Book of Ages (6 page)

This Sarah Silsbe copied verses, too, about
history:

Her needlework is her artifact. It is all that is left of her: threadbare lines.

There were exceptions. The most unnaturally accomplished girl in Boston was Jane Colman, the daughter of
Benjamin Colman, the minister of the
Brattle Street Church, the church Jane’s uncle Benjamin belonged to. Colman was a far sight worldlier than most Massachusetts ministers, more a man of the
Enlightenment than of the Reformation. He had graduated from Harvard in 1692 and three years later sailed for
London. Captured by pirates, he was imprisoned in
France. Ransomed, he went to England, where he stayed until 1699, and studied; he read widely; he especially admired
Alexander Pope. His sermons were
Addisonian.
¹⁴

Jane Colman was born in Boston in 1708. For the first seven years of her life, she was an only child. She knew her letters by the age of two. By five she could recite the psalms. When she turned six, her father began teaching her to write; he wanted her to learn to write not only well but forcibly: manfully. By eleven, she was composing
hymns: “Happy are they that walk in Wisdom’s Ways,/That tread her Paths, and shine in all her Rays.” At fourteen, she began keeping a diary. Her father “spar’d no Cost nor Pains in my Education,” she wrote. She composed poetry for him: “An Infant Muse begs leave beneath your Feet,/To lay the first Essays of her poetic Wit.”
¹⁵
She and her father began a daily correspondence.
¹⁶
“A very little Use will make you Mistress enough of the Art of decent, familiar, common Letters,” her father wrote. “Practice is the best and shortest Way of learning this.” On receiving her letters, he corrected them, and sent them
back. He once parsed for her the different meanings of
fortune, chance,
and
providence
. But he offered, too, more capacious advice: “Write more or less according as you find your Thoughts flowing or restrained. But always remember, that it is better to be short and full of good Sense, than to draw out your Letters to an empty Length.”

This continued every day until she was eighteen. “With the Advantages of my liberal Education at School and College,” her father wrote her, “I have no reason to think but that your Genius in Writing would have excell’d mine.”
¹⁷

Jane Franklin never had the education Jane Colman had. Her mother taught her some. What more she learned, she learned from her brother. From childhood, she loved him tenderly. “My Affection for you has all ways been so grate I see no Room for Increec,” she once wrote to him, “& you have manifested yrs to mee in such Large measure that I have no Reason to suspect Itts strength.”
¹⁸

All her life, she wrote to him the way Jane Colman wrote to her father. She wrote to him the way a student writes to a tutor. “I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she confessed, again and again.
¹⁹

She tried to correct herself. “When I read this over I see so many buts I am ashamed,” she once apologized. “Place them to the old accompt.”
²⁰

Her brother would have none of it; he knew her pride well enough not to credit her humility. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased her. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for Commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.”
²¹
This was, miserably, true.

Benjamin Franklin fought for his learning, letter by letter, book by book, candle by candle. He valued nothing more. He loved his little sister.

He taught her how to write. It was cruel, in its kindness. Because when he left, the lessons ended.

CHAPTER VII

S
he learned to bake and to roast, to mend and to scrub. She learned to sew and to knit. She helped her mother tend the garden. She learned to dye.
¹
She helped her father in the shop, doing the work that her brother hated, “cutting Wick for the
Candles, filling the Dipping Mold, and the Molds for cast Candles.”
²

What more could she study? A Boston newspaper printed “A Dialogue between a thriving Tradesman and his Wife about the Education of Their Daughter.” The wife wishes to send the girl to school. The husband refuses, telling her:

That Jane Franklin learned to write as well as she did was a twist of fate: she was her brother’s sister. Mostly, she learned other things. She was bred to bookery and cookery, needle and thread.

She learned how to make soap. She once wrote down the family recipe. In a wooden box with a hole bored in the bottom and set over a tub filled with bricks, soak eighteen bushels of ashes and one bushel of lime with water. Leach lye. Then, in a copper pot, boil the lye with wax—“won third mirtle wax two thirds clean tallow the Greener the wax the beter,” she wrote—and keep it from boiling over “by flirting the froith with a scimer.” Stir in salt. “Be carefull not to Put two much salt in it will make it Britle.” Line a mold with a cloth (“not too coars”) and pour in the boiling soap: “keep it smoth on the top take care to let your Frame stand on a Level let care be taken when it is in that it Is not Jogd.” Let it set overnight, and in the morning cut it “with a small wier fixed to a round stick at Each End.” Use a gauge to make sure each cake is of equal weight and, if not, “Pare it fitt.”
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She lived a life of confinement. She never learned to ride. (“I hant courage to ride a hors,” she once admitted.)
⁵
If she left the city, it was with her mother, by boat, to visit the Folgers on
Nantucket, where she played with her cousin Keziah.
⁶
She spent her Sundays at the Old South Meeting House, listening to men’s voices thundering from the pulpit. She ran errands, to the shops, to the docks, and to James’s printing house, to visit her brothers. She visited her married sisters and helped care for their children, or they for her: some of her nieces and nephews were older than she was. She loved best her niece Grace.
⁷

Most days she spent at home, close to the fire. She was curious, and she could be untoward. But she was dutiful. She was pared to fit.

A girl’s apprenticeship was girlhood itself. A boy’s apprenticeship was a trade. In 1717, when Jane was five, her brother James came back from England and set up a printing shop
in Boston, “over against the Prison in Queen Street.”
⁸
It was a godsend. Here at last was a trade for Benjamin, the bookish boy too poor to go to Harvard. In 1718, he became his brother’s apprentice: a printer’s devil. He moved into a room above James’s shop. Benny was twelve; Jenny was six.

The best part of his apprenticeship, Franklin always said, was the chance it gave him to read. At the Blue Ball, he had only ever found in his father’s
library a few books he liked:
Plutarch’s
Lives,
“a Book of Defoe’s called an Essay on Projects and another of Dr. Mather’s call’d Essays to
do Good.” But working at a printer’s shop was almost as good as working at a bookshop. “I now had Access to better Books,” he remembered. “An Acquaintance with the Apprentices of Booksellers, enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and clean. Often I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night.”
⁹

Jane Colman read all night long, too. Her father’s house was stocked with books. She read “all the
English
Poetry, and polite Pieces in Prose, printed and Manuscripts in her Father’s well furnish’d Library, and much she borrow’d of her Friends and Acquaintance. She had indeed such a Thirst after Knowledge that the Leisure of the Day did not suffice, but she spent whole Nights in reading.”
¹⁰

Jane Franklin enjoyed neither the leisure of a minister’s daughter nor the library of a printer’s apprentice. What books she read were what books she found in the house of a poor soap boiler. “My Father’s little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity,” her brother had written. Her world of learning widened so far, and no farther.

Her brother resolved to be his own tutor. Determined to become a good writer, he trained himself by reading. The boy who wanted to become the author of his own life taught himself to write by copying the prose style he found in the
Spectator
. “I thought the Writing excellent, and wish’d if possible to imitate it,” he explained. He read an essay, wrote an abstract, and then rewrote the argument from the abstract, to see if he could improve on the original. Then he rewrote the essays as poems since, he thought, “nothing acquaints a Lad so speedily with Variety of Expression, as the Necessity of finding such Words and Phrases as will suit with the Measure, Sound and Rhime of Verse, and at the same Time well express the Sentiment.” He wrote rules, pledging himself to brevity (“a multitude of Words obscure the Sense”), clarity (“To write
clearly,
not only the most expressive, but the plainest Words should be chosen”), and simplicity: “If a Man would that his Writings have an Effect on the Generality of Readers, he had better imitate that Gentleman, who would use no Word in his Works that was not well understood by his Cook-maid.” His cook-maid … or his little sister.

“Prose Writing has been of great Use to me in the Course of my Life,” Franklin knew, “and was a principal Means of my Advancement.” He would write his way up, and out.
¹¹

Reading, he grew skeptical of his family’s faith. The more books he read,
the less he believed the
Bible. “I was scarce 15,” he remembered, “when, after doubting by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.”

He discovered, too, that he liked to argue. “My indiscrete Disputations about Religion began to make me pointed at with Horror by good People, as an Infidel or Atheist.” He especially liked to debate, like “University Men,” with “another Bookish Lad in the Town,
John Collins by Name.” They once debated “the Propriety of educating the Female Sex in Learning, and their Abilities for Study.” Young Collins “was of Opinion that it was improper” and that girls “were naturally unequal to it.” Franklin disagreed: “I took the contrary Side, perhaps a little for Disputes sake.”
¹²

In crafting his argument, Franklin leaned on Defoe’s
Essay on Projects,
one of the few books in his father’s
library that he liked. Defoe had proposed the establishment of an “Academy for Women”: “I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the world, considering us as a Civilised and a Christian Countrey, that we deny the advantages of Learning to Women.” Like Astell, Defoe regretted the frivolousness of girls’ education: “Their youth is spent to teach them to Stitch and Sew, or make Bawbles. They are taught to Read indeed, and perhaps to Write their Names, or so; and that is the heighth of a Woman’s Education.” His Academy for Women was to embrace every subject: “To such whose Genius wou’d lead them to it, I wou’d deny no sort of Learning.”
¹³