by John Updike
Within a few days of his London arrival in 1757, Franklin had found lodgings in Craven Street, Strand, with Margaret Stevenson, a widow his age, and her daughter Mary, called Polly. This surrogate household, echoing in composition that of the wife and daughter he had left behind in Philadelphia, remained his home for all his English years; when, in 1772, Mrs. Stevenson moved a few doors away, her distinguished lodger moved with her. She cooked for him and nursed him when he was sick. According to Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia W. Herbert in their lively The Private Franklin, “People fell into a habit of inviting them together or sending greetings to both.” Were they, in his fifteen years beneath her roof, lovers? Some historians speculate that his amorous favor fell instead upon her daughter, who was eighteen when they first met. Before Polly Stevenson’s marriage, to Dr. William Hewson, Franklin wrote long paternally instructive letters to her, and she was responsive enough to attempt communicating in the phonetic alphabet he invented, of which the Library of America volume includes three eye-boggling pages. After her husband’s death, she came to Philadelphia at Franklin’s invitation, stayed four years, until his death, then stayed five years more, until her own death, even though she had complained to her son, “Nothing but insignificance or slavery awaits a woman here.”
In London, on the face of it, Franklin behaved as head of the Stevenson household and used it as the comfortable base of his flattering English life. An American friend, after visiting Craven Street, reported that “Doctor Franklin looks heartier than I ever knew him in America.” He became a man-about-town. As earlier in Philadelphia and later in France, his devoted membership in the Masons opened doors and cemented friendships. While still in America, he had been elected a member of the Royal Society and of the Premium Society, or Society of Arts. He received awards and honorary degrees, and, summers, travelled in the British Isles and on the Continent, receiving more honors. He frequented taverns and coffeehouses, usually dining on Mondays at the George and Vulture with a group of scientists, and on Thursdays with the Club of Honest Whigs at St. Paul’s Coffeehouse. “Conversation warms the mind,” he wrote one of his many new friends, Lord Kames. Not only was Franklin’s one of those reputations, like Poe’s and Faulkner’s, that the French have returned to us enhanced but he was one of those Americans, like Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who found refuge in England from the thinness of native cultural life. Temporarily back in Philadelphia in 1763, he wrote Polly, “Of all the enviable Things England has, I envy it most its People. Why should that petty Island … enjoy in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.”
His renown as a scientist, especially as an “electrician,” had preceded him and smoothed his way, and it is the scientific passages in the London pages of this bulky selection that form the easiest reading and best give the impression of a mind congenially engaged. These years began with his penning, on the boat across the Atlantic, the haranguing summary of Poor Richard’s cautionary sayings which, separately published as “Father Abraham’s Speech” or “The Way to Wealth,” was to enjoy wide circulation and many translations. During his Philadelphia hiatus, he wrote perhaps his fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet, decrying the slaughter of twenty friendly Indians living peaceably in Lancaster by a gang of Scotch-Irish farmers calling themselves the Paxton Boys, in reaction to Indian massacres along the Pennsylvania frontier. Franklin’s passionate language still stings: “What had little Boys and Girls done; what could Children of a Year old, Babes at the Breast, what could they do, that they too must be shot and hatcheted?—Horrid to relate!—and in their Parents Arms! This is done by no civilized Nation in Europe. Do we come to America to learn and practise the Manners of Barbarians? But this, Barbarians as they are, they practise against their Enemies only, not against their Friends.”
The bulk of the topical articles and ironical letters published in England, under a parade of pseudonyms—A New Englandman, A BRITON, The SPECTATOR, A TRAVELLER, N.N., PACIFICUS SECUNDUS, HOMESPUN, F.B., AMERICANUS, ARATOR, A Friend to both Countries—have rather outworn their complicated occasions. When his sister Jane asked him for a collection of his recent political pieces, Franklin wrote her, “They were most of them written occasionally for transient Purposes, and having done their Business, they die and are forgotten. I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails.” Only when the irony—aimed now from a British persona, now from an American—grows outrageous, do the pieces still throw off sparks, as when whales are alleged to leap up the Niagara Falls in the pursuit of cod (“one of the finest Spectacles in Nature!”) or, in a hoax that was taken seriously in some quarters, the King of Prussia is supposed to be promulgating an edict demanding, since ancient Britain was a kind of German colony, that all British cargoes be unloaded and taxed in Köningsberg, on the analogy of regulations and duties imposed by the Crown upon the American Colonies. As Boston was blockaded and American blood shed, Franklin’s satires became more savage and Swiftian. One of them provides a slogan that Jefferson proposed as a motto for the great seal of the United States: “REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD.”
The reader enters sweeter, less swift-flowing waters in those letters which deal with science, in lessons to Polly Stevenson or in consultation with such learned men as John Pringle, David Hume, Oliver Neave, Thomas Percival, Benjamin Rush, and William Brownrigg. Eighteenth-century science lay in the care of amateurs and permitted a vigorous-minded original like Franklin to roam productively across a wide range of basic phenomena. How and why evaporation cools, how raindrops accumulate, why oil calms water, why a low canal pulls harder than a full one, why rock strata are jumbled, what strange old teeth and tusks signify—such questions are attacked at the level of common sense and everyday life. Franklin describes an experiment in chromatic heat conduction charming in its simplicity, though rigorous and conclusive:
My Experiment was this. I took a number of little Square Pieces of Broad Cloth from a Taylor’s Pattern Card, of various Colours. There were Black, deep Blue, lighter Blue, Green, Purple, Red, Yellow, White, and other Colours or Shades of Colours. I laid them all out upon the Snow in a bright Sunshiny Morning. In a few Hours (I cannot now be exact as to the Time) the Black being warm’d most by the Sun was sunk so low as to be below the Stroke of the Sun’s Rays; the dark Blue almost as low, the lighter Blue not quite so much as the dark, the other Colours less as they were lighter; and the quite White remain’d on the Surface of the Snow, not having entred it at all. What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use? May we not learn from hence, that black Cloaths are not so fit to wear in a hot Sunny Climate or Season as white ones?
With the revelations of microscopy barely dawned upon them, Franklin and his contemporaries groped in the familiar macrocosm. He almost arrived at the germ theory of disease: “I have long been satisfy’d from Observation, that … People often catch Cold from one another when shut up together in small close Rooms, Coaches, &c. and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each others Transpiration, the Disorder being in a certain State. I think too that it is the frowzy corrupt Air from animal Substances, and the perspired Matter from our Bodies, which … obtains that kind of Putridity which infects us.” His Philadelphia experiments with electricity, demonstrating that lightning and static electricity were the same “Fluid” and leading to his invention of the lightning rod, made him celebrated in scientific circles and popularly regarded as something of a wizard, like Swedenborg and Cagliostro. On at least one occasion, Franklin acted the part. At Lord Shelburne’s castle, while a large party was walking outdoors, Franklin volunteered that he could calm the waters quite as easily as Jesus Christ. Meeting general disbelief, he went to a pond that was being rippled in the breeze, raised the staff with which he had been walking, whirled it three times above the water, and signed the air with a magic hieroglyph. In a few minutes, the company was astonished to see, the pond became glassy a
s a mirror. The magician later revealed that his staff was hollow and had been filled with oil. Franklin had become interested in the calming effects of oil upon water while observing a swinging lamp on one of his eight trips across the Atlantic. And he also employed these long crossings to study and describe the Gulf Stream—the first scientist to do so. Worlds lay open to his endless curiosity, and he once wrote to Joseph Priestley, “The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.”
4. The Philadelphia Franklin
Alone and almost penniless, Franklin came to Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. The next day, he had found work, as a journeyman printer, and within six years he and a partner owned their own press and newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. His business, which included a shop that sold stationery, books, quills, ink, slates, parchment, sealing wax, foodstuffs, patent medicines, cloth, stoves, and even slaves and the unexpired terms of indentured servants, prospered to such an extent that in 1748, at the age of forty-two, he felt free to retire and to devote himself to scientific research and civic affairs. Though by 1725 Philadelphia was the second-biggest city in the New World, it seems to have been an institutional wasteland, wherein Franklin founded or was a prime mover in organizing the first self-improvement and mutual-aid society, the Junto (1727), the first subscription library (1731), the first German-language newspaper (1732), the first fire company (1736), the first citizen militia (1747), the Colonies’ first learned society, The American Philosophical Society (1743), the city’s first college, the Philadelphia Academy, which became the University of Pennsylvania (1749), the first hospital (1751), and the first American fire-insurance company (1751). He also proposed and supervised the first plans to sweep and light Philadelphia’s streets, not to mention proclaiming the province’s first fast day, on January 7, 1748. This Philadelphia Franklin, the tireless improver of self and surroundings, is the one most deeply settled in American legend, thanks mostly to himself. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin lists his “firsts,” describes his rise, and contains a detailed prescription, with a handy checklist, for attaining “moral Perfection.” It is this document, along with the repeated admonitions to thrift and prudence in Poor Richard’s Almanacks, that goaded D. H. Lawrence to protest, “I am not a mechanical contrivance,” and to sneer:
The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. Which of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other?
Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He’ll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American.
And yet Franklin’s autobiography is a very unmechanical, elastically insouciant work, full of cheerful contradictions and humorous twists—a fond look back upon an earlier self, giving that intensely ambitious young man the benefit of the older man’s relaxation. He loves his younger self—his strength,‡ his scrapes. He relates amusingly how the young man tried to seduce his friend’s mistress, and how he gave up vegetarianism when confronted with some tasty cod: “When the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.… So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” The Autobiography’s first, and masterly, part was written in the form of a letter to his son William, in two weeks of a summer visit to the English countryside, at Bishop Shipley’s residence in Twyford, when Franklin was sixty-five. It breaks off as the Philadelphia Franklin is founding the subscription library, and was resumed in 1784, in the idyll of Passy, without the earlier section’s being at hand. It then breaks off in a discussion of how to subdue the natural passion of Pride, and was taken up again in 1788, and carried forward into the beginnings of the English mission in 1757, but breaks off a last time, as the by now very aged writer bogs down in the details of futile bygone negotiations. The details of his unheralded arrival in Philadelphia—the weary boy in dirty clothes, the unexpected type and quantity of bread he gets for three pennies, the two excess rolls carried one under each arm, the amused glance from the girl who was to become his wife, the involuntary nap in the Quaker meeting—have passed into American mythology, and have the advantage over Parson Weems’s tale of Washington and the cherry tree of being possibly true. These pages by Franklin, from his Boston departure to his employment by the printer Samuel Kiemer, are a surpassingly vivid window into colonial life:
In crossing the Bay we met with a Squall that tore our rotten Sails to pieces, prevented our getting into the Kill, and drove us upon Long Island. In our Way a drunken Dutchman, who was a Passenger too, fell over board; when he was sinking I reach’d thro’ the Water to his shock Pate & drew him up so that we got him in again.—His Ducking sober’d him a little, & he went to sleep, taking first out of his Pocket a Book which he desir’d I would dry for him. It prov’d to be my old favourite Author Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in Dutch, finely printed on good Paper with copper Cuts, a Dress better than I had ever seen it wear in its own Language.
At a later stage of this long, damp journey, while walking fifty miles across New Jersey, Franklin encounters “an itinerant Doctor,” who “was ingenious, but much of an Unbeliever, & wickedly undertook some Years after to travesty the Bible in doggrel Verse as Cotton had done Virgil.”§ Thus in the space of a few paragraphs the seventeen-year-old pilgrim meets types of drunkenness and unbelief, and has reason to remember the Puritan author who inspires his own progress. As his Philadelphia career evolves, other characters—Kiemer, gluttonous and disorganized; Governor William Keith, who out of empty vanity sends the boy on a fool’s errand to England; James Ralph, who deserts his wife and child and wastes Franklin’s money—serve as bad examples amid whose sinking the young hero, a fine swimmer, can be felt almost physically to be rising, toward Virtue and Happiness.
The close relation between virtue and happiness is his great perception. “I grew convinc’d that Truth, Sincerity & Integrity in Dealings between Man & Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life.” “It was my Design to explain and enforce this Doctrine, that vicious Actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful, the Nature of Man alone consider’d: That it was therefore every ones Interest to be virtuous, who wish’d to be happy even in this World.” And this recognition is not itself enough: “I concluded at length, that the mere speculative Conviction that it was our Interest to be compleatly virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our Slipping, and that the contrary Habits must be broken and good Ones acquired and established.” Hence, the self-conditioning of his list of thirteen virtues and their daily checklist, detested by D. H. Lawrence and touchingly echoed in the journal of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s aspiring bootlegger Jay Gatsby.
Franklin’s criterion of utility works as well the other way: a Deist by fifteen, in rejection of his parents’ strict Presbyterianism, and at nineteen the author of a published dissertation arguing that God sees no evil in the universe and that “since every Action is the Effect of Self-Uneasiness” there can be no distinction between virtue and vice, Franklin at twenty-two (according to Franklin at sixty-five) “began to suspect that this Doctrine [Deism] tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.” Usefulness is all. “What signifies Philosophy that does not apply to some Use?” There is, he wrote in the Gazette, a “SCIENCE OF VIRTUE” that is “of more consequence to [a man’s] Happiness than all the rest put together.” “Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter,” Poor Richard said, and, most famously, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise”—the lack of serial commas emphasizing, perhaps, the interchangeability of health, wealth, and wisdom. Among the assertions of Poor Richard will not be found “Honesty is the best policy”; this saying dates from the sixteenth century a
nd appears in the Apophthegms of Archbishop Whately of Dublin with an unexpected second thought: “Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.”
Those who would find Franklin’s practical morality too hard-hearted and smugly anti-rational should try to imagine the profligate, besozzled, rather murderous New World it was meant to tame. The Library of America reprints a number of news items that Franklin is now believed to have written for The Pennsylvania Gazette: