Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Although Franklin would continue to study the effect of oil on water seriously, he also found ways to have fun by turning it into a conjuring trick. “After this, I contrived to take with me, whenever I went into the country, a little oil in the upper hollow joint of my bamboo cane,” he wrote. On a visit to the house of Lord Shelburne, he was walking by a stream with a group of friends, including the great actor David Garrick and the visiting French philosopher the Abbé Morellet, and told them he could still the waves. He walked upstream, waved his cane three times, and the surface of the stream calmed. Only later did he show off his cane and explain the magic.1

  His tour of midland and north England in the company of two fellow scientists gave Franklin the chance to study the Industrial Revolution that was booming there. He visited an iron and tin factory in Rotherham, the metal casting shops of Birmingham, and a silk mill in Derby where 63,700 reels were turning constantly “and the twist process is tended by children of about 5 to 7 years old.” In Manchester, he “embarked in a luxurious horse-drawn boat” owned by the Duke of Bridgewater that, befitting the peer’s name, took him onto an aqueduct that crossed a river before ending in a coal mine. Near Leeds they called on the scientist Joseph Priestley, “who made some very pretty electrical experiments” for them and then described the various gases he had been discovering.

  Franklin had denounced England’s mercantile trading laws, which were designed to suppress manufacturing in her colonies, by arguing (a bit disingenuously) that she would never have to fear that America would become an industrial competitor. In his letters from his tour in 1771, however, he sent detailed advice about creating silk, clothing, and metal industries that would make the colonies self-sufficient. He had become “more and more convinced,” he wrote his Massachusetts friend Thomas Cushing, of the “impossibility” that England would be able to keep up with America’s growing demand for clothing. “Necessity therefore, as well as prudence, will soon induce us to seek resources in our own industry.”

  Franklin returned to London briefly in early June “in time to be at Court for the King’s birthday,” he wrote Deborah. Despite his disagreements with Parliament’s taxation policies, he was still a loyal supporter of George III. “While we are declining the usurped authority of Parliament,” he wrote Cushing that week, “I wish to see a steady dutiful attachment to the King and his family maintained among us.”2

  After a fortnight in London, Franklin headed to the south of England, where he visited his friend Jonathan Shipley at his Tudor manor in Twyford, just outside Winchester. Shipley was an Anglican bishop in Wales, but he spent most of his time in Twyford with his wife and five spirited daughters. It was such a delightful visit (Franklin might well have defined delight as an intellectually stimulating country house filled with five spirited young women) that he lamented that he had to leave after a week to attend to the correspondence that had been piling up in London. In his thank-you note to the Shipleys, which included a present of dried apples from America, Franklin complained that he had to “breathe with reluctance the smoke of London” and said he hoped to get back to the “sweet air of Twyford” for a longer visit later that summer.3

  The Autobiography

  Franklin, at 65, had begun to think about family matters more. He felt affection for all of his kin, despite the fact—or perhaps, as he himself speculated, because of the fact—that he continued to live far away from them. In a long letter to his sole surviving sibling, Jane Mecom, that summer, he praised her for getting along well with her Philadelphia in-laws and, in a telling passage, reflected on how much easier it was for relatives to remain friendly from afar. “Our father, who was a very wise man, used to say nothing was more common than for those who loved one another at a distance to find many causes of dislike when they came together.” A good example, he noted, was the relationship their father had with his brother Benjamin. “Though I was a child I still remember how affectionate their correspondence was” while Benjamin remained in England. But when Uncle Benjamin moved to Boston, they began to engage in “disputes and misunderstandings.”

  Franklin also wrote Jane about Sally Franklin, a 16-year-old who had joined his surrogate family on Craven Street. Sally was the only child of a second cousin who had continued the Franklin family’s textile dyeing business in Leicestershire. Accompanying the letter was a detailed family tree showing how they were all descendants of Thomas Franklin of Ecton and noting that Sally was the last in England to bear the family name.

  His interest in family was further piqued when he happened to visit one of his favorite used-book shops in London. The dealer showed him a collection of old political pamphlets that were filled with annotations. Franklin was amazed to discover that they had belonged to his Uncle Benjamin. “I suppose he parted with them when he left England,” Franklin wrote in a letter to another cousin. He promptly bought them.4

  So, in late July, when he was finally free to return to Twyford for a longer stay with the Shipleys, he was in a reflective mood. His career was at an impasse, and the history of his family was on his mind. Thus, the stage was set for the first installment of the most enduring of his literary efforts, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

  “Dear son,” he began, casting his account as a letter to William, whom he had not seen for seven years. The epistolary guise gave him the opportunity to be chatty and casual in his prose. He pretended, at least initially, that this was merely a personal communication rather than a work of literature. “I used to write more methodically,” he said in a paragraph he inserted into the text after rereading some of the rambling genealogical digressions he had composed on the first day. “But one does not dress for private company as for a public ball.”

  Was the autobiography really just for the private company of his son? No. It was clear from the outset that Franklin was writing for public consumption as well. The family information that would most interest his son was omitted completely: the identity and description of William’s own mother. Nor did Franklin write the letter on regular stationery; instead, he used the left half of large folio sheets, leaving the right half blank for revisions and additions.

  At the beginning of his second day of writing, he stopped to make an outline of his entire career, showing his intention to construct a full memoir. Also, that second morning, he used the blank right-hand columns of his first pages to insert a long section justifying the “vanity” of his decision to “indulge the inclination so natural in old men to be talking of themselves.” His goal, he declared, was to describe how he rose from obscurity to prominence and to provide some useful hints about how he succeeded, expressing hope that others might find them suitable to be imitated.

  This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey. There was, however, a subtext directed at him: William had taken on airs since becoming a governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father. The autobiography would be a reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.

  For almost three weeks, Franklin wrote by day and then read aloud portions to the Shipleys in the evening. Because the work was cast as a letter, and because it was read aloud, Franklin’s prose took on the voice of a lovable old raconteur. Lacking in literary flair, with nary a metaphor nor poetic flourish, the narrative flowed as a string of wry anecdotes and instructive lessons. Occasionally, when he found himself writing with too much pride about an event, he would revise it by adding a self-deprecating comment or ironic aside, just as would a good after-dinner storyteller.

  The result was one of Franklin’s most delightful literary creations: the portrait he painted of his younger self. The novelist John Updike has memorably called it an “elastically insouciant work, full of cheerful contradictions and humorous twists—a fond look back upon an earlier self, g
iving an intensely ambitious young man the benefit of the older man’s relaxation.”

  With a mix of wry detachment and amused self-awareness, Franklin was able to keep his creation at a bit of a distance, to be modestly revealing but never deeply so. Amid all the enlightening anecdotes, he included few intimations of inner torment, no struggles of the soul or reflections of the deeper spirit. More pregnant than profound, his recollections provide a cheerful look at a simple approach to life that only hints at the deeper meanings he found in serving his fellow man and thus his God. What he wrote had little pretension other than pretending to poke fun at all pretensions. It was the work of a gregarious man who loved to recount stories, turn them into down-home parables that could lead to a better life, and delve into the shallows of simple lessons.

  To some, this simplicity is its failing. The great literary critic Charles Angoff declares that “it is lacking in almost everything necessary to a really great work of belles lettres: grace of expression, charm of personality, and intellectual flight.” But surely it is unfair to say that it lacks charm of personality, and as the historian Henry Steele Commager points out, its “artless simplicity, lucidity, homely idiom, freshness and humor have commended it anew to each generation of readers.” Indeed, read with an unjaundiced eye, it is a pure delight as well as an archetype of homespun American literature. And it was destined to become, through hundreds of editions published in almost every language, the world’s most popular autobiography.

  In this age of instant memoirs, it is important to note that Franklin was producing something relatively new for his time. St. Augustine’s Confessions had mainly been about his religious conversion, and Rousseau’s Confessions had not yet been published. “There had been almost no famous autobiographies before Franklin, and he had no models,” writes Carl Van Doren. That is not entirely true. Among those who had already published some form of autobiography were Benvenuto Cellini, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Bishop Gilbert Burnet. But Van Doren is correct when he says that Franklin “wrote for a middle class which had few historians. His book was the first masterpiece of autobiography by a self-made man.” The closest model that he had, in terms of narrative style, was one of his favorite books, John Bunyan’s allegorical dream, A Pilgrim’s Progress. But Franklin’s was the story of a very real pilgrim, albeit a lapsed one, in a very real world.

  By the time he had to leave Twyford in mid-August, he had finished the first of four installments in what would later become known as the Autobiography. It took him through his years as a young printer engaged in civic endeavors and ended with the founding of the Philadelphia library and its offshoots in 1731. Only in his last lines did he let a note of politics creep in. “These libraries,” he noted, “have made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.” It would be thirteen years before, at the urging of friends, he would pick up that part of the tale.5

  Always eager to create a family wherever he could find one, Franklin took the Shipley’s youngest daughter, Kitty, 11, under his wing and brought her in his coach back to London, where she was going to school. Along the way, they chatted about the type of man each of the Shipley daughters would marry. Kitty felt all of her sisters deserved a very rich merchant or aristocrat. As for herself, Kitty coquettishly allowed, “I like an old man, indeed I do, and somehow or another all the old men take to me.” Perhaps she should marry a younger man, Franklin suggested, “and let him grow old upon your hands, because you’ll like him better and better every year as he grows older.” Kitty replied that she would prefer to marry someone already older, “and then you know I may be a rich young widow.”

  Another lifelong flirtation was born. He had his wife send over a squirrel from Philadelphia as a pet for all the Shipley girls. When the creature met an untimely end a year later in the jaws of a dog, Franklin composed a flowery epitaph and then added a simpler one that would become famous: “Here Skugg/Lies snug/As a bug/In a rug.” His affection for Kitty would be immortalized fifteen years later when Franklin, then 80, wrote for her a little essay on “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams.”

  On his last evening at Twyford, the Shipleys had insisted on throwing a birthday party, in absentia, for his Philadelphia grandson, 2-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache. “That he may be as good as his grandfather,” Mrs. Shipley said in her toast. Franklin responded that he hoped that Benny would, in fact, turn out much better. To which Bishop Shipley added, “We will compound the matter and be contented if he should not prove quite so good.”6

  The odd thing about all this affection for Benny was that Franklin had never met him, nor showed much of an inclination to do so. He had not even met the boy’s father. But at that moment, Richard Bache was arriving in England on a mission to find his famous father-in-law. Bache appeared unannounced on Craven Street, where Mrs. Stevenson joyously greeted him. Franklin, however, had already departed, after little more than a week in London, for another extended vacation.

  Ireland and Scotland

  Traveling with Richard Jackson, Pennsylvania’s other agent in England, Franklin left in late August 1771 for three months in Ireland and Scotland, hoping to see if the relationship those countries were trying to forge within the British Empire might serve as a model for America. There were some promising signs. When they visited the Irish Parliament, Jackson was accorded the right to sit in the chamber because he was a member of England’s Parliament. On seeing the famous Franklin, the Speaker proposed that, because he represented American legislatures, he should be accorded such a privilege as well. “The whole House gave a loud, unanimous Aye,” Franklin reported to Cushing. “I esteemed it a mark of respect for our country.”

  On the other hand, much of what he saw in Ireland distressed him. England severely regulated Irish trade, and absentee English landlords exploited Irish tenant farmers. “They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes,” he noted. His shock at the disparity between rich and poor made him all the more proud that America was building a vibrant middle class. The strength of America, he wrote, was its proud freeholders and tradesmen, who had the right to vote on public affairs and ample opportunity to feed and clothe their families.7

  While in Dublin, Franklin happened to run into his nemesis, Lord Hillsborough, whose family estate was in northern Ireland. Surprisingly, Hillsborough insisted that he and Jackson stop by on their way to Scotland. Franklin was conflicted. “As it might afford an opportunity of saying something on American affairs,” he wrote one friend, “I concluded to comply with his invitation.” But he subsequently wrote his son that he had “determined not to go.” As it turned out, Jackson insisted on going, and Franklin could not find another coach so had to follow along.

  It was an astonishingly friendly visit. At Hillsborough’s house, Franklin was “detained by a thousand civilities” for almost a week. The minister “seemed attentive to everything that might make my stay in his house agreeable.” That even included “putting his own cloak about my shoulders when I went out, that I might not take cold.”

  In discussing Ireland’s poverty, Hillsborough blamed it on England for restraining manufacturing there. Wasn’t the same true, Franklin asked, about England’s policy toward America? To Franklin’s pleasure, Hillsborough responded that “America ought not to be restrained in manufacturing.” He even suggested a subsidy for American silk industries and winemaking. He would be pleased to hear Franklin’s “opinion and advice” on that, as well as on how to form a government for Newfoundland. Would Franklin consider these issues and when he returned to London “favor him with my sentiments?”

  “Does not all this seem extraordinary to you?” he wrote his son. In a letter to Thomas Cushing, he suggested there might be a more cynical explanation. Hillsborough’s behavior might be “meant only, by patting and stroking the horse, to
make him more patient when the reins are drawn tighter and the spurs set deeper into his sides.” Or, perhaps “he apprehended an approaching storm and was desirous of lessening beforehand the number of enemies he had so imprudently created.”8

  Franklin arrived, through storms and floods, in Edinburgh late on a Saturday and spent one night “lodged miserably” at an inn. “But that excellent Christian, David Hume, agreeable to the precepts of the gospel, has received the stranger and I now live with him,” Franklin reported the next day. His old friend Hume had built a new house, and he took pride that the sheep’s head soup made by his cook was the best in Europe. The talk at the table was also enviable: philosophy (Hume had recently befriended Rousseau in Paris), history, and the plight of the American colonies.

  After ten days, Franklin traveled west toward Glasgow to see Lord Kames, his other favorite Scottish philosopher. Kames was also a great botanist who cultivated arbors of diverse trees; the ones Franklin planted on his visit are alive today. On his way back to Edinburgh, Franklin stopped at the Carron iron works, where James Watt was developing the steam engine, so that he could continue his study of industrialization. Among the ordnance they saw being cast, some of which would be used against the colonies in a few years, were cannons that weighed up to thirty-two tons.

  Back at Hume’s house in Edinburgh, Franklin spent another few days enjoying the intellectual circle there. He met with Adam Smith, who reportedly showed him some early chapters of the Wealth of Nations that he was then writing. Perhaps suspecting that they would never see their American friend again, Hume hosted a farewell dinner that included a variety of Franklin’s favorite Scottish academics and writers, including Lord Kames.9