Book of Ages (36 page)
Authors: Jill Lepore
Anthony Stickney wanted Franklin to help educate his son,
Benjamin Franklin Stickney. To this end, he not only wrote to Franklin but also, no doubt after hearing that Jane had visited his aunt, traveled from New Hampshire to
Boston to plead his case to her in person.
He was not well received. Jane took a dim view of the idea that just because Stickney had named the boy “Benjamin Franklin” her brother owed him an
education.
“I tould him if you were to take such Notice of all who had been named In Respect to you,” she dryly reported, “you must build an Academy for there Reception.” And not only that, she told him, but, “that I had a Grate-Grandson Prehaps would clame Admitance when it was well Established.”
10
They wrote and wrote. Her brother asked her to make him some more crown soap. “I wish it to be of the greenish Sort that is close and solid and hard like the Specimen I send; and not that which is white & curdled and crumbly.”
11
She rode to Rhode Island, to Caty’s house, and boiled up sixty pounds of soap. Jonathan Williams Jr., who had served as an agent for the American commissioners in France, came to watch her work. (Williams had replaced his father as a kind of guardian of Jane’s affairs. “How has my poor old Sister gone thro’ the Winter?” Franklin asked him. “Tell me frankly whether she lives comfortably or is pinched? For I am afraid she is too cautious of acquainting me with all her Difficulties tho’ I am always ready and willing to relieve her when I am acquainted with them.”)
12
To the soap boiling, Williams brought a pen and paper. He wanted to learn the family recipe. “I have gone through the Operation of making the soap and by taking Notes throughout the whole, I have a tolerable Idea of both Theory and Practice,” he reported to Franklin, who had once again lost the recipe. “Aunt Mecom will soon send you the Recipe, and the soap is ready to be sent to you by the first Vessel.”
13
Jane had stopped calling it crown soap. The people who, she thought, had stolen the name had ruined it (“dirty Stinking Stuff,” she called it). “The Crown Soap now vended among us,” she said, “is as contemptible as the British Head that now wears won.” She didn’t have a crown stamp anymore, anyway, but she wouldn’t use it if she did. If she were to stamp her soap, she had a better idea than to stamp it with a British crown. “It would be cleaver,” she thought, to stamp it with a stamp of “thirteen Stars.”
14
American soap.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The Petition of the LetterJ
H
e wrote her on the first day of January 1786: “Our good God has brought us old Folks, the last Survivors of 17 Brothers & Sisters, to the Beginning of a new Year.”
1
She wrote back on January 6, his eightieth birthday. She wanted more to read. “I have two favours to Ask of you,” she begged. “Your New
Alphabet of the English Language, and the Petition of the Letter Z.”
2
Franklin had written “The Petition of the Letter Z,” a satire, in 1778; it had been published in the
Tatler
in 1779. In it, the letter
Z,
distressed at being the last letter in the alphabet, complains, “That he is not only plac’d at the Tail of the Alphabet, when he had as much Right as any other to be at the Head; but is, by the Injustice of his Enemies totally excluded from the Word WISE, and his Place injuriously filled by a little, hissing, crooked, serpentine, venomous Letter called S.” The letter
Z
’s petition is denied, however, the judges urging “that Z be admonished to be content with his Station, forbear Reflections upon his Brother Letters, & remember his own small Usefulness, and the little Occasion there is for him in the Republick of Letters, since S, whom he so despises, can so well serve instead of him.”
3
“The Petition of Z is enclos’d,” Franklin replied. “My new Alphabet is in a printed Book of my Pieces, which I will send you the first Opportunity I have.”
4
In April, he sent her the Vaughan edition of his collected writings,
Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces,
a book she had wanted for a very long time. It contains the essay she was after, which is called “A Scheme for a New Alphabet and Reformed Mode of
Spelling.”
5
Franklin had written it in 1768. He had been making a study of phonetics.
The English language, as he argued, is a poor fit with a Greek-derived alphabet; some letters, like
c,
have more than one sound, and some sounds, like
sh,
require more than one letter. “If we go on as we have done a few Centuries longer,” Franklin warned, “our words will gradually cease to express sounds.” Franklin, like many another tinkerer both before and after him, offered a solution whereby there might be a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. He proposed deleting the letters
c, w, y,
and
j
and adding six new letters. He explained:
Az to oz hu du nt spel uel, if i tu difikltiz er kmpêrd, at v titi em tru speli in i prezent mod, and at v titi em i nu alfabet and i nu speli akrdi to it; i am knfident at i latr uuld bi bi far i liist. ê natrali fl into i nu med alredi, az mt az i imperfekn v er alfabet uil admit v; êr prezent bad speli iz onli bad, bikz kntreri to i prezent bad ruls: ndr i nu ruls it uuld bi gud. i difiklti v lrni to spel uel in i old uê iz so grêt, at fiu atên it; uzands and uzands riti n to old ed, uiut ever bii ebil to akuir it.
That is to say:
As to those who do not spell well, if the two difficulties are compared, that of teaching them true spelling in the present mode, and that of teaching them the new alphabet and the new spelling according to it; I am confident that the latter would be by far the least. They naturally fall into the new method already, as much as the imperfection of their alphabet will admit of; Their present bad spelling is only bad, because contrary to the present bad rules; under the new rules it would be good. The difficulty of learning to spell well in the old way is so great, that few attain it; thousands and thousands writing on to old age, without ever being able to acquire it.
6
Nothing had come of Franklin’s new scheme for spelling.
7
But when, in the spring of 1786, Jane read about it, she attempted to learn it. “My Daughter & I sat down to Study the Alphabet,” she wrote her brother, “Imagining we should soon Larn it so as to write you in that way.” She gave it a great deal of thought. “I sopose you meen to have the writing and Printing as near alike as Posable.” She found it hard to write but easy to read: “It must be a more Acute Pen than mine that can Imitate it, I however
could Read it Perfectly.”
8
The difficulty of learning to spell well in the old way is so great, that few attain it; thousands and thousands writing on to old age, without ever being able to acquire it.
Jane found this a relief, “Since I am but won of the Thousands, & thousands, that write on to old Age and cant Learn.” She would not accept, though, that this meant that she was worthless. “I know the most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some Use of in the Scale of Beings, may Touch some Spring, or Verge to some wheel unpercived by us.”
9
“You need not be concern’d in writing to me about your bad Spelling,” Franklin wrote back, “for in my Opinion as our Alphabet now Stands, the bad Spelling, or what is call’d so, is generally the best, as conforming to the Sound of the Letters and of the Words.” And then he told her a story:
A Gentleman receiving a Letter in which were these Words, Not finding Brown at hom, I delivered your Meseg to his yf. The Gentleman finding it bad Spelling, and therefore not very intelligible, call’d his Lady to help him read it. Between them they pick’d out the meaning of all but the yf, which they could not understand. The Lady propos’d calling her Chambermaid; for Betty, says she, has the best Knack at reading bad Spelling of any one I know. Betty came, and was surpriz’d that neither Sir nor Madam could tell what y, f was; why, says she, y, f spells Wife, what else can it spell? And indeed it is a much better as well as shorter method of Spelling Wife, than by Doubleyou, I ef, e, which in reality Spells, Doubleyifey.
10
Jane loved that. “I think Sir & madam were deficient in Sagasity that they could not find out y f as well as Bety,” she wrote back. “Some times,” she ventured, “the Betys has the Brightst understanding.”
11
In January 1786, Jane’s twenty-five-year-old grandson, Josiah Flagg, wrote to Benjamin Franklin—whom he had never met—seeking assistance. “My mother was Sally Mecom Daughter of Mrs Jane Mecom of Boston, and Niece to your Excellency,” he began, by way of introduction. His mother having died when he was three, Josiah had then lived in Jane’s house. Reduced to a state of “unhappy Lameness” by a fall before the age of five, he had been taken from his grandmother’s house when his father remarried.
When Jane fled
Boston in 1775, she had been unable to find the boy. The ailing William Flagg had not survived the occupation; not long after the
Battle of Bunker Hill, he was poisoned by a
British Army surgeon. Josiah Flagg once wrote about what happened next: “I was left a helpless orphan at the age of fourteen, and during the whole of the Revolution suffered very much.”
12
He probably ended up in the
almshouse; from there, he was bound into service as an apprentice to a shoemaker, the lowliest of the trades. Since the end of the war, he had been working as a cobbler in Boston. But he had pretensions to gentility; he wanted to climb his way up the trades, and then out. He went to Lancaster, a farming town north of Worcester, where his father’s family came from.
13
In November 1785 he had left
Massachusetts to seek his fortune in Virginia.
“Dear Coz,” he wrote to his cousin Jenny Mecom from Virginia. “This is the most dirty place I ever saw.” He found the place melancholy and slavery grotesque: “The Virginians as a people are given to Luxury and Dissipation of every kind, and are supported in their Extravagance by Afric’s sable sons, who they consign to the most Abject Slavery.”
14
Josiah Flagg was bright and ambitious and, for a self-taught man, a fine writer. (“I endeavour to behave as well as my slender Education and Knowledge of the World will admit,” he wrote his “Dear Grandma.”) From Virginia, Flagg wrote to Benjamin Franklin, expressing a hope that his granduncle might help find him a position as a clerk.
15
“Loving Kinsman,” Franklin wrote back. “If you should call here in your Way, I will give you some Writing to do for me.”
16
When Jane found out, from Jonathan Williams Jr. (to whom she was still trying to teach the art of making soap), that her grandson had gone knocking on her brother’s door, she was mortified.
17
Flagg was as bad as Stickney. “Cousen Jonathan has Just now Informed me that my Grandson Josiah Flagg has Aplied to you to Put him in to Busness,” Jane wrote to her brother. “Tho he is my Grandson & I wish him well settled to somthing he can git his Liveing by I am Angry with him for his Audacity in writing to you on such an Acount.” She had sympathy for him: “He is a Poor unfortunate youth.” But she didn’t like the way he put on airs, accusing him of having “too Proud a Spirit to conform to the occupation he was Taught” and refusing to recommend him: “What his capasety is for Any other I am not qualified to Inform you.” She was, uncharacteristically, uncharitable:
“Tho I am his Grandmother, he has been at so Grat a Distance from me Ever since the war commencd, but in ansure to all my Inquiries I have allways heard he behaved Honestly & uprightly & he has Apeared so when he has been to see me but has had so few advantages that it must be the highest Impropriety in him to Adres you on such an ocation.”
18
Flagg wheedled himself into his grandmother’s good graces when he wrote to her using Franklin’s new mode of spelling. “Anyrd Grandma,” he began, thanking her for her “tu letrys.”
19
But Jane was vexed that he hadn’t written to her before imposing himself on Franklin (“I think it was Disrespectfull in him to me not to ask my advice,” she wrote her brother).
20
And Flagg made matters worse when, in a letter asking Jane to use her “Influence with him in a Recommendation of me,” he begged her not to tell Franklin that he had been a shoemaker. She found this “Ridiculous Vanety.” Instead of complying, she forwarded Flagg’s letter to Franklin, “wherein you will see the man as he is, & I can Add nothing to it as it contains all I beleve about him.”
21