Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  Like Hogarth’s industrious apprentice, he became known for his diligence. Philadelphia was still a small city where reputations were swiftly lost and made by word of mouth. There was a Scottish surgeon, Patrick Baird, who inspected incoming ships for smallpox and plied his profession from an office next door to Nicholas Scull. Of an evening, Mr. Baird would go to a gentleman’s club, where he heard people prophesy that with two other printers already in the town, Franklin and Meredith were doomed. He begged to disagree.17

  “The industry of that Franklin,” Baird told his friends, “is superior to anything I ever saw….I see him at work when I go home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.” With a recommendation so glowing, the jobs were bound to keep coming in. By the late summer of 1728, even though the economy was faltering a little, Franklin felt confident enough to think, like his brother James before him, of launching his own newspaper. He intended to go head-to-head with Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury.

  It was a shoddy, provincial paper, Franklin thought, and one that he could easily defeat with his superior skills as a writer. True, there was talk yet again of war with Spain, which might wreck the West Indian trade on which the colony relied so heavily, but Franklin had little time for what he called “the croakers” who were always calling down the economic prospects for the region. The time seemed right for a battle with the Bradfords.

  Six months or so earlier, his old bugbear Sir William Keith had at last been obliged to flee back to London, selling his land and his ironworks to pay down his borrowings. Franklin had passed him in the street, where the ex-governor tried not to look him in the eye. That year, the Keithites who remained had tried to fight on against Governor Gordon by staging a boycott of the assembly; a ploy that could only work for a time. Their cause was all but lost and instead Andrew Hamilton, Franklin’s patron of choice, was moving center stage in the Delaware valley.

  Down in New Castle, he had already supplanted Keith and Colonel French to become the power broker of the Lower Counties, which chose him as speaker of their elected assembly. Soon Hamilton would also be the boss of politics in Pennsylvania proper. That being so, the wind ought to be set fair for Franklin: assuming that he could master his turbulent feelings. By now Deborah Read was alone again, her spouse, John Rogers, having fled to the West Indies at the end of 1727 to escape his creditors. It was rumored that he had another wife in England, but no one could be certain, and so he and Deborah were still married in the eyes of the law.

  With Mrs. Rogers spoken for in this way, Franklin had to look elsewhere. He had fallen into the habit of what he calls “intrigues with low women who fell in my way.” In other words, he went for sex to women from the tavern or the street. Scared as he was of venereal disease—he makes that clear as well—and worried by the money all this cost, he knew that it could not go on.

  That autumn he also suffered a setback in his career for which he blamed the Oxford man, George Webb. The young man had found somebody to buy him out of his indentures with Keimer, and so he came to Franklin in search of a job. Although Franklin had nothing to offer, foolishly he told Webb about his newspaper plan. Breaking a confidence, Webb passed this on to Keimer, who stole the idea. On October 1, with the elections due in two days’ time and the town filled with folk from all over the province, Keimer put out a printed handbill advertising a weekly to be titled The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Universal Instructor, to start life in December. It would be sold up and down the coast from New Castle to New England by the same agents who stocked his almanac.

  Lambasting Bradford’s Mercury, which he dismissed as “nonsense in folio,” Keimer promised “to please all and offend none,” with what he called “a most useful paper of intelligence,” filled with news but also with the arts and sciences, an A to Z of learning from Agriculture to Zoology. Not only would his new Gazette “far exceed all others that ever were in America,” in Mr. Keimer’s modest words; it would also present “the most compleat body of history and philosophy ever yet published since the creation.” In fact, he merely intended to reprint pirated extracts from a British encyclopedia; but however absurd his publicity might be, Keimer might spoil Franklin’s market. Eccentric he might be, but Keimer was also a sharp businessman. He offered free advertising space to anyone who bought a subscription.

  Franklin had to postpone his own project until Keimer’s paper folded. He also had his mind on subjects more sublime. Six weeks after Keimer’s handbill appeared, Franklin wrote out a new personal creed, very different from the plan of conduct composed on the Berkshire. Where the plan had been terse and prosaic, his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion—Franklin’s title—were almost pure poetry, even though written in prose. A statement of principles but also a prayer book, meant for his own private use, they were only published long after his death.

  Drawn up on November 20, 1728, dated and preserved among his papers, from which so much else went missing, the Articles are another extraordinary document. In his early days in Philadelphia, there were really two Franklins, the public and the private. The Articles show us how wide a gap there was between the two. In the eyes of people like Patrick Baird, he was Franklin the industrious. In private he was something else: the young man estranged from his parents and prone to lapses with women from the inn. Hidden away as well was the visionary Franklin. In the Articles, we meet the young man who read poems, dreamed of science, and pondered his place in Sir Isaac Newton’s universe: an infinite cosmos that left him with mixed feelings of anxiety and awe.

  FRANKLIN THE POET

  “I believe there is one Supreme most perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves,” wrote Franklin in the Articles, as if he were an ancient philosopher and not a British subject in an empire still officially Christian. On the one hand, Franklin makes it plain that he is no longer an unbeliever. Atheism and infidelity, impiety and profaneness: these he rejects entirely, as he promises to shun all forms of vice and to live what he calls “a virtuous and holy life.” But the God to whom he swears to be faithful is not his father’s orthodox Jehovah.

  Instead Franklin begins the Articles with a statement of heresy. Gazing up into the sky at night—“beyond our system of planets…into space that is every way infinite”—he imagines it filled with an endless multitude of suns other than our own. Above or behind all this astronomy, so orderly and so mathematical, as Newton had shown it to be, there must surely be a Creator, a being Supremely Perfect: but what can He possibly care about a species so puny as humanity? Confined on earth, “this little ball on which we move,” we count for almost nothing. The Supreme Being cares not a jot whether we worship or praise him at all.

  In his boyhood Franklin had read the philosopher Pascal. It may very well be that he was thinking here of the Frenchman’s account of the terror he felt at the notion of infinite space; but his remedy was very different. Not for Franklin the solution of Pascal, the Catholic layman filled with guilt and fear, who wagered his eternal fate on a Gospel faith in Jesus. Deep inside, Franklin feels an urgent need to be devout, to worship something; and so he concocts a personal mythology, unbeholden to the Bible. Or rather he comes up with a hypothesis: Franklin’s God will be a concept, and not a revelation.

  “I conceive then,” he writes, “that the Infinite has created many Beings or Gods, vastly superior to man, who can better conceive his perfections than we, and return him a more rational and glorious praise.” Perhaps these Gods are immortal, or perhaps they exist only temporarily, to be superseded by others when they have served their purpose. Franklin cannot say for sure. He chooses to think that every planetary system, including our own, has a God of its own, good and wise and loving, and in that God, temporary or eternal, he intends to place his trust.

  With that point established, his anxiety begins to fade and Franklin can move forward with enthusiasm. What he seeks is not a set of doctrines, but instead a source
of inspiration and a program of action. Poetry is what he is after; and so he begins his personal liturgy with a long act of worship of the Being he calls his “Deity.” At its heart is a hymn in praise of Creation, forty-eight lines taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic that Addison had thought of as the most sublime of poems, second only to the Iliad of Homer.

  “These are thy Glorious Works, Parent of Good!” With that pentameter from Milton, so alien in sound and rhythm to the sort of thing we write and read today, Franklin applauds the order of things. The planets, the stars, the seas and the rain, the endless varieties of birds and flowers and animals: these he finds in Milton’s verse, praising their creator. And then, once elevated to the heights, he goes on to ask his God for help.

  There follow long petitions to the Deity, in which Franklin asks for every virtue: love of country, love of freedom, loyalty, clemency, and fortitude, generosity, sincerity, and tenderness. As for the vices he hates, they include ambition, avarice, intemperance, and luxury, “craft and over-reaching,” perjury, calumny, detraction, and fraud. “That I may be just in all my dealings and temperate in my pleasures, full of candour and ingenuity, humanity and benevolence: Help me, O Father”: so he writes.

  At the end, he offers a prayer of thanksgiving: for peace and liberty, for “knowledge, and literature, and every useful art,” and for “all thy innumerable benefits; for life and reason…for health and joy and every pleasant hour.” For all of these, says Franklin, “my Good God, I thank thee.” Along the way, he has parted company for good, or so it seems, with the cynicism he displayed in London in his Dissertation about fate. He has also set himself goals that are unattainable. Soon enough, in the early 1730s, he would have to climb down to earth and arrive at a more realistic creed.

  We might ask why Franklin felt the need to write a piece as exalted as his Articles of Belief, at a moment when he was so busy with his printing business. His eagerness to distance himself from Keimer might be one explanation; or guilt about his sexual intrigues; or his problems with his family in Boston. Or it might have been something else entirely. In London, whose affairs he followed so closely, the literary world had moved on, in a direction that Franklin found entirely delightful. And so of course in his Articles he would wish to follow this new trend.

  At just the time Denham and Franklin were leaving the capital, a great new poet had emerged in the shape of a Scotsman, James Thomson. His work was to be one of the lesser known loves of Franklin’s life. In 1726, Thomson had produced a poem called Winter, the first installment of his masterpiece, The Seasons, with Summer and Spring following on in 1727 and 1728. As the eighteenth century unfolded, so The Seasons became immensely popular, with well-thumbed copies to be found in every coaching inn. No one admired the book more than did Benjamin Franklin. “Whatever Thomson writes, send me a dozen copies of,” he once asked a friend in England. “That charming poet has brought more tears of pleasure into my eyes than all I ever read before.”18

  This is not the familiar Franklin of the Autobiography, so matter-of-fact and so pragmatic. The other, more private Franklin was the one who took pleasure in what Thomson had to offer: a new kind of religious poetry, not specifically Christian but always sublime. Writing in the blank verse of Paradise Lost, Thomson was a poet of nature and science, who strove to beautify the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton and to use them as a creed to which a modern person could pay homage. Like Franklin, James Thomson had steeped himself in the work of the deistical Lord Shaftesbury. Like Franklin, he believed in the infinity of space and the plurality of worlds. And like Franklin, he found the best proof of God—a benevolent creator—in the splendor of the world God had made.19

  When Sir Isaac died in 1727, to be acclaimed in the press as “the boast and glory of the British nation,” it was Thomson who wrote his poetic eulogy. By the year’s end, this rhapsody in verse had gone into five editions, marking a new high tide of Newtonian literature in England. In his Articles of Belief, Franklin supplied an American equivalent: his personal combination of science, art, and religion, written in prose but as enthusiastic as the lines of Thomson. This was surely Franklin’s aim in writing as he did, but he kept his Articles from the public eye, doubtless for the obvious reason: writing so lyrical would have left him open to derision.

  Meanwhile an old friend was working in the same field. In London James Ralph exploded on the literary scene, with poems that he hoped might make his name. Influenced by Thomson, they also spoke of nature and sublimity, and they were intended to promote the ideas of Shaftesbury. As things turned out, Ralph’s poetic career was disastrous, leaving him close to destitution. Throughout the early manhood of Benjamin Franklin, the fate of James Ralph would loom over him, as a warning of just how easy it was for an ingenious person to fail.

  Chapter Thirteen

  CITIZEN FRANKLIN

  Let us imagine that Franklin and James Ralph had both died at the age of forty. If so, then Franklin would be forgotten but his friend would always have a niche in history. Not as a success, but instead as a writer laid low by ridicule. Betrayed by his ambition, Ralph came to be known in London as “Jemmy Ninny Hammer” and his career collapsed beneath a torrent of abuse. He had made a terrible mistake: he backed the wrong side in a city where the arts were thoroughly political.

  A new weekly paper had appeared, The Craftsman, Tory in its origins and beautifully written, with Alexander Pope thought to be among its contributors. With The Craftsman as their flagship, the Tories hoped to rally the opponents of the government in a chorus of indignation against the prime minister. On the stage Sir Robert Walpole had more enemies; and early in 1728, while The Craftsman continued to attack him tickets went on sale for The Beggar’s Opera, the musical sensation of the age. The author was John Gay, a friend of Pope, and his songs and dialogue carried the same political message: Walpole and the Whigs, said Mr. Gay, were little better than a gang of thieves.

  We know that Franklin read and admired The Craftsman. He followed the rest of the London press as well—this was his specialty, his knowledge of the empire’s capital—and so he must have been aware of what happened to his friend. As The Beggar’s Opera ran and ran, heaping satire on Sir Robert’s head, it occurred to James Ralph that he might make his name by taking the opposite side, to become the poetic mouthpiece of the Whigs.

  Since he and Franklin parted company, Ralph had become a published author, finding friends among the literati who hoped he might be a second James Thomson. He also won the backing of another newspaper that Franklin followed from afar, The London Journal, once an organ of the opposition but now a publication that Walpole secretly controlled. With their support, Ralph produced a stream of prose and poetry, printed by Franklin’s old colleague Charles Ackers. He began with an exercise in Gothic horror, titled The Tempest: or the Terrors of Death, and after that there came a series of rambling efforts in Thomson’s style. They met with acclaim from The London Journal, which said that they bore “the marks of genius.” When Ralph wrote an ode in praise of George II, who had just come to the throne, the paper was even more effusive. They praised the poet to the skies and called him a finer writer than Addison.1

  James Ralph was playing a dangerous game. Had he written these reviews himself? So it was suspected. He was also coming to be seen as a toady in the service of the government. And this Ralph proved to be, when he chose to pick a fight with the most distinguished writers of the period. Soon after The Beggar’s Opera appeared, Pope brought out the first edition of his Dunciad, another masterpiece of Tory satire. Eager to please the men in power, Ralph produced a Whig reply—Sawney: an Heroic Poem, Occasion’d by the Dunciad—with which he more or less destroyed his own career.

  It was a vicious piece, in which James Ralph plumbed the lower depths of unpleasantness. An invalid from childhood, Pope was severely disabled, tiny in stature and often confined to bed. And so in Sawney Mr. Ralph put these words into his mouth:
<
br />   Nature curs’d me with a monster’s form,

  Shap’d like a bear, yet little as a worm.

  Even then it was thought of as a wicked thing to heap contempt on the afflicted, but Ralph went further and described The Dunciad as a piece of “nonsense…execrably dull.” As for Jonathan Swift, Ralph called him “a lewd-swearing priest,” and he dismissed Gulliver’s Travels as a “monstrous tale.” Ralph rounded off the poem with an attack on The Beggar’s Opera, which he labeled “wretched stuff,” fit only for an audience of fools.

  In the face of insolence so blatant, of course the Tories had to take their revenge. In the next edition of The Dunciad, Pope made cruel fun of Ralph’s poetic style and added a footnote that nearly finished Ralph for good, calling him “a low writer…wholly illiterate.” Worse was to come, when Mr. Pope’s friends on The Grub-Street Journal slandered James Ralph as “a smock fac’d, self worshipping prig.” Beneath so many insults, his writing career withered and died.2

  William Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1736). Although often thought to be a likeness of the impoverished writer Lewis Theobald, it would have served just as well as a portrait of James Ralph.

  On the brink of ruin he was rescued by Henry Fielding. The author of Tom Jones was making his name as a playwright and theatrical manager, and he wanted Ralph as an assistant. For seven years they worked together until they were censored by Walpole and put out of business, a disaster that reduced James Ralph to penury again, so poor that he had to send out begging letters, some of which survive in manuscript in London: pathetic little items, full of humiliation. Although Ralph made a new career as a journalist, he never regained his standing as a poet.

  Of all the many failures Franklin knew, Ralph has to rank as the most remarkable. He was also the closest to home: the one whose fate had the most to offer as a cautionary tale. Ralph had been his alter ego, the man who Franklin might have been if he had lingered on in London, among the skeptics in the coffeehouses. Even though later they met on friendly terms, in his memoirs Franklin showed little sympathy for Ralph. The path that Franklin had to tread was very different. In his years of labor at the printing press, Franklin had to stick to what he knew as “regularity”: a talent that he had not seen in James Ralph’s repertoire.3