1732 Almanacs were popular in colonial America. They offered a calendar, long-term weather predictions and astrological tables for the coming year, along with jokes, puzzles and practical household hints. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he wrote and published for sixteen years, also included aphorisms and proverbs, like ‘He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals’, ‘Wise men learn by others’ harms, fools by their own’, and (inevitably) ‘God helps them that help themselves’.
In his autobiography, written from 1771 to 1790, over the period straddling the country’s fight for independence, Franklin tried so hard to present himself as a representative American that it’s hard not to read Poor Richard’s Almanack as a uniquely American production. After all, it seems to have suited a democratic readership so well, being practical, written in a demotic style and immensely popular, selling 10,000 copies a year at a time when the literate population of the British colonies in America probably numbered under 625,000.
But in all respects of literary and publishing history, Poor Richard’s was less original than it has since been seen to be. For one thing, not all the aphorisms were freshly minted; many, by Franklin’s own admission, were gathered from the ‘wisdom of the ages and nations’. As he has often been quoted as saying: ‘Originality is the art of concealing your sources.’
Poor Richard’s is a parodic almanac; it pokes fun at conventional almanacs, often for satiric purposes. The parodic form goes back almost as far as its ‘straight’ counterpart, to François Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostications (1532), which Franklin knew. Popular English predecessors included Jonathan Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaff’s Predictions (from 1708), and before that, two almanacs from which Franklin took the name of his own: Poor Robin’s (from 1663) and Richard Saunders’ Apollo Anglicanus, or English Apollo (from 1694).
Frank Palmieri shows that Poor Robin’s, though conservative in its politics (upholding the values of the Restoration, for example), also debunked ‘the pieties generally accepted by the serious almanacs’, and so ‘had an implicitly irreverent and deflating effect on the form and the culture that was at odds with its overt allegiance’.
Facing each other across the Atlantic, the satiric almanacs began to diverge in their politics as the 18th century advanced, the British remaining ‘staunchly royalist’ while Poor Richard’s became ‘more radical, Whiggish, and contrarian’. For all that, though, ‘both address the reader as a member of the nation, defining him as an Englishman in one case and an American in the other’.1 Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, two Englishmen of differing political persuasions. For the lesson implicit in Poor Richard’s lack of originality is that Franklin and his readers were not yet thinking of themselves as part of an exceptional, distinct nationality, but as part of a wider British community allowing diverse political viewpoints. This is a perspective often obscured by the ‘American Studies’ industry.
1 Frank Palmieri, ‘History, nation, and the satirical almanac, 1660–1760’, Criticism, Summer 1998: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n3_v40/ai_21182130/pg_2/?tag=content;col1, passim.