Book of Ages (22 page)

I have had some children that seemed to be doing well till they were taken off by Death
. It may be that, at the height of the Enlightenment, the children and grandchildren of Benjamin Franklin’s sister sickened, wasted, and died—and maybe even lost their minds—because they lived in darkness.

CHAPTER XX

I
n 1758, settled
in Boston, Benjamin Mecom had the idea to start a
magazine.
¹
He called it the
New-England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure
. It was, he explained, his stab at “undermining the Interests of Ignorance, Vice and Folly; and of attempting to substitute in their Stead,—Learning, Piety, and good Sense.”
²

Magazines were new. The
Gentleman’s Magazine—
the first periodical called a “magazine”—appeared in London in 1731. It offered “a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces.”
³
The metaphor is to weapons. A magazine is, literally, an arsenal; a piece is a firearm. A magazine is an arsenal of knowledge. It is also a library, dissected: bits of this book and bits of that. A magazine is a library—knowledge—cut into bits, so that more people can use it. Magazines, then, contained the great and soaring promise of the age: knowledge for all.

“No Man or Woman is obliged to learn and know every Thing,” Benjamin Mecom wrote. “Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to
improve their own Understanding,
otherwise it will be like a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown with Weeds and Brambles.”
⁴
He meant his magazine for every reader. What he needed was writers: “ANY
Writers
who may incline to publish their Sentiments in this Magazine, are desired to send their Papers (Postage paid) under a Cover directed to
Benjamin Mecom,
Printer, at the
New
Printing-Office in Boston.” He chose, for its motto,
E Pluribus Unum
.
⁵

Unfortunately, writers were hard to come by. With no class of hacks—no equivalent of London’s Grub Street—nearly everything printed in
American magazines was a reprint. Mecom filled his magazine with Addisonian puffery, cribbing material from Swift, Hume, Bacon, and Pope and, above all, from his uncle, including “
Advice to a Young Tradesman.” In the magazine’s inaugural issue, Mecom even printed, a little desperately, the epitaph Benjamin Franklin had written for Josiah and Abiah Franklin’s
gravestone.
⁶

If writers were hard to come by, nearly as hard were readers. No magazine started in the colonies lasted for long. In 1741, Benjamin Franklin had launched what he’d expected would be the very first American magazine, the
General Magazine,
but his rival
Andrew Bradford got out his own magazine three days before the first issue of Franklin’s appeared, and with a better name, too. Bradford’s was called the
American Magazine
. Neither publication finished out the year.
⁷
In 1757,
James Parker had proposed a “New
American
Magazine,” promising that its first issue would contain “A new and complete History of the
Northern Continent of America,
from the Time of its first Discovery to the present: Compiled with that Impartiality and Regard to Truth, which becomes a faithful Historian.” Mecom sold Parker’s magazine in Boston, but the
New American Magazine
didn’t last
three years.
⁸
“The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of Magazine,”
Noah Webster would one day write in his own
American Magazine
—which went the way of many another American magazine within the year.
⁹

Mecom’s
New-England Magazine
appeared while Parker’s
New American Magazine
was still running. The colonies could barely support one magazine, let alone two. Still, Mecom aimed, by being various, to please many. “
Kind Reader,
—Pray, what would you have me do,” he wrote, “If, out of Twenty, I should please but Two?”
¹⁰
He promised that his magazine would contain

Too many refused. The
New-England Magazine
folded after just three issues.

By 1761, Mecom’s shop was growing. He advertised for a journeyman.
¹²
He sold a good number of imported books, advertising his stock as “very cheap indeed, Wholesale and Retail.”
¹³
Still, he was forever missing his mark. On the strength of a loan from his aunt Deborah Franklin, he printed thirty thousand copies of
The New England Psalter,
then priced them too low to make a profit.
¹⁴

Unable to repay the debt he owed his aunt, he named a daughter after her instead, writing to her, “If our Daughter proves as worthy a woman, we shall be contented.” (He named all of his daughters after Franklin women: Sarah, Deborah, Abiah, and Jane.) “Debby is put out to a reputable Nurse at Charlestown,” he reported to his aunt. “Betsy is weak yet, but has no Milk, & parted with her Child with great Regret.”
¹⁵

Mecom wrote polite and witty and kindhearted and affable letters. He was charming. He was also terribly odd. He wore a powdered wig and ruffles, even when operating his press. This was so very strange that the
printers in Boston gave him a nickname: they called him, after one of his columns, Queer Notions.
¹⁶

Queer Notions kept printing: sermons; psalters; almanacs; a parable titled
The Prodigal Daughter;
John Perkins’s disquisition on storms at sea; James Otis Jr.’s essay on Latin prosody; a collection of Franklin’s best writings, called
The Beauties of Poor Richard’s Almanack;
and an edition of
Advice to a Young Tradesman.
¹⁷
Much of what her son printed, Jane must have read, including his magazine (though she spelled the word “magizeen”).
¹⁸
And he would surely have given her a copy of any of his uncle’s books that he printed, books that would have been special to her: written by her brother, printed by her son. Jane’s copy of his
printing of
The Interest of Great Britain Considered
she inscribed, so that the half-title page bore all three of their names.
¹⁹
Written by
Benjamin Franklin. Printed by Benjamin Mecom. Read by Jane Franklin Mecom.

While Benjamin Mecom lived near his mother in Boston, William Franklin lived with his father
in London, where he acquired a fascination with royalty. He attended the coronation of George III. He acquired, too, a bastard son, William Temple Franklin (known as Temple), whom he abandoned. (It was Benjamin Franklin who paid for the boy’s keep and his education.) Then he acquired a wife, Elizabeth Downes, not the mother of his child but the very wealthy daughter of a Barbadian plantation owner. And he acquired a sinecure: the king appointed him governor of New Jersey.

“I have no doubt but that he will make as good a Governor as Husband,” Benjamin Franklin wrote his sister.
²⁰

Benjamin Franklin returned to America in November 1762. The following summer, he planned a visit to Boston, as part of a tour to inspect the post roads.
²¹

“I purpose to lodge at your house if you can conveniently receive me,” he wrote to his sister.
²²
He brought his daughter with him. En route, they stopped to visit Caty Ray, now married and living in Warwick,
Rhode Island.
²³

In Boston, Franklin learned that Peter Mecom had lost his mind. Franklin arranged for him to be sent to the country, to be cared for by a farmer’s
wife, where he may have been tied up in a barn, like an animal. There was very little else to do with a lunatic. There were no asylums; there was no hospital in Boston; and the
almshouse refused to admit madmen. To pay for Peter’s keep, Franklin used income from the Douse house, on Unity Street in Boston. Since Elizabeth Franklin Douse had died in 1759, the house had been rented. In 1763, Franklin told Jonathan Williams Sr. of his wish “that the Rent of the House be applied to assist my Sister
Mecom in the Maintanance of her unhappy Son.”
²⁴

By then, Benjamin Mecom had abandoned Boston, having failed once more. He went next to New York with his little brother Johnny as his apprentice—Johnny having abandoned his
apprenticeship to the
goldsmith William Homes—and opened yet another printing office, on Rotten Row, where he launched a newspaper called the
New York Pacquet
. It lasted only six weeks.
²⁵
In April 1764, Mecom was ruined; he sold “The Remains of the Shop” at auction, not just his scant stock (“a Variety of valuable Pamphlets, a few bound Books, some Waste Paper”) but the very shelves.
²⁶
By July, John Mecom had given up his brief stint as a printer and returned to smithing. He opened up a shop in New Brunswick, where he sold everything from nails and chisels to sheep shears and scissors.
²⁷

Benjamin Franklin tried, once more, to save his nephew: he appointed Benjamin Mecom
postmaster of New Haven and arranged for
James Parker to set him up in business there.
²⁸
(Years before, Mecom had been a wayward and ungrateful apparentice in Parker’s shop
in New York.) By the end of 1764, Mecom was printing Yale dissertations.
²⁹
He had, as usual, grand plans. They fell through. Mecom’s “lethargick Indolence” was his great fault, Parker reported to Franklin. “I can not get him to do any Thing hardly.” He would not even answer letters. Up and down he went: bursts of extraordinary activity, followed by periods of profound indolence. “Benny Mecom continues—I fear on the going-back Road,” Parker wrote. “My hopes of him wax fainter and fainter.”
³⁰
He grew queer, and even queerer.

In November 1764, Franklin sailed, once more, for London. Before he left, he sent copies of a likeness of himself to Boston, “it being the only way in which I am now likely ever to visit my Friends there.” He shipped the miniatures to Jonathan Williams Sr. and suggested a few people who might like them: one for Jane’s minister
Samuel Cooper; one for John Withrop,
a Harvard professor; one for
Mather Byles. “And my Sister will possibly like to have one for herself, and one for her Doctor Perkins.” A portrait—“I hope a long Visit in this Shape will not be disagreable to them”—a likeness, and no more.
³¹

In New Jersey, Franklin’s son moved into the governor’s mansion. In New Haven, Jane’s son struggled to keep out of debtors’ prison.