liked the idea. He thought about it for a while and referred the matter to the wise Mr. Denham: and then he said no.
He was set upon Philadelphia. A ship was due to leave that summer, the Berkshire, bound for the Delaware. Once again, it was time to be on the move. Franklin began to busy himself running errands for his new partner, and saying goodbye to his friends. Among those who had worked with him at Mr. Palmer’s workshop at St. Bartholomew’s was the young Charles Ackers, with whom he would keep in touch for many years to come. In the 1730s, when Franklin was publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette, Ackers was his principal contact in the press in the capital, the man to whom he could send his American newspaper in exchange for the latest journalism from London.
In the shape of Charles Ackers, Franklin beheld his mirror image. When they met, Ackers was about twenty-three, the son of a gardener, and just finishing his time as one of Palmer’s apprentices. Like Franklin, he was capable of rare feats of technical skill. Ackers was one of the very few compositors in London who could set a book in Arabic. Indeed in 1726 he was the compositor for an Arabic translation of the New Testament, intended to assist with the conversion of the Muslims to Christianity.14
A year after that, Ackers had his own workshop, where he printed all the early published work of James Ralph. He went on to a prosperous career that made him a gentleman and a pillar of society, a justice of the peace for Middlesex with a town house and small country estate. Among his friends, Ackers counted people whom Franklin admired: not only a fellow printer, Samuel Richardson, who became the author of Pamela, but also William Caslon, the most famous English typefounder of the eighteenth century, renowned for the strength and precision of the letters he produced. By the 1740s, Caslon’s lead type had become Franklin’s favorite. Indeed he rarely used any other.
To survive in a market as competitive as London, a printer required a reliable flow of business from editions that would find a ready market. With his alliance with the Tonsons, John Watts had shown one way in which this could be done; but Charles Ackers was even more creative and adaptable. Besides printing a wide range of sermons, schoolbooks, and histories, plus a cookery book that sold extremely well, he became the printer and co-owner of a new monthly, The London Magazine, founded in 1732. One such periodical already existed, The Gentleman’s Magazine, which had come into being early in 1731, offering a rich and varied diet of poetry, book reviews, political news and comment, and even scientific essays. Charles Ackers and his partners strove to do the same, promising “greater variety, and more in quantity, than any monthly book extant.” In its heyday The London Magazine had a circulation of about eight thousand.15
Among its most avid readers was Benjamin Franklin, who often lifted material from both periodicals for reuse in The Pennsylvania Gazette. Indeed his early work on electricity owed its beginnings to detailed reports in The Gentleman’s Magazine of experiments in Paris and Germany. In 1740, Franklin tried to launch his own equivalent, a venture that swiftly ended in failure. In the colonies, where the market was so much smaller, and the magazines imported from London already had a following, he could not make a monthly pay its way. But although their markets were so very different, Franklin and Ackers had goals and ambitions that were identical. Back home in Philadelphia, Franklin’s career for the next two decades was a long attempt to achieve the kind of success that Charles Ackers achieved in England.
Both Ackers and Franklin began as highly skilled artisans, born the sons of tradesmen, but all the time they were striving to be accepted as something more. They wanted to be gentlemen printers. In other words, they saw their business careers as a means not just to make money, but also as a way to become respected figures in their community. For that to occur, they needed flagship publications whose high quality would establish their reputation as publishers with taste and ingenuity. They also required a product range so wide and so robust that eventually their business would almost run itself.
As we would say today, Franklin had to build a brand, a printing franchise so strong that one day he could leave it to somebody else to manage, giving him the leisure for civic virtue and for s
cience. In America, Franklin had to be still more flexible than Ackers, and also more opportunistic. But eventually, by different means, they reached the same destination. America’s gentleman printer: that was what Benjamin Franklin would become, before he turned to science and politics. But in 1726, he had yet to appreciate that this would be his future; and in fact he almost abandoned the colonies forever.
At the last moment, as the Berkshire was ready to sail, Franklin came close to changing his mind and turning his back on Thomas Denham. Word of Franklin’s adventure in the Thames had spread around the city, reaching the ears of a Tory politician, Sir William Wyndham, who was making his name in Parliament as an opponent of Walpole and the Whigs. Somehow—presumably by way of John Wygate, and his Tory connections—he found the big American. Wyndham made Franklin another attractive offer: teach my sons to swim, and I will pay a handsome fee.
It occurred to Franklin that many other people might want the same tuition from a personal trainer. Why not stay in London and open a swimming school? An even more appealing proposition. But then he thought again: he had gone too far with Denham, with whom he had a deal. And so on the afternoon of July 21, the Berkshire slipped her moorings and left the river Thames for America, taking him with her and bringing to a close an extraordinary phase in the life of Benjamin Franklin.
He had seen many plays and read many books. By the time he left he had lost his virginity: Franklin hints at that in his autobiography. In his eighteen months in London, he had mixed with a demimonde of writers and intellectuals, and he had met Tories, Whigs, and scientists: “ingenious acquaintances,” as he describes them. He had encountered the kind of eccentrics whom he so enjoyed, Papists and freethinkers alike, in far larger numbers than he could have found in the colonies and they had enlarged his knowledge of human nature. In the workshops run by Watts and Palmer he had also been through what amounted to a graduate school of the printing trade. Only one thing was missing: for all his frugal ways, Franklin had failed to save any money. To pay his fare on the Berkshire, Mr. Denham had to lend him £10 and he still had nothing to give back to Mr. Vernon in Rhode Island.
Long before he set foot in England, Franklin had already been ingenious. Now he was far more so: a brilliant youth who had been at the center of things, in the London of Walpole, Hogarth, and Sir Isaac Newton. For that there was a price to be paid, by way of the frustrations of maturity. After so enjoying the excitement of London, he had to return to a provincial town where perhaps no one would understand the talk he had heard in the coffeehouses.
He was still only twenty. For many years he was going to have to work very hard to make a living, for himself and for a wife and family, if such he came to have, with little likelihood that he would see London again and no guarantee that he would ever find the time and leisure to be a man of letters and ideas. Not until Franklin was more than forty could he pick up the trail of science that Sir Isaac had left for him to follow. In the meantime, he would require all the “regularity” that Samuel Palmer had prized so highly.
Part Four
THE WEEKLY GRIND
Chapter Twelve
SEAWEED, SICKNESS, AND THE JUNTO
The voyage began as a jaunt, a bit of fun, as though Franklin were enjoying one last holiday before adult life closed in around him. As the ship lay at anchor off the coast of England, he took a bath by leaping into the sea and swimming around the hull, with porpoises basking in the distance. On the Isle of Wight, where they spent a week or so waiting for the wind, Franklin stepped ashore to visit the attractions. Carisbrooke Castle, already in ruins, covered in ivy and tumbling down: it was something that he had to see, and so up he went in the sunshine. Ever the student, he peered at the stones and listened to the guide, who kept an alehouse at the gate. The next day, he was the boy from Boston again, playing games like the old ones when he built his little wharf. When he and his friends were returning to the Berkshire in the dark, it was Franklin who waded into the mud, up to his waist, to borrow a boat to carry them over a creek: but without the owner’s permission.
He was keeping a journal, his version of the log Sir Hans Sloane had compiled of his voyage to Jamaica. Once or twice in the Courant, Franklin had shown how well he could write descriptively, a skill he would require for the kind of science he would do later on. Here in his diary of life at sea he gives us everything we need, if we are to share his changing mood as the journey becomes an ordeal. They spent sixty days out of sight of land. It was not an especially long crossing; but long enough for their supplies to run short and for tempers to fray.1
“A contrary wind…puts us all out of good humour,” he writes. “We grow sullen, silent, and reserved, and fret at each other on every little occasion.” When a cardsharper is caught by his fellow passengers, they sentence him to pay two bottles of brandy. He refuses, and so they hoist him up on a rope and let him hang, “cursing and swearing,” until he goes black in the face, cries “murder!” and they have to let him down. A ship comes by, sailing from Dublin with a cargo of indentured servants bound for New York. As the smell drifts over the water, Franklin shows that there are limits to the charity he learned from Mrs. Holt. He calls the Irish “a lousy stinking rabble,” and pities anyone who has to travel with them.
Six hundred miles out from England, a “poor little bird” lands on the deck. Too weak to be fed, it disappears, falling victim to the cat. On a calm, hot day when the skipper has the steward flogged for using too much flour, Franklin strips for another swim in the sea, only to see a shark circling the Berkshire in “a slow majestic manner,” surrounded by pilot fish, “the smallest not bigger than my little finger.” Coming back from the West Indies, Sir Hans had seen the sailors catching dolphins with bait made to look like a flying fish. Franklin writes about the very same thing.
Best of all is his account of Sargassum, a kind of brown algae floating on the waves. On a branch of Sargassum, he found what he called “vegetable animals,” tiny little fruit that resembled shellfish, attached to the weed on little stalks of gristle. Inspecting them closely, he saw that some of the fruit contained a soft jelly, like the flesh of an oyster, but others—the larger ones—were “visibly animated, opening their shells every moment, and thrusting out a set of unformed claws.” Among them he found a miniature crab, “about as big as the head of a tenpenny nail.” Since the crab was as yellow as the Sargassum, Franklin thought it might be “a native of the branch,” growing out of the weed by a process of reproduction. He placed samples in a bottle filled with saltwater, to see if any more crabs appeared.
From his reading of Wollaston, Franklin was aware that one of the most tantalizing scientific questions of the age had to do with what was called “equivocal” generation. Could one species of organism—a flea, a worm, or perhaps a crab—emerge by chance, “spontaneously” or “equivocally,” from another kind of creature, or from dead flesh? If so, then perhaps there existed no rigid distinction between animals and vegetables, or between fish and plants or the medium in which they lived. This theory worried men like Wollaston, who rejected it entirely because—like the ideas of Spinoza—it might lead in dangerous directions. If it were taken to its logical conclusion—as it was by French biologists, twenty years later—this kind of thinking might do away with God as a creator, and leave no room for the notion of a soul.2
As a young man aboard the Berkshire, Franklin was a long way from anything quite so sophisticated, but he certainly knew that this was the sort of question that scientists wanted to explore. His journal of the voyage is impressive for three things: his powers of observation; his skill with language; and his appreciation that odd phenomena like the Sargassum might one day supply a key to unlock the secrets of nature. With its echoes of Sloane and its allusions to biology, the journal shows how much he had learned in London. His meetings with Sir Hans and in the coffeehouses had started to give him a taste for empirical research. After flirting for so long with metap
hysics, Franklin was beginning to leave it behind. He was gradually giving up abstract speculation in favor of natural science, a field where—in the 1740s—his talents could be far more productive.
At last, on October 9, after a few days when the wind stood fair behind them, blowing them in at a brisk seven knots, they saw a long spit of white sand and the tops of trees. The Berkshire was just where she ought to be, in sight of Cape Henlopen, at the very mouth of the Delaware. On the 11th, in fine autumn weather, Denham and Franklin landed in Philadelphia by night. On their arrival, they found that in their absence many things had changed: in politics, in publishing, and in the lives of their friends.
On Market Street, Miss Read had ceased to be a spinster. Her dead father had left the Reads in debt and with only a small income, so that Deborah had to find a husband. This she had done: but as we shall see in a moment, he was far from being an ideal companion. As for Sir William Keith, he had been dismissed at last, to give way to a new governor, Patrick Gordon. He was an elderly soldier from Scotland who had served without distinction in Marlborough’s campaigns but appeared to the Penns to be a much safer pair of hands than Sir William to oversee their property. As always, there was talk of war with Spain, after a naval fracas said to have occurred in the West Indies; but as always, until the end of the next decade, the rumors turned out to be false.
Although maritime trade had dwindled a little, Pennsylvania was still doing well. The exports went out, mainly food to the Caribbean, and the imports still came in, especially people: the Irish of course, but also there were signs of a new wave of German migrants from the Rhineland. The iron trade was looking promising, with new projects for mines and furnaces in the hills above the Delaware and to the west in Chester County. But for Franklin, the most surprising thing of all would have been the success of his strange old employer: because Samuel Keimer had found a new way to make money.