Young Benjamin Franklin

by Nick Bunker

  23. Franklin as sales agent for the American Magazine: Boston Weekly Newsletter, January 20, 1743.

  24. Franklin to Strahan, January 4, 1747, BFP 3, pp. 107–8; Bartram to Professor Gronovius in Leiden: December 15, 1746, CJB, p. 283; Bartram to Collinson, March 2, 1747, CJB, p. 285. Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Vol. 2, Chapter 11, argues that Franklin began his electrical experiments in the winter of 1745–46, but this cannot be correct because (see note 20) Collinson did not send the tube until April of the latter year.

  25. Franklin to Thomas Darling, February 10, 1747; and Logan to Franklin, February 23, 1747, BFP 3, pp. 110–13. Logan mentions a “printed piece” that Collinson sent him the previous summer referring to electrical experiments made by the French scientist the Comte du Buffon. In fact, Buffon had not yet begun his own electrical work. However, in Paris he had seen the trials by his friend Le Monnier and he had discussed them with Father Needham, who mentioned their conversations in his article of July 1746. And so this article must have been the “printed piece” that Logan had seen.

  EPILOGUE: AN UNEASY SPIRIT

  1. BFP 3, p. 186.

  2. For the eighteenth century’s love of “variety,” the best sourcebook is James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, where time and again he praises Dr. Johnson’s variety of knowledge and conversation: or indeed Johnson’s own essay “Variety Necessary to Happiness,” No. 80 of The Rambler (1750).

  3. Colden admired Plain Truth so much that he lifted whole paragraphs from it and included them in his patriotic “Address to the Freeholders of New York,” published in The New-York Gazette of January 18, 1748. On Colden’s political vision of a unified empire in America with the colonies making common cause in matters of defense and Indian affairs: Paul Tonks, “Empire and Authority in Colonial New York: The Political Thought of Archibald Kennedy and Cadwallader Colden,” in New York History 91, no. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 25–44.

  Sources and Further Reading

  For nearly seventy years after it appeared in 1938, Carl Van Doren’s biography of Franklin led a crowded field as the most attractive single volume account of his adventures. Even now, when Van Doren has found himself displaced from bookstore shelves by Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), his book retains its charm as a rare combination of scholarship, accessibility, and elegant prose. For anyone coming to Franklin for the first time, the best place to begin is with his memoirs in Joyce Chaplin’s annotated Norton edition (2012), followed perhaps by a viewing on video of one of Isaacson’s sparkling lectures about Franklin and then by a reading of his or Van Doren’s book.

  Neither Isaacson nor Van Doren delve as deeply as they might into Franklin’s scientific work, but we have two sound guidebooks to this complicated topic: Joyce Chaplin’s The First Scientific American (2006), and Bernard Cohen’s superb introductory essay to his edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments. Cohen was one of the Harvard University pioneers of the history of science. Although his essay dates back to the early days of that academic discipline (it was published in 1941), Cohen still provides the clearest description of Franklin’s achievements with electricity.

  When readers venture beyond overviews of Franklin’s life and work, they can soon feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of material about him and by a host of differing interpretations of this multifarious human being and his diverse career. On average, in each year of the twenty-first century so far, scholarly journals have published more than thirty articles with “Benjamin Franklin” in the title. New books appear with equally daunting frequency.

  Fortunately, Professor David Waldstreicher has laid a trail through the forest by editing an excellent collection of essays by historians and Franklin scholars—A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2011)—that gives us a composite portrait of the man with the benefit of the best recent research. The book also provides a program for inquiry into questions that remain unanswered about his place in the wider history of the eighteenth century. The first four chapters, by Nian-Sheng Huang, George Boudreau, Sheila Skemp, and Jonathan Dull, contain in eighty pages a concise, chronological analysis of the principal issues at stake in each decade of his life. The remainder of the book comes at Franklin from almost every relevant angle—political, religious, social, economic, and literary—with clear signposts for readers who wish to explore each area more thoroughly.

  Other than those mentioned above, the books about Franklin and his era that I have found most rewarding are as follows. Looming over the landscape like a scholarly sierra we have Leo Lemay’s immense biography, left unfinished at his death in 2008. Three volumes appeared, taking the story as far as Franklin’s departure for London in 1757. Each one is a treasure store of diligent research. As a university professor of English, Lemay lays too heavy a stress on Franklin’s achievements as a writer and journalist, rather than his science, and his account of Franklin’s politics makes the young Franklin sound too much like a New Deal Democrat, more egalitarian than Franklin really was in the 1720s and 1730s. But taken as a whole, Lemay’s book is as important as the vast Yale edition of Franklin’s papers. No biographer can do without them.

  The same is true of Bernard Cohen’s Franklin and Newton from 1956, with its painstaking analysis of the roots of his electrical work. Next on my list come Edmund Morgan, with his extended essay Benjamin Franklin (2002), and Gordon Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, first published in 2004, which helped to shape my ideas about Franklin’s yearning for the status of a gentleman.

  Too many writers about Franklin and his era fall at the first hurdle, by failing to convey any sense of life as it really was in colonial America or Georgian England. This could never be said about Jill Lepore. From 2013, her Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin gives us the Franklins without clichés, nostalgia, or sentimentality, but better still is Professor Lepore’s disturbing book about the early 1740s, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. To help me make my way around the Philadelphia of Franklin’s early manhood, I turned most of all to Gary B. Nash, and especially the opening chapters of his book First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (2002), with its brief but excellent account of artisan culture in the town.

  As a path of entry into Franklin’s world, I can also recommend a book about someone else: Ronald Paulson’s masterpiece Hogarth, especially the first volume, subtitled The Modern Moral Subject, 1697–1732, published in 1992. Anyone who looks at it will soon see why I find in William Hogarth’s life, his pictures, and his obsessions so many parallels with the young Benjamin Franklin’s career and attitudes. Last but most enjoyable, I have to mention Stacy Schiff. Although her A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (2005) deals with a much later epoch in Franklin’s life, it surpasses every other Franklin book (including Van Doren’s) in its literary quality.

  However, on many occasions while working on Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity I have had to operate without modern writers to help me. The decisive moment in my research took place in 2014 at the Guildhall Library in London, England, where I found the apprenticeship records of his father, Josiah. This was entirely unexpected—I was merely looking for a little extra detail about Josiah’s brothers—since hitherto it has always been thought that Josiah Franklin trained as a silk dyer in the English country town of Banbury. My discovery that Josiah actually learned his trade in the capital meant that I felt obliged to check and verify from primary sources every statement about the Franklin family’s origins that I found in earlier biographies or indeed in Franklin’s memoirs.

  Later I spent several days in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the American Antiquarian Society, a wonderfully tranquil haven of scholarship, examining the Commonplace Book of his uncle Benjamin, an item long overdue for publication. While reading it, I formed the view that biographers have tended to
pass over too quickly the environment from which Franklin and his family emerged, all too often making them out to be people who came from almost nowhere. From material in the archives on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially those in Northamptonshire, London, and Pennsylvania, I have tried to redress the balance by putting Franklin firmly back into the context of his time. My endnotes to this book record the sources on which I have drawn.

  Illustration Credits

  IN TEXT

  1(Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of Franklin): Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with a generous grant from The Barra Foundation, Inc., matched by contributions from the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund in memory of Frances P. McIlhenny, the Walter E. Stait Fund, the Fiske Kimball Fund, and with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Jack M. Friedland, Hannah L. and J. Welles Henderson, Mr. and Mrs. E. Newbold Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Mark E. Rubenstein, Mr. and Mrs. John J. F. Sherrerd, The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest, Leslie A. Miller and Richard B. Worley, Mr. and Mrs. John A. Nyheim, Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Fox, Stephanie S. Eglin, an anonymous donor, Mr. and Mrs. William T. Vogt, and with contributions from individual donors to the Fund for Franklin, 1996–162–1

  2Wenceslaus Hollar’s map of London. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  3Josiah Franklin’s freedom record, 1678. The Worshipful Company of Dyers and Guildhall Library (City of London).

  4Broadsheet engraving of the Rye House Plot © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  5Thomas Franklin Jr. as a tax inspector. National Archives, Kew, England.

  6Judge Samuel Sewall, painted by Nathaniel Emmons. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  7John Bonner’s map of Boston. Library of Congress.

  8Cotton Mather, by Peter Pelham. Library of Congress.

  9Philadelphia house on Chesnut and 2nd Streets. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, 2010–212–2.

  10Slate Roof House, Philadelphia. Free Library of Philadelphia/Bridgeman Images.

  11Sir Isaac Newton’s letter. National Archives, Kew, England.

  12Vernon’s tankard. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Sylvester Dering, 1915.

  13William Hogarth’s shop card for his mother and sister. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

  14William Hogarth’s shop card for Mrs. Elizabeth Holt. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

  15The Distressed Poet by William Hogarth. Library of Congress.

  16A page from the Franklin shop accounts: American Philosophical Society.

  17Enthusiasm Displayed. Library of Congress.

  18Edward Marshall’s rifle. From the collection of the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society.

  19James Logan’s Iron Fireback from Stenton. Courtesy of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at Stenton, Philadelphia.

  20German stove plate with David and Goliath. Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection.

  21Early example of a Franklin fireplace. From the collection of the Mercer Museum of the Bucks County Historical Society.

  COLOR INSERT

  1Great Map of Ecton, 1703. Map 2115, © Northamptonshire Record Office, England.

  2Bartholomew Close. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  3The Oxford Arms, Warwick Lane. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  4Seventeenth-century houses. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  5Sardinian Embassy, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  6Don Saltero’s Coffee House, Chelsea. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

  7Peter Cooper’s panorama of Philadelphia. Library Company of Philadelphia.

  8From William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  9From Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  10James Logan, by Gustavus Hesselius. Courtesy of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.

  11Andrew Hamilton, by Adolf Ulrick Wertmüller. Courtesy of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.

  12William Allen, by Robert Feke. Courtesy of Independence National Historical Park.

  13Cadwallader Colden, by John Wollaston. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Grace Wilkes, 1932.

  14Deborah Read Franklin, by Benjamin Wilson. American Philosophical Society.

  15Benjamin Franklin, by Robert Feke. Harvard University Portrait Collection, bequest of Dr. John Collins Warren, 1856; and photograph by Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NICK BUNKER is the author of Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World and An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, the latter of which won the 2015 George Washington Prize. In the same year, An Empire on the Edge was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, he worked as a reporter for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, where he was one of the writers of the Lex Column. After leaving journalism, he was a stockbroker and investment banker, principally for the HongKong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. For many years he served on the board of the Freud Museum, based in the house in Hampstead, London, where Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Nick Bunker now lives with his wife, Susan, and their otterhound, Champion Teckelgarth Mercury, in Lincolnshire, England.

  From 1703, the estate map of Ecton, Northamptonshire, the English home of the Franklin family. With the parish church and manor house at the center, and the River Nene flowing along the bottom, the map shows the medieval pattern of fields divided into strips, with somewhere among them the land held by the Franklins.

  A twenty-first-century view from south to north across the Nene valley, with Ecton’s Georgian manor house just visible among trees on the hillside toward the right. At bottom left, the stone farmhouse is a survival from the 1600s.

  Close to the porch of St. Mary Magdalene, Ecton, the graves—marked with crosses against the headstones—of Thomas Franklin Jr. and his wife, Eleanor, Benjamin Franklin’s uncle and aunt. Benjamin visited the graves in 1758.

  An image of London as Franklin saw it in the 1720s, a wooden house from the seventeenth century in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, where he worked as a printer for Samuel Palmer. The picture was taken in about 1870, before developers and German air raids swept away the buildings Franklin knew.

  On arriving in London late in 1724, Franklin’s friend James Ralph tried to get work from the bookseller John Roberts in Warwick Lane, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. This photograph from 1875 shows the ancient coaching inn, the Oxford Arms, that stood in the street.

  What Franklin saw out the windows of Palmer’s printing shop at the church of St. Bartholomew the Great. Taken in 1908, the picture shows timber-framed houses from the 1600s—since demolished—facing the north side of the church.

  In 1726, this was the Sardinian embassy in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. The covered passageway—through which Franklin would have passed many times—led to Duke Street, where he lodged in Mrs. Holt’s Italian warehouse opposite the embassy’s Catholic Chapel. This picture was taken in 1882. All the buildings in the picture were pulled down in the early 1900s.

  With barrels outside, Don Saltero’s coffeehouse at 18 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, visited by Franklin in 1726, from a watercolor of about 1800. The house is still standing, greatly altered.


  Peter Cooper’s panoramic painting of Philadelphia from the Delaware River in about 1720, making an interesting comparison with the nineteenth-century photographs of buildings from the era in Chapter Eight. The Library Company of Philadelphia

  The milliner or seamstress Moll Hackabout arriving in London, a scene from William Hogarth’s narrative cycle The Harlot’s Progress (1731−2). As discussed in Chapter Ten, the subject matter of Hogarth’s work from this period has close affinities with the themes of Franklin’s autobiography.

  Another Franklinesque scene, from Hogarth’s cycle Industry and Idleness, with the two apprentices at their looms: one working hard, the other dozing. The two Bible texts beneath are very Franklinian: “The drunkard shall come to poverty” and “The hand of the diligent maketh rich.”

  Franklin’s friend and intellectual mentor, the Pennsylvania lawyer and agent for the Penn family, James Logan (1674−1751), painted about 1740 by Gustavus Hesselius.