Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (5 page)

The print trade was a natural calling for Franklin. “From a child I was fond of reading,” he recalled, “and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.” Indeed, books were the most important formative influence in his life, and he was lucky to grow up in Boston, where libraries had been carefully nurtured since the
Arabella
brought fifty volumes along with the town’s first settlers in1630. By the time Franklin was born, Cotton Mather had built a private library of almost three thousand volumes rich in classical and scientific as well as theological works. This appreciation of books was one of the traits shared by the Puritanism of Mather and the Enlightenment of Locke, worlds that would combine in the character of Benjamin Franklin.
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Less than a mile from Mather’s library was the small bookshelf of Josiah Franklin. Though certainly modest, it was still notable that an uneducated chandler would have one at all. Fifty years later, Franklin could still recall its titles: Plutarch’s
Lives
(“which I read abundantly”), Daniel Defoe’s
An Essay upon Projects,
Cotton Mather’s
Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good,
and an assortment of “books in polemic divinity.”

Once he began working in his brother’s print shop, Franklin was able to sneak books from the apprentices who worked for booksellers, as long as he returned the volumes clean. “Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.”

Franklin’s favorite books were about voyages, spiritual as well as terrestrial, and the most notable of these was about both: John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress,
the saga of the tenacious quest by a man named Christian to reach the Celestial City, which was published in 1678 and quickly became popular among Puritans and other dissenters. As important as its religious message, at least for Franklin, was the refreshingly clean and sparse prose style it offered in an age when writing had become clotted by the richness of the Restoration. “Honest John was the first that I know of,” Franklin correctly noted, “who mixed narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader.”

A central theme of Bunyan’s book—and of the passage from Puritanism to Enlightenment, and of Franklin’s life—was contained in its title:
progress,
the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian’s famous opening phrase sets the tone: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world…” Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and communities, to triumph over obstacles.

Likewise, another Franklin favorite—and one must pause to marvel at a 12-year-old with such tastes in leisure pursuits—was Plutarch’s
Lives,
which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch’s heroes, like Bunyan’s Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of humanity. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

This outlook clashed with some of the tenets of Calvinism, such as the essential depravity of man and the predestination of his soul, which Franklin would eventually abandon as he edged his way closer to the less daunting deism that became the creed of choice during the Enlightenment. Yet, there were many aspects of Puritanism that made a lasting impression, most notably the practical, sociable, community-oriented aspects of that religion.

These were expressed eloquently in a work that Franklin often cited as a key influence:
Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good,
one of the few gentle tracts of the more than four hundred written by Cotton Mather. “If I have been,” Franklin wrote to Cotton Mather’s son almost seventy years later, “a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.” Franklin’s first pen name, Silence Dogood, paid homage both to the book and to a famous sermon by Mather, “Silentiarius: The Silent Sufferer.”

Mather’s tract called on members of the community to form voluntary associations to benefit society, and he personally founded a neighborhood improvement group, known as Associated Families, which Benjamin’s father joined. He also urged the creation of Young Men Associated clubs and of Reforming Societies for the Suppression of Disorders, which would seek to improve local laws, provide charity for the poor, and encourage religious behavior.
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Mather’s ideas were influenced by Daniel Defoe’s
An Essay upon Projects,
which was another favorite book of Franklin’s. Published in 1697, it proposed for London many of the sort of community projects that Franklin would later launch in Philadelphia: fire insurance associations, voluntary seamen’s societies to create pensions, schemes to provide welfare for the elderly and widows, academies to educate the children of the middle class, and (with just a touch of Defoe humor) institutions to house the mentally retarded paid for by a tax on authors because they happened to get a greater share of intelligence at birth just as the retarded happened to get less.
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Among Defoe’s most progressive notions was that it was “barbarous” and “inhumane” to deny women equal education and rights, and
An Essay upon Projects
contains a diatribe against such sexism. Around that time, Franklin and “another bookish lad” named John Collins began engaging each other in debates as an intellectual sport. Their first topic was the education of women, with Collins opposing it. “I took the contrary side,” Franklin recalled, not totally out of conviction but “perhaps a little for dispute sake.”

As a result of his mock debates with Collins, Franklin began to tailor for himself a persona that was less contentious and confrontational, which made him seem endearing and charming as he grew older—or, to a small but vocal cadre of enemies, manipulative and conniving. Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.” Later in his life he would wryly say of disputing: “Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.”

Instead, after stumbling across some rhetoric books that extolled Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.” Although he later abandoned the more annoying aspects of a Socratic approach, he continued to favor gentle indirection rather than confrontation in making his arguments.
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Part of his debate with Collins over the education of women was waged by exchanging letters, and his father happened to read them. Though Josiah did not take sides in the dispute (he achieved his own semblance of fairness by providing little formal education to any of his children of either sex), he did criticize his son for his weak and unpersuasive writing style. In reaction, the precocious young teen devised for himself a self-improvement course with the help of a volume of
The Spectator
that he found.

The Spectator,
a London daily that flourished in 1711–12, featured deft essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele probing the vanities and values of contemporary life. The outlook was humanistic and enlightened, yet light. As Addison put it, “I shall endeavor to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality.”

As part of his self-improvement course, Franklin read the essays, took brief notes, and laid them aside for a few days. Then he tried to recreate the essay in his own words, after which he compared his composition to the original. Sometimes he would jumble up the notes he took, so that he would have to figure out on his own the best order to build the essay’s argument.

He turned some of the essays into poetry, which helped him (so he thought) expand his vocabulary by forcing him to search for words that had similar meanings but different rhythms and sounds. These, too, he turned back into essays after a few days, comparing them to see where he had diverged from the original. When he found his own version wanting, he would correct it. “But I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”
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More than making himself merely “tolerable” as a writer, he became the most popular writer in colonial America. His self-taught style, as befitting a protégé of Addison and Steele, featured a fun and conversational prose that was lacking in poetic flourish but powerful in its directness.

Thus was born Silence Dogood. James Franklin’s
Courant,
which was modeled on
The Spectator,
featured sassy pseudonymous essays, and his print shop attracted a congregation of clever young contributors who liked to hang around and praise each other’s prose. Benjamin was eager to become part of the crowd, but he knew that James, already jealous of his upstart young brother, was unlikely to encourage him. “Hearing their conversations, and their accounts of the approbation their papers were received with, I was excited to try my hand among them.”

So one night, Franklin, disguising his handwriting, wrote an essay and slipped it under the printing house door. The cadre of Couranteers who gathered the next day lauded the anonymous submission, and Franklin had the “exquisite pleasure” of listening as they decided to feature it on the front page of the issue out the next Monday, April 2, 1722.

The literary character Franklin invented was a triumph of imagination. Silence Dogood was a slightly prudish widowed woman from a rural area, created by a spunky unmarried Boston teenager who had never spent a night outside of the city. Despite the uneven quality of the essays, Franklin’s ability to speak convincingly as a woman was remarkable, and it showed both his creativity and his appreciation for the female mind.

The echoes of Addison are apparent from the outset. In Addison’s first
Spectator
essay, he wrote, “I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure ’til he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.” Franklin likewise began by justifying an autobiographical introduction from his fictitious narrator: “It is observed, that the generality of people, nowadays, are unwilling either to commend or dis-praise what they read, until they are in some measure informed who or what the author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a scholar or a leather apron man.”

One reason the Silence Dogood essays are so historically notable is that they were among the first examples of what would become a quintessential American genre of humor: the wry, homespun mix of folksy tales and pointed observations that was perfected by such Franklin descendants as Mark Twain and Will Rogers. For example, in the second of the essays, Silence Dogood tells how the minister to whom she was apprenticed decided to make her his wife: “Having made several unsuccessful fruitless attempts on the more topping sort of our sex, and being tired with making troublesome journeys and visits to no purpose, he began unexpectedly to cast a loving eye upon me…There is certainly scarce any part of a man’s life in which he appears more silly and ridiculous than when he makes his first onset in courtship.”

Franklin’s portrayal of Mrs. Dogood exhibits a literary dexterity that was quite subtle for a 16-year-old boy. “I could easily be persuaded to marry again,” he had her declare. “I am courteous and affable, good humored (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.” The flick of the word “sometimes” is particularly deft. In describing her beliefs and biases, Franklin had Mrs. Dogood assert an attitude that would, with his encouragement, become part of the emerging American character: “I am…a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly. I have likewise a natural inclination to observe and reprove the faults of others, at which I have an excellent faculty.” It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin—and, indeed, of a typical American—as is likely to be found anywhere.
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Of the fourteen Dogood essays that Franklin wrote between April and October 1722, the one that stands out both as journalism and self-revelation is his attack on the college he never got to attend. Most of the classmates he had bested at Boston Latin had just entered Harvard, and Franklin could not refrain from lampooning them and their institution. The form he used was an allegorical narrative cast as a dream. In doing so, he drew on, and perhaps was mildly parodying, Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress,
also an allegorical journey set as a dream. Addison had used the form somewhat clumsily in an issue of
The Spectator
that Franklin read, which recounted the dream of a banker about an allegorical virgin named Public Credit.
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