The Society for Useful Knowledge (6 page)

Benjamin's misgivings proved well-founded. The brothers quarreled frequently, mostly over matters of discipline, and the youngster cut short his apprenticeship in 1723, in violation of his legal obligations, by running away—first to New York and then to Philadelphia—and striking out on his own. But by then Benjamin Franklin had acquired a taste for the vocation that would remain central to his character, and dear to his heart, for the rest of his days. It was also the key to virtually every facet of his public and private lives, for the many aspects of the printing and publishing business proved essential to Franklin's multiple and overlapping careers as aphorist and essayist, scientist, diplomatist, postmaster, investor and patron, civic activist and politician, head of household, and well-to-do landlord.

Franklin himself expressed this organic link with the printing trade when he drafted his own mock epitaph, in 1728, more than six decades before his death:
^a

The Body of
B. Franklin,
Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more,
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended,
By the Author.
¹⁸

The opening words of his last will and testament put his profession ahead of his other worldly honors: “I, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, of Philadelphia, Printer, late Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to the Court of France …”

In many ways, printing was unique among the contemporary trades. By its very nature, its successful practitioners required something of a worldly outlook. They were, as a result, less insular than members of other craft guilds, which were fundamentally conservative and designed almost exclusively to preserve trade secrets among a limited number of apprentices, journeymen, and masters in order to limit competition.

True, printers also served apprenticeships and they had their own set of skills to protect and pass along to succeeding generations of craftsmen. Nevertheless, the scope of their activities—encompassing what we would distinguish today as the separate endeavors of publishing, marketing, editing, public relations, advertising, and journalism—and their reliance on technological innovation and trends in reading, writing, politics, and scholarship marked them out for greater interaction with society at large. And it was in many of these affiliated realms, all gathered under the general notion of the printer, where Franklin himself excelled.

Somewhat more prosaically, the printing trade also came to the rescue of this restless young man on those occasions when he found himself stranded in an unfamiliar town with no money and no prospects. Such had been the case when Benjamin fled his brother's high-handed behavior for a new life in Philadelphia. And such was the case upon his first arrival in England. Soon he was working as a journeyman in the studio of the respected London printer Samuel Palmer, where Franklin's speed and skill with learned texts—as a compositor, he was able to accommodate quotations in Greek, Latin, and even Hebrew—proved invaluable.

The sheer physicality of the work further enhanced its appeal in Franklin's eyes. Here was an activity worthy of both a strong mind and a strong body. The strapping young printer took after his father—“well set and strong”—and he kept fit by exercising regularly, dabbling in vegetarianism and watching his diet in general, getting plenty of fresh air, and largely abstaining from the bad habits of his workmates, most of whom were “great Guzzlers of Beer.” At one point, Franklin positively crows as he recalls his displays of strength in front of his fellow workmen, who berated him over his preference for drinking only water.

“On occasion I carried up and down Stairs a large Form of Types in each hand, when others carried but one in both Hands. They wondered to see from this and several Instances that the Water-American as they called me was stronger than themselves who drank strong Beer.”
¹⁹
He was also a regular at the theater and “other Places of Amusement” and chased the city women, at one point making an ill-fated attempt to seduce his best friend's mistress.
²⁰
Franklin's London exploits were not limited to the purely physical or the sensual. He also threw himself into the political, social, and religious debates that animated the city's lively coffeehouses, the so-called Penny Universities where a lowly coin bought not only a cup of imported coffee but also access to pamphlets and gazettes, the latest news from café “runners” or criers, and seemingly endless discussion of the day's affairs, developments in science, and other intellectual pursuits.

By the turn of the century, coffeehouses had become a vital part of London's social and intellectual scene. Even the Royal Society lent their learned imprimatur. “The Coffee-Houses make all sort of People sociable, they improve Arts, and Merchandise, and all other Knowledge,” concluded a report published in the Society's
Philosophical Transactions
in 1699.
²¹
These establishments took in mail for regular customers and hosted many of London's clubs, professional associations, and debating societies. Traders in commodities and securities, the so-called stockjobbers, met over coffee to swap shares, make deals, or compare rumors. City physicians—those “dispensers of life and death, who flock together like birds of prey watching for carcasses”—as well as local clerics and visiting American merchants all had their favorite haunts.
²²

As an institution, the coffeehouse provided patrons with something of a respite from the rigid and highly stratified social and economic system that awaited in the world beyond its doors. Here, the rising cohorts of urban professionals, intellectuals, independent merchants, and other businessmen could socialize, debate political, social, and religious issues, and transact business in relative freedom, outside the reach of church, state, or university. Wit, business acumen, political intelligence, and related gossip—rather than formal social standing or birthright—secured access to this café society's most sought-after tables and its liveliest clubs and discussion circles.

For a sharp young man with an impressive reservoir of book learning but little social standing—Franklin was, after all, still a lowly journeyman printer and a colonial hayseed to boot—the leveling atmosphere he found in the
coffeehouses seemed made to order. Here, he discovered that his sharp pen and quick wit offered access to some of the city's leading lights, a phenomenon that soothed his vanity and addressed, if not quite quenched, his considerable ambition. On subsequent stays in the imperial capital, the mature Franklin became a mainstay of gatherings of Royal Society members at the Grecian Coffee House and of the progressive Club of Honest Whigs at St. Paul's café.
²³

London's coffeehouses also traded in controversy, reveled in argument, and, on occasion, smacked of sedition and heresy. By now, Franklin was familiar with the most contentious issues of the times, largely through his striking ability to tease complex ideas from the written word. Even as a youngster, Franklin spent what little pocket money he had on books. Later, he haunted the booksellers of Boston, Philadelphia, and London, and he regularly prevailed upon fellow apprentices and journeymen to surreptitiously borrow volumes from their masters' stocks so that he could read them at night and then return them unnoticed in the morning.

Such was the power of books that they often shaped Franklin's outlook on life. Delving into his father's modest collection of religious works, for example, had already led him, by age fifteen, to stray from the family's Puritan traditions. Instead, he numbered himself among the growing ranks of the deists, who believed in a supreme God but rejected any necessary role for revelation or for the infallible scripture said to have recorded it. “Some Books against Deism fell into my hands.… It happened that they wrought an Effect on me quite the contrary to that was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the Refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist.”
²⁴

Here, young Franklin was not alone. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume underwent a very similar experience, turning to deism after reading polemics against it. In time, Hume would celebrate the philosopher in Franklin. “America has sent us many things—gold, silver, tobacco, indigo, and so forth; but you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to her.”
²⁵

Back home in America, Franklin had already learned that a bookish youth could attract the attention and the patronage of the rich and powerful, no matter his tender age or precarious position in society.
²⁶
According to Franklin's memoirs, the governor of New York sought him out after hearing the
extraordinary news that a young man had just arrived by ship from Boston accompanied by “a great many books,” and he treated the boy with “great Civility” and showed off his own well-stocked library.
²⁷

James Logan, one of the founders of the Pennsylvania colony and an accomplished classical scholar, discussed books with Franklin and even allowed him to borrow from his personal collection—then the finest in colonial America. Governor Keith likewise took a personal interest in the abundant talents of the teenage lad, although it was the governor's deceptive offer to set him up in the printing business that had left the would-be protégé almost penniless in London.

What held true in colonial America, with its less-than-rigid social barriers and general, if imperfect, inclination to privilege talent over rank, likewise held true in the cafés and taverns of London. All Franklin needed was an entrée to this heady world of unorthodox ideas, freewheeling debate, and the latest in literary fashion. He found it in a curious little essay of his own contrivance that began as a stunt for a drinking buddy who had sought out Franklin's “
present
Thoughts of the
general State of Things
in the Universe.”
²⁸

At the time, Franklin was setting type at Palmer's for a new edition of a bestselling religious work that argued that morality—and, by analogy, truth itself—is aligned with the natural world and may be discerned by man's reason. The book,
The Religion of Nature Delineated
by William Wollaston, hews closely to the Enlightenment vogue for so-called natural religion, which in keeping with the scientific tenor of the age sought evidence of God and his wisdom in the wondrous order of the natural world. Here, the orthodox Wollaston endeavors to outflank the deists by making room for both Isaac Newton's ironclad laws of motion—and the day's ever-new scientific discoveries in general—and traditional scriptural teachings.

Franklin got right to work on a response, adopting a style not unlike that of a Euclidean proof that establishes a set of propositions, in this case about the nature of God, from which then flows the entire argument, all laid out in what he later called a “Chain of plain Consequences.” The finished pamphlet,
A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain
, denied any real distinction between good and evil and sees pleasure and pain as binary opposites that control man's behavior as surely as Newton's new laws seemed to regulate the movements of the celestial bodies. In Franklin's youthful hands, then, God himself was little more than a machine. Samuel Palmer, on
whose press Franklin discreetly printed one hundred copies, admired the boy's “undoubted Ingenuity” but nonetheless found his unorthodox ideas “abominable.”
²⁹

No doubt anticipating just such a reaction, Franklin concludes his essay on a note of youthful defiance and ascribes the inevitable rejection of its arguments to humankind's natural vanity: “Whatever sooths our Pride, and tends to exalt our Species above the rest of the Creation, we are pleased with and easily believe, when ungrateful Truths shall be with the utmost Indignation rejected.… But, (to use a Piece of
common
Sense) our
Geese
are but
Geese
though we may think 'em
Swans
; and Truth will be Truth though it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.”
³⁰

Among the very few copies of the
Dissertation
that circulated in the city, one came to the attention of William Lyons, a surgeon and regular at Batson's coffeehouse. He filled the pamphlet's margins with handwritten notes and other critical comments and set out to meet the author. “It occasioned an Acquaintance between us; he took great Notice of me, called on me often, to converse on those Subjects,” writes a clearly gratified Franklin.
³¹
Lyons introduced his young interlocutor to the inflammatory moralist and philosopher Bernard Mandeville, who held court regularly at the Horns alehouse.

The Dutch-born Mandeville, steeped in the republicanism of his native land, had recently achieved considerable notoriety after a British grand jury sought to suppress his latest edition of
The Fable of the Bees
. In it, Mandeville argues that man's private vices, for example the profligate consumption of luxuries, confer important public benefits. More specifically, the pursuit of self-interest, when managed astutely and channeled effectively by political leaders, is vital to the material well-being and overall success of society at large. A lesser-known work,
A Modest Defence of Publick Stews
, endorsed legalized prostitution, albeit in a highly regulated form, and matter-of-factly numbered sexual services among the many commodities in any market economy.
^b

Later, Mandeville sought to clarify his central argument in
The Fable of the Bees
in an attempt to ward off further criticism or legal troubles: “Private Vices by the dexterous Management of a skilful Politician, may be turned into public Benefits.”
³²
The often subtle notions hidden beneath Mandeville's satirical
presentations influenced the works of Adam Smith, David Hume, and other leading Scottish intellectuals, and—with Mandeville's rough edges smoothed away—would later resonate among the rebellious American colonists, with their demands for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
³³