by Jim Bernhard
Franklin’s physician, Dr. John Jones, gave this account of his last days to the Pennsylvania Gazette:
About sixteen days before his death, he was seized with a feverish indisposition, without any particular symptoms attending it until the third or fourth day, when he complained of a pain in his left breast, which increased until it became extremely acute, attended with a cough and laborious breathing. In this frame of body and mind he continued till five days before his death, when his pain and difficulty breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of a recovery, when an imposthumation [abscess], which had formed itself in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a great quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had sufficient strength to do it, but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed—a calm lethargic state succeeded—and on the 17th instant, about 11 o’clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months.
After the abscess burst, Franklin’s daughter suggested shifting his position in bed to breathe more easily. “A dying man can do nothing easily,” said Franklin, in what are regarded as his last words.
Approximately twenty thousand people attended his funeral, including the clergy of nearly every religious group in Philadelphia. He was interred in the Anglican Christ Church burial ground.
When he was only twenty-two and immersed in the publishing business, Franklin wrote an epitaph for himself:
The body of B. Franklin printer; like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and stript of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost: for it will, as he believed, appear once more, in a new & more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.
Franklin’s actual grave, however, as he specified in his will, is a plain marble slab, six feet long and four feet wide, with the simple inscription: “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.”
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Although Samuel Johnson was afflicted with lifelong poor health from the day of his birth, he knew, as he later said, it does a man “no good to whine.” Dr. Johnson, as he is usually known thanks to his biographer, James Boswell, was born September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, the son of an impecunious bookseller. As an infant, Samuel suffered from scrofula, an infection of the lymph nodes that causes chronic swelling in the neck. An unsuccessful operation left him with permanent scars on his face, neck, and body.
He attended Lichfield Grammar School, where he excelled in Latin, and then, owing to a small inheritance, was able to enroll in Pembroke College, Oxford. By this time Johnson had developed what is now known as Tourette syndrome, causing him to have lifelong nervous tics. He also suffered from depression and poor eyesight, especially in his left eye—as well as severe hypochondria (with more cause than most). His money soon ran out, and he was forced to leave university without a degree, but years later was awarded honorary doctorates from Oxford University and Trinity College in Dublin.
He taught school for a while, then wound up in Birmingham, where he eked out a living as a writer. When he was twenty-five, he married a widow, Elizabeth Porter, who was twenty years his senior and had a comfortable income. After trying unsuccessfully to operate a boarding school (one of his few pupils was the future actor David Garrick), Johnson made his way to London and found steady work on The Gentleman’s Magazine.
He continued to scramble for a living, writing a series of essays known as The Rambler and a play called Irene. These labors were generally ill-paid, and no doubt inspired his famous comment, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” He hoped to make some with his Dictionary of the English Language, on which he had been working for nine years. Published in 1755, it remained for 150 years the standard English lexicon.
His other major works include a mythical fable called Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; an edition of Shakespeare’s plays; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; and The Lives of the Poets. Johnson’s wife died in 1752, when he was forty-two.
At the age of fifty-two, Johnson began receiving an annual stipend of £300 from King George III, which eased his constant financial struggles. Along with several of his impecunious friends, he lived for more than fifteen years in comfortable rooms over a brewery owned by a friend, Henry Thrale, whose wife nursed Johnson through his various ailments. They included frequent gout, testicular cancer, chronic pulmonary fibrosis, hypertension, coronary disease, constant depression that he feared was a symptom of madness, and what Boswell described as “horrible melancholia, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery.”
Through it all, Johnson remained a devout, conservative Anglican in his religious beliefs. In answer to a question from Boswell about how death should be approached, Johnson said, “It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time. A man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.”
Despite his faith, Johnson was worried about his soul’s ultimate fate. He told a friend: “No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension. His hope of salvation must be founded on the terms on which it is promised that the mediation of our Saviour shall be applied to us, namely, obedience; and where obedience has failed, then repentance. But no man can be sure that his obedience and repentance will obtain salvation.”
Johnson suffered a stroke on June 17, 1783, which caused him to lose his ability to speak for a few days. He then underwent surgery for his gout and was confined to his room for four months. Defiant of his illness, Johnson vowed to fight it: “I will be conquered; I will not capitulate!” But his health continued to go downhill during the next year, and by early December of 1784, he was near death. His physician, Thomas Warren, asked him if he felt any better. “No, sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance toward death.”
A number of friends, including the novelist Fanny Burney, visited him in his final days. One who sat with him during his last night said, “No man could appear more collected, more devout, or less terrified at the thoughts of the approaching minute.” On the afternoon of December 13, 1784, Johnson fell into a coma and died at seven o’clock that evening, at the age of seventy-five.
Johnson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey created a controversy among his friends. Although he was buried near Shakespeare and his old pupil Garrick, he was not accorded the honor of a cathedral service—an omission that his friends thought disrespectful—and, to make matters worse, Johnson’s old friend, the Reverend John Taylor, who conducted the simple burial rites, was accused of doing so in an “unfeeling manner.” Johnson’s executor, Sir Joshua Reynolds, explained that a grander funeral, with lights and music, would have been too expensive.
THOMAS PAINE
Thomas Paine, whose radical pamphlet Common Sense was a catalyst for the American Revolution, was a johnny-come-lately to the colonies, arriving on the very eve of hostilities in late 1774. Before that, he led a varied life, which began with his birth in Thetford, Norfolk, England, January 29, 1737, to a Quaker corset-maker father and an Anglican mother. He was apprenticed to his father for a time, then broke loose to set up his own shop as a stay-maker. He married a young woman named Mary Lambert, who died with their newborn in childbirth.
Paine tackled other jobs in various English locales, including customs officer, schoolteacher, and tobacconist. He was married again, to his landlord’s daughter, Elizabeth Ollive, from whom he separated four years later. Armed with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in England, Paine emigrated to America.
In Philadelphia, the versatile Paine became editor of Pennsylvania Magazine, and also worked as a designer and inventor, executing plans for a bridge, a smokeless candle, and a steam engine. He penned a pamphlet, Common Sense, issued in 1776 and endorsing revolt against the British. One of the most famous docume
nts in American history, it brewed controversy from the outset; even some revolutionaries thought the views expressed in Common Sense were far from sensible. John Adams called it a “poor, ignorant, malicious, shortsighted, crapulous mass.” Undeterred, Paine followed this with The American Crisis—famous for the line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Feeling insufficiently appreciated after the Revolution, Paine nagged the state of New York to reward him for his services to the new nation, and the state grudgingly granted him a farm near New Rochelle.
Thereafter, Paine regarded himself as a revolutionary missionary to the world. First he went back to England, where his agitation resulted in his expulsion. Then he fled to France and became active in the French Revolution, issuing a new manifesto called The Rights of Man. Unfortunately, he aligned himself with the wrong camp, incurring the wrath of Maximilien Robespierre, who imprisoned him for several months. Paine believed George Washington had conspired in causing his incarceration, and he wrote scurrilous attacks on the American leader while seeking solace in frequent and generous doses of brandy. In 1794, Paine issued The Age of Reason, a free-thinking attack on religion.
Unpopular in Europe, he returned to the United States, but there he was reviled for his views and largely ignored by the public that had once adulated him. He lived in a succession of seedy rooming houses, and continued to write and to drink more heavily.
For all his anti-religious views, Paine was not an atheist. Although he castigated churches as “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,” he also wrote in The Age of Reason:“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” Although he never called himself a Deist, his views were similar to those held by other Deists, like his friend Franklin.
The circumstances of Paine’s death, on June 8, 1809, in the home of a longtime friend, Marguerite de Bonneville, in New York’s Greenwich Village, are still marked by controversy. He had been ill for some time, possibly from alcoholism, and certainly from the effects of a stroke he had suffered in 1806, tumbling down a flight of twenty stairs and temporarily losing the ability to speak or use his hands. He also suffered from some sort of palsy, which may have been Parkinson’s disease. He was bedridden for several weeks before his death, coughing blood and plagued by bedsores that wore his flesh away.
During his final days, Paine had numerous visitors urging him to embrace Christianity, each of whom conveyed his own version of Paine’s state of mind. A Methodist minister warned Paine that unless he repented, he would be eternally damned. Paine, weak with illness, rose in his bed and ordered the clergyman to leave the room. Another cleric asked Paine if he wished to believe that Jesus was the son of God. Paine’s reply was, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.”
A Catholic priest, Joseph Fenwick (later Bishop of Boston), was asked by Paine to visit him on his sickbed. Fenwick recalled:
We found him just getting out of his slumber. A more wretched being in appearance I never beheld. He was lying in a bed besmeared with filth; his look was that of a man greatly tortured in mind; his eyes haggard, his countenance forbidding, and his whole appearance that of one whose better days had been one continued scene of debauch. His only nourishment at this time was milk punch. He had partaken recently of it, as the sides and corners of his mouth exhibited traces of it, as well as of blood, which had also followed in the track and left its mark on the pillow. Immediately upon making known the object of our visit, Paine interrupted by saying: “That’s enough, sir; that’s enough, I see what you would be about. I wish to hear no more from you, sir. My mind is made up on that subject. I look upon the whole of the Christian scheme to be a tissue of absurdities and lies, and Jesus Christ to be nothing more than a cunning knave and impostor. Away with you and your God, too; leave the room instantly; all that you have uttered are lies—filthy lies; and if I had a little more time I would prove it, as I did about your impostor, Jesus Christ.”
Other sources reported Paine’s last words as an echo of the Biblical David’s Psalm: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” A friend recounted: “On the eighth of June, 1809, about nine in the morning, he placidly, and almost without a struggle, died, as he had lived, a Deist.” Paine was seventy-two.
Some accounts maintain that Paine died in a drunken delirium, anguished by torment and fear. Others claim that he repented and had a deathbed conversion to Christianity. But most evidence suggests that he held on to his anti-ecclesiastical principles to the very end.
Only seven people attended his funeral, and he was refused burial in a Quaker cemetery, as he had wished, so he was laid to rest at his farm in New Rochelle. His obituary in the New York Citizen said, “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.”
Ten years later, the radical journalist William Cobbett dug up Paine’s earthly remains and brought them to England, intending to rebury them beneath a memorial monument. Cobbett died, however, before the monument could be built, and the bag of Paine’s moldy bones disappeared.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Now best known for his lofty tragic play retelling the German legend of Faust, but renowned in his lifetime for a novel about a love-smitten suicide, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began his long life on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, now part of Germany. His family was well-to-do, and young Johann received lessons in riding, fencing, and dancing, as well as a privately tutored education in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, English, French, and Italian.
He studied law, but felt drawn to theatre and poetry. At age twenty, he suffered a serious year-long illness, which was probably a stubborn urinary infection, before going to Strasbourg for further legal study. He then opened a small—and unsuccessful—legal practice. When he was only twenty-five, and heartbroken by an unhappy romance, he published a blockbuster novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a young man heartbroken by an unhappy romance—but who, instead of writing a novel, shoots himself. A bestseller throughout Europe, it caused a number of copycat suicides and brought Goethe worldwide notoriety, allowing him to give up the practice of law. He was invited to Weimar by his patron, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and he made his home there for the rest of his life, managing the court theatre and continuing to write plays and poetry, as well as scientific treatises on botany, anatomy, and color theory.
When he was thirty-nine, Goethe began an eighteen-year affair with a young woman named Christiane Vulpius, with whom he had several children (only one of whom survived to adulthood), and whom he finally married in 1806. In 1808, he published Part I of Faust, which he continued to revise throughout his lifetime. Part II was finished in 1832, the year he died, and published posthumously.
Raised a Lutheran, Goethe as a young man described his faith as “not anti-Christian, nor un-Christian, but most certainly non-Christian.” His religious beliefs later in life were hard to pin down. Friedrich Nietszche characterized Goethe’s creed as “a joyous and trusting fatalism” that has “faith that only in its totality does all redeem and affirm itself.” At various times, Goethe identified with pantheism, humanism, and various esoteric mystical medieval philosophies. He sometimes spoke in veiled abstractions, as when he said, “Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.”
Despite intermittent ailments, especially urinary infections, gout, and intestinal disorders, for which he received continuing treatment, Goethe lived to the ripe old age of eighty-two. The cause of his death has been variously attributed to a heart attack, cholera, or, most likely, a chest cold that developed into pneumonia. Theatre historian Alfred Bates provides this account:
On Friday, March 16th, 1832, Goethe awoke with a chill, from which he gradually recovered, and was so much better by Monday that he designed to begin hi
s regular work on the following day. But in the middle of the night he woke up with a deathly coldness, which extended from his hands over his body, and which it took many hours to overcome. It then appeared that the lungs were attacked and that there was no possible hope of recovery. Goethe did not anticipate death. He sat fully clothed in his arm-chair, spoke confidently of his recovery, and of the walks he would take in the fine April days. On the morning of the 22nd his strength gradually left him, and he sat slumbering in his arm-chair, holding his daughter-in-law Ottilie’s hand. His last words were an order to a servant to open another shutter to let in more light. After this he traced with his forefinger letters in the air. At half-past eleven in the forenoon he drew himself, without any sign of pain, into the left corner of his arm-chair, and went so peacefully to sleep that it was long before the watchers knew that his spirit was fled.
Goethe was buried in the ducal vault at Weimar’s Historical Cemetery, next to the remains of his friend and colleague, the author Friedrich Schiller.
The Romantic Era
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The fountainhead of English Romanticism—a poetic movement that included Coleridge, Southey, Keats, Shelley, and Byron—William Wordsworth sowed a few radical wild oats when he was young, but settled into a more mundane regimen in his middle years. He was born April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumbria, in the Lake District of England. Orphaned with his four siblings at an early age, young William attended Hawkshead Grammar School and then won a position at St. John’s College in Cambridge, where he had a lackluster career and graduated without honors. He journeyed to France, where he became caught up in the spirit of the Revolution, and began a brief love affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter named Caroline.
