by Nick Bunker
In London Sir Robert’s influence was everywhere. To forestall any plots by the Jacobites, Walpole ran agents in every part of the city; and he kept an especially close eye on the corner of the capital where Franklin and Ralph rented a little apartment. They found their lodgings in a street called Little Britain, an obvious choice for two young men of letters. For more than a century, this neighborhood had been a home for bookstores, publishers, and printers. It was also politically suspect, lying within a city ward called Farringdon Without, a buzzing hive of radicals and Jacobites and Tories. As one of the area’s booksellers put it at the time, he and his rivals were “taken for little better than a pack of knaves and atheists.” The district Franklin chose could also be a brutal place, where dreams might be shattered and innocence corrupted.22
Chapter Ten
LITTLE BRITAIN
Sixty years earlier, when the Great Fire reduced so much of London to ashes, the blaze died down on the northern edge of the city just before it reached Little Britain. At one end of the street there stood the ancient church of St. Botolph. The flames licked up against the walls, and left them scorched, but the church, its steeple, and the area beyond it survived. In the 1720s the houses remained as they had been long ago. Built of wood and plaster, decked out with Tudor carvings of animals and birds, they rose to as many as five floors, shutting out the light from a labyrinth of courtyards and alleys.
At the heart of the maze, Franklin and Ralph took rooms in a tenement known as the Golden Fan, with behind it the graveyard of St. Botolph’s. Until the eve of World War I, some of the oldest houses hereabouts were still intact. Photographs were taken that show us the streets as Franklin knew them. They had curious names, relics of the past: Cloth Fair, Duck Lane, and Pelican Court. The district was a blend of the sordid and the subtle, an assault on the senses and the intellect. From his reading, Franklin had an inkling of what he might discover; but nothing on a printed page could entirely prepare him for what he found.1
By 1724, London had no fewer than nineteen newspapers, and five of them were published from Little Britain. This street and Duck Lane were lined with bookstores, used books at one end, and new at the other. In the previous century, this had been “a perpetual emporium of learned authors,” one book lover recalled, but now it was gradually losing its cachet. The better sort of booksellers had begun to leave, in search of more elegant premises beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral, with its dome rising over the rooftops. They were keen to escape the squalor that surrounded Little Britain.2
A few minutes’ walk away, the streets were foul with the stench of Smithfield, the cattle market—a “shameful place,” in the words of Charles Dickens, who knew the area well, “all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam.” Between the holding pens and the Golden Fan there lay the sprawling premises of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Each year six thousand of the maimed and sick and indigent passed through its doors. Next to the hospital there stood some old cloisters, ever more ruinous as each year went by.
Although their fate was sealed—the cloisters were knocked down in 1730, when the hospital began a great rebuilding—in the meantime they were rented out to shopkeepers, milliners especially. The cloisters had an evil reputation as the haunt of card-sharpers and whores. With inns and taverns on all sides, alcohol was everywhere, just as it was in America. The difference was that here they wrecked the brain or the liver with a spirit flavored with juniper, rather than with rum. In 1725, campaigners for temperance counted more than six thousand locations in London where gin was sold.3
When he set foot in Little Britain, Franklin entered the city of the artist William Hogarth. His painterly fables of ruin and sin bear a close resemblance to the stories of drink and failure that Franklin gives us in his memoirs. It was here, between Smithfield and Little Britain, that Hogarth began his observations of high life and low life, here that he first saw harlots, thieves, and apprentices, clergymen and hypocrites, and people degraded by gin. Born only nine years before Franklin, Hogarth spent his childhood in the area: until the fearful day when his father was slung into prison for debt.
Released from jail, Mr. Hogarth took William and the rest of the family back to Smithfield, where they lived in an old wooden house in Long Lane, close to the cloisters and the cattle pens. When Franklin arrived in London, the widow Hogarth was still there, a few hundred yards from the Golden Fan. She and the painter’s sister were among the milliners who sold their wares from the stalls around the hospital.4
Because we mostly remember Franklin for the achievements of his later years, after the Boston Tea Party and Bunker Hill, it is all too easy to forget that he grew up in a very different era. He was already an adult long before the birth of the rest of America’s founding fathers. Franklin came to maturity in the 1720s, in a world very different from the one that belonged to Washington or Jefferson, men born to rural privilege whose take on life could never be quite the same as his. In his youth in London, Franklin’s world was William Hogarth’s world. They inhabited a city where the penalty for error was annihilation, on the streets, in the paupers’ hospital, or in the debtors’ prison.
Engraved by William Hogarth in the 1720s, this shop card advertises the millinery business owned by his mother and sister in Smithfield, a short walk from Franklin’s lodgings.
Much later, when Franklin returned to England in 1757, the two men became directly acquainted, but Franklin had known Hogarth’s work long before that. In 1739 he imported some of Hogarth’s engravings for sale in his store in Philadelphia. The two men had a vast amount in common, not only in the circumstances of their lives but also in the themes that animated their work. Both were apprentices who never finished their indentures, but struck out on their own. Both Franklin and Hogarth were highly skeptical about orthodox Christian belief. Indeed they both became Freemasons, taking the masonic Craft as an alternative ethical creed. They read and admired the same books—the philosopher Shaftesbury, Daniel Defoe, and The Spectator—and came away with a fund of motifs and ideas that shaped the way they saw the world around them.
Hogarth and Franklin were people who reached the heights of success but never forgot just how easy it was to fail. Uncle Benjamin, the strumpets on the boat down from Newport, John Collins, James Ralph, and even Mr. Denham: these were characters who might have stepped out of one of Hogarth’s narrative cycles. Among the stories Hogarth told in each of his series of paintings and engravings, the most relevant are those in his cycle Industry and Idleness, from 1747. Here William Hogarth shows us the parallel lives of two very different apprentices. One of them works and prays hard, goes to church, marries the boss’s daughter, and rises to be London’s lord mayor. The other apprentice runs away to sea, takes to a life of crime, and meets his death swinging on a noose at Tyburn. In telling this story and so many others, Hogarth gives us parables resembling those in Franklin’s autobiography, where Franklin is so industrious, while John Collins plays the part of the idle youth who disappeared.
Readers have sometimes found Franklin insufferably smug, as he describes his brilliant career. And yet beneath the surface of Franklin’s narrative there lies an undercurrent of anxiety, the same fear of ruin and of destitution that we find in Hogarth and later in Dickens. Perhaps it flows from Franklin’s memory that he had made mistakes—dipping into Vernon’s money, for one—and that he had escaped disaster only by the skin of his teeth. If he too had run away to be a sailor, as he yearned to do, Franklin’s life might also have ended in catastrophe, like the idle apprentice or his brother Josiah, lost at sea. This was something Franklin always remembered: that although he had been industrious, he might so easily have done the other thing.
For all his achievements, Franklin never succumbed to complacency. Like Hogarth, in whose pictures the people who rise to the top of the pile are viewed ironically, shown up as hypocrites or mocked for their vanity, Franklin knew that what the world means by “success” is often j
ust another kind of failure. If he wished to rise in the world, it was not because he wanted to be a bloated official like Hogarth’s lord mayor. That was never Franklin’s aim. Of course he aspired—like James Franklin with the Courant—to be “ingenious.” But more than that, he intended to be an ingenious gentleman, with the leisure to practice his ingenuity for the good of society as well as his own enjoyment.
In the London of Hogarth, Franklin encountered incidents far more extreme than anything he might have witnessed in America. A crime wave had engulfed the capital; and just five weeks before Franklin arrived, its most notorious incident occurred within a half mile of his lodgings. Newgate Prison was the place where the warders had the keeping of a burglar, Jack Sheppard, who had been condemned to death. Three times Jack Sheppard broke out of his cell, taking refuge in the slums of Smithfield, until at last they hanged him like Hogarth’s idle apprentice. Beneath the gallows Defoe stood by with his notebook, the diligent reporter waiting to take down Jack’s final words. As the young Franklin came ashore in London, the press were running advertisements for ballads, books, and a musical that dramatized the Sheppard story.
It was also a city steeped in politics. That winter Sir Robert Walpole was tightening his grip on London by taking a new law through Parliament, the City Elections Act, intended to rig the ballots by striking thousands of voters off the rolls: a measure aimed at troublesome wards like Farringdon Without, where at election time the Tories could count on as many as one thousand supporters. In Little Britain and elsewhere, the act aroused a storm of protest that supplied the backdrop for everything Franklin saw as he found his feet in the metropolis. Almost everyone in London whom Franklin mentions in his memoirs had some kind of political allegiance or agenda, even if—at first meeting—their party ties were often far from obvious.5
He would spend eighteen months in the empire’s capital before sailing home to Philadelphia in the middle of 1726. In his autobiography, Franklin gives this brief phase of his life more than ten printed pages of narrative, almost as much as he allocates to the entire decade after 1730. London served as his substitute for Harvard, giving him an education of a kind that college professors could not have supplied. Of course he saw plays and read books—Franklin tells us that in his autobiography—but what he remembered best of all from London was the people he met: some of whom opened up new vistas of imagination, while others revealed the nastier side of human nature. His schooling in the ways of the city began with the destruction of a dream.
AN ILLUSION LOST
As the London Hope entered the English Channel, the skipper had kept his promise to Franklin. He opened the mailbag and showed the young man what he took to be the governor’s letters, including—he presumed—Sir William’s letter of credit in his favor. None of them had his name on the outside, but Franklin picked out six or seven that looked as though they came from Keith. Using his initiative, Franklin set out to deliver them, in the expectation that they included the letters he was promised. One of the envelopes came addressed to John Baskett, the king’s official printer, with whom the governor had business dealings. Baskett owned the rights to English editions of laws made by the colonial assemblies. And so when the ship reached the city on Christmas Eve, Franklin made for Baskett’s premises, in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
On the way, he stopped at a stationer’s shop to drop off another of the letters. To Franklin’s dismay, the owner had never heard of Governor Keith. But he did know the name of someone else: William Van Haes Dunk Riddlesden, alias William Cornwallis, crooked attorney, thief, and bigamist, wanted for trying to pass dud banknotes in France. In Maryland, where Riddlesden had left a trail of disaster behind him, that year the assembly had passed a special Riddlesden act, branding him “a person of matchless character in infamy.” Franklin knew him as the fraudster who had cheated poor John Read of the little money he possessed.6
On the letter he was given, the stationer recognized Riddlesden’s handwriting. “A complete rascal!” he exclaimed. He thrust the paper back in Franklin’s hand, and turned away to serve a customer, leaving the young man aghast and—we must assume—deeply embarrassed. “The famous Mr Riddlesden,” as newspaper readers knew him in London, was by now so notorious that when he was in Newgate his case was dealt with by Walpole’s closest aides. Nobody, least of all Franklin, who was still two weeks’ shy of his nineteenth birthday, would wish to be associated with such a villain.
And of course the episode raised a large question mark over Sir William Keith. How had Riddlesden’s letter come to be in the mailbag? And where was the letter of credit that Sir William had promised, made out in Franklin’s name? If he had gone on to see John Baskett, he would have discovered that Keith owed money to the printer, who was about to pursue the governor through the law courts of Pennsylvania. It was all such a mystery; and so the bewildered Franklin hurried off in search of advice from his new mentor, Thomas Denham, who had also just landed from the London Hope.
The Quaker merchant told his young friend the truth about Sir William, his unreliability, and his very shaky finances. Denham laughed at the notion that Franklin could obtain a letter of credit from a governor so deep in debt that he had no credit to give. They studied Riddlesden’s letter—what happened to the other five or six is something Franklin does not tell us in his autobiography—and there they found something still more distressing. It seemed that Riddlesden and Governor Keith were working together, hatching a devious plot against Andrew Hamilton. It was all so very complicated, but Denham gave the young man some excellent advice. At this point, Hamilton was still in America waiting for the next ship to London, the Samuel. She would not set sail from New York until ten days after Christmas. But if and when Hamilton arrived, they would tell him everything: that was Denham’s suggestion. It turned out to be very fruitful. In the meantime Franklin should find a job. He should learn the finer points of the printing trade of London, and then set up in business at home.7
Which Franklin agreed to do. But this left another question hanging in the air: what was to be done about James Ralph? While Franklin had some money, fifteen Spanish doubloons, Ralph was broke. Although he had a sister and some other relatives in London, they were poor and could not help him. To cap it all, Ralph suddenly revealed that his plans had changed again. Far from modeling himself on Mr. Denham, making business connections and then sailing home to his wife and child in Philadelphia, he planned to remain in London and become a poet: or perhaps an actor.
With a chutzpah that even Franklin could not surpass, James Ralph headed straight for the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. There he applied for a place in His Majesty’s Company of Comedians, led by the actor-manager Robert Wilks, a Dublin man. Ralph could not have chosen a worse moment or a more skeptical impresario. Wilks had been the promoter of the musical about Jack Sheppard, complete with a song from Jack’s paramour, Frisky Moll. But the show had been a fiasco, hissed off the stage on opening night. Wilks was a kindly old fellow but he could not be doing with amateurs, especially at a time like this. The Irishman told James Ralph that he had no future on the stage.8
So the poet thought of something else. In a fine location near St. Paul’s there lived John Roberts, a theatrical publisher, whose list of plays included the Sheppard musical. Ralph went to see him with another idea: he would write a weekly paper, in the style of The Spectator, and Roberts would be its proprietor. It was not so hapless a notion as it might seem, because in time Ralph became an excellent critic of drama and painting. But again the answer was in the negative. Snubbed by John Roberts, he went down to the legal district, the Temple, in search of a vacancy for a copy clerk. Once more he asked in vain.
And so the feckless poet had to follow the example of John Collins, and borrow from Benjamin Franklin. Ralph “seemed quite to forget his wife and child,” Franklin wrote, “and I by degrees my engagement with Miss Read, to whom I never wrote more than one letter, and that was
to let her know I was not likely soon to return.” This was one of the errors he would recall with grief in his autobiography; but, as Franklin also pointed out, how could he have found the cash to buy a ticket home? Their rent in Little Britain came to three shillings and sixpence a week, and he and Ralph loved to go to plays.
The cheapest seat at Drury Lane cost one shilling, and so—what with books to buy, appearances to be kept up, and Ralph incapable of earning a penny—Franklin’s cash disappeared as swiftly as sand through the neck of an hourglass. From America, he had brought with him a small curiosity, a purse made from colonial asbestos, which could amuse an audience by failing to burn when thrown into a fire: but while it might be worth some money in London, it would not be very much. And all the while he was still in debt to the silversmith from Newport, Mr. Vernon. But Rhode Island was a long way off; and besides, Franklin came up trumps when he went looking for a job of his own.
Forty years earlier, his uncle Benjamin had worked with the very best London dyers of silk, adept in the latest techniques. Now Franklin could do something similar in the printing trade. It was a demanding business, requiring a rare combination of physical strength, a knowledge of words, a nimble hand, and an aptitude for focus on the job in front of you. Here in London he could develop these talents to the full.
A REGULAR PRINTER
Around the corner from the hospital, there stood the church where Hogarth was baptized. Somehow it escaped the wrath of Adolf Hitler, whose bombs laid waste the streets around it; and so the church still stands today, St. Bartholomew the Great, complete with the font and the Lady Chapel at its eastern end. It was here that Franklin found a job, with a master printer who used the Lady Chapel as his workshop.
