Book of Ages (8 page)

And then, he sailed away. He was seventeen. Jane was eleven.

An advertisement appeared in the
New-England Courant:

He had no use for a likely lass.

CHAPTER IX

O
n January 6, 1727, the day Benjamin Franklin turned twenty-one, he wrote Jane Franklin a letter.
¹
She was fourteen. More than three years had passed since he’d run away.

“Dear Sister,” he began. “I always judged by your behaviour when a child that you would make a good, agreeable woman, and you know you were ever my peculiar favourite.”

He had gotten news about her from
Isaac Freeman, a ship’s captain from Boston. “I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty,” he wrote.

An eighteenth-century letter is a tissue of coyness and custom. Was Jane Franklin beautiful? She never sat for a portrait. She never described her appearance. She almost never described herself at all, except to remark upon her flaws, which she considered to be chiefly failings of temperament. She was, by nature, of a cheerful disposition. “I Love to hope the Best,” she said.
²
Even amid setbacks, she once explained, “I am still chearful for that is my Natural Temper.”
³
But she suffered from restlessness. “I beleve I am as happy as it is common for a human being, what is otherways may proceed from my own Impatience,” she wrote her brother.
⁴
“My natural temper is none of the patientest.”
⁵
She was miffy.

It was, he once told her, as if she were made of tinder. “I think there is rather an overquantity of Touchwood in your Constitution.”
⁶

Maybe she was beautiful and maybe not. But she was bridling. People who are proud and impatient and flammable tend to be at their worst between the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. “I my self was a Queen from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Year of my Age,” Silence Dogood had confessed.
⁷
Jane, at that age, must have been cheerful but restless and, like her brother, saucy and provoking.

Something Captain Freeman told Franklin must have been troubling, because he was writing Jane in order to warn her to watch out for her
virtue: “Remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the want of it infallibly renders the most perfect beauty disagreeable and odious.”
⁸
A brother urging modesty on his sister was a letter-writing convention. But, curiously, this letter came from a very passionate young man who, in the time since he had run away, had jilted a woman on one side of the ocean and been whoring on the other.

After leaving Boston, Franklin had settled
in Philadelphia, a city as worldly as Boston was provincial. He lodged in the Market Street house of a man named
John Read. He courted Read’s daughter Deborah, and found work in the print shop of
Samuel Keimer.
⁹

Everywhere Franklin went, he made friends. “I began now to have some Acquaintance among the young People of the Town, that were Lovers of Reading.… I lived very agreeably, forgetting Boston as much as I could, and not desiring that any there should know where I resided, except my Friend Collins who was in my Secret, and kept it.” Only Collins even knew where he was, until Franklin’s brother-in-law Robert Homes, a ship’s captain who sailed between Boston and Delaware and who had married Franklin’s sister Mary, heard word of him and wrote him a letter, urging him to return to Boston.
¹⁰

Franklin was such an extraordinary young man that
William Keith, the governor of Pennsylvania, made him an extraordinary proposition: if Franklin would venture to travel to London to buy a press and type, Keith would give him
letters of credit and would set him up in a print shop when he came back. But for this he first needed his father’s approval. Keith gave Franklin a letter to carry to Boston. In May 1724, eight months after he left home, Franklin had turned up at the
Blue Ball.

“My unexpected Appearance surpris’d the Family,” Franklin wrote. “All were however very glad to see me and made me Welcome, except my Brother.” James might have forgiven his former apprentice had not Franklin made matters worse. “I went to see him at his Printing-House: I was better dress’d than ever while in his Service, having a genteel new Suit from Head to foot, a Watch, and my Pockets lin’d with near Five Pounds Sterling in Silver. He receiv’d me very frankly, look’d me all over, and turn’d to his Work again.” Their mother tried to effect a reconciliation, but James was so offended by his brother’s behavior at the print shop—“I had
insulted him in such a Manner before his People that he could never forget or forgive it”—that James would barely speak to him.

About Keith’s proposal that Franklin sail to London, Josiah was dubious. “My Father receiv’d the Governor’s Letter with some apparent Surprise,” according to Franklin. Josiah thought that Keith must be a gentleman “of small Discretion to think of setting a Boy up in Business who wanted yet 3 Years of being at Man’s Estate.” He refused his support, his son “being in his Opinion too young to be trusted with the Management of a Business.”
¹¹
If Benjamin had been twenty-one—“at Man’s Estate”—and not eighteen, he said, he might have felt differently.

Franklin stopped in to visit Cotton Mather: “As I was taking my Leave he accompany’d me thro’ a narrow Passage at which I did not enter, and which had a Beam across it lower than my Head. He continued Talking which occasion’d me to keep my Face partly towards him as I retired, when he suddenly cry’d out, Stoop! Stoop! Not immediately understanding what he meant, I hit my Head hard against the Beam. He then added,
Let this be a Caution to you not always to hold your Head so high; Stoop, young Man, stoop—as you go through the World—and you’ll miss many hard Thumps
.”
¹²
These young Franklins were all alike: they would not learn to stoop.

Days after he arrived, Franklin left, with no help from his father—only “some small Gifts as Tokens of his and my Mother’s Love”—and little more than his father’s advice to “avoid lampooning and libeling to which he thought I had too much Inclination.”
¹³
Back in Philadelphia, Franklin “interchang’d some Promises” with Deborah Read and, soon after, sailed for London. When he arrived, he found that Keith had trifled with him. Not only had he sent him no
letters of credit, he had no credit to give: “he wish’d to please everybody; and having little to give, he gave Expectations.” Franklin, who could not afford a return passage across the Atlantic, found work at a printer’s and forgot “by degrees my Engagements with Miss Read, to whom I never wrote more than one Letter, and that was to let her know I was not likely soon to return.”
¹⁴

In London, he amused himself.
Gulliver’s Travels
was published that year; Franklin undertook his own adventures, treading streets that were trod, in those same months, by
Voltaire, Newton, Defoe, Fielding, and Swift, none of whom he met, though not for lack of trying.
Samuel Richardson, having recently finished his
apprenticeship, had opened his own
printing shop, on Fleet Street; Franklin found journeywork in the shops of one printer after another. Nights, he went to plays and trawled the city. He indulged, he admitted, in more than a few “Intrigues with low Women that fell my Way, which were attended with some Expence and great Inconvenience, besides a continual Risque to my Health by a Distemper which of all Things I dreaded, tho’ by great good Luck I escaped it.”
¹⁵
He did not get the pox. For all his dissolution, he impressed a great many people as being “a young Man of some Ingenuity,” especially after he wrote
A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,
ridiculing the argument that evil, pain, and suffering can be taken as evidence of God’s existence.
¹⁶
He had traveled a great distance from the pews at Old South.

He began to have misgivings. The whoring, the lampooning: weren’t these pleasures at the cost of someone else’s pain? He had been aimless, and cruel. In the summer of 1726, he sailed back to Philadelphia, determined to mark the change of situation with a reformation of morals. On board the ship, he drafted a plan of conduct, a creed, pledging to be frugal, honest, and industrious, and “to speak ill of no man.”
¹⁷

He landed
in Philadelphia to find that Deborah Read had married “a worthless Fellow” named Rogers. This was a disappointment, but Franklin found other satisfactions. He set up a printing shop, on Water Street. He did, on his own, what his father had said so young a man could not. And then, on the day he turned twenty-one, he wrote a letter to his sister.

To write a letter is to reveal one’s character. There were rules, conventions, forms: molds. There were also, therefore, manuals, like recipe books, and Franklin must have owned one; he was schooling himself in the art of becoming a gentleman.

The Young Secretary’s Guide,
published in
Boston beginning in 1703, had run to six editions by 1727. It included a template for “A Brother’s Letter to a Sister, enquiring of her Welfare.”

“Loving Sister,” it begins, “My long Absence from you, tho’ I have not wanted good Conversation, has however made the Time seem tedious.”
¹⁸

Most
writing manuals, including
The Young Man’s Companion,
published in New York by
William Bradford, and in Philadelphia by Bradford’s
son Andrew, included a template for “A Letter from a young Man newly out of his Time”—that is, a letter written by an apprentice who has completed his apprenticeship: on the day he turns twenty-one.
¹⁹

On his twenty-first birthday, when Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Jane Franklin, telling her how much he missed her and urging her to cultivate modesty, he was adapting for his purposes a variety of forms—A Brother’s Letter to a Sister, enquiring of her Welfare; A Letter from a young Man newly out of his Time. But he also made those forms his own. He wished to send her a
gift. “I had almost determined on a
tea table,” he wrote, “but when I considered that the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a
spinning wheel
.” This was a joke. A tea table was a preposterous extravagance, a luxury, something for fine ladies with two-foot-tall periwigs and whalebone bustles as wide as a two-horse cart. He wasn’t about to give Jane a tea table, no matter how beautiful she was.
²⁰
But he wasn’t about to send her a spinning wheel, either.
²¹

Whether a girl warranted a gift of a tea table or a spinning wheel was a measure of her
virtue. The tea table was a symbol of female
vanity, the spinning wheel a symbol of female chastity. “Who can find a vertuous woman?” asks Proverbs 31. “She layeth her handes to the spindle, and her handes hold the distaffe.” It was more than a symbol. When Benjamin and Jane Franklin were growing up, there had been plans afoot
in Boston to force poor girls to toil at spinning wheels to offset the cost of the
almshouse (a building for which their father supplied the
candles). In 1720, the Boston town meeting appointed a committee to “Consider abt promoting of a Spinning School.”
²²
It doesn’t appear that any school was then built, though, since in 1725 someone signing himself “Homespun Jack” wrote a letter to James Franklin, published in the
New-England Courant,
putting forward a similar proposal: