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Benjamin Franklin: Printer, Editor, and Writer

Stephen Carl Arch

Benjamin Franklin would probably be amused by the fact that his first name is now synonymous with the $100 bill. Though he never actually wrote the phrase often misattributed to him, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” Franklin did write that “A penny sav’d is Twopence clear” (Franklin 1987: 1204). Twopence, or two pennies, are “clear” in this scenario because one still has the penny not spent and is not stuck with the penny’s worth of something not needed. And Franklin wrote elsewhere, “Many a Little makes a Mickle [a large amount]” (Franklin 1987: 1299), another sentiment that suggests his familiarity with work, labor, and saving. That his image now graces the largest bill in circulation in the United States suggests a divide between the iconic Franklin that has come to inhabit the popular imagination and the actual person who lived in the eighteenth century. Born in obscurity and raised in a working‐class family, Franklin eventually became a scientist, inventor, diplomat, and politician. First and foremost, however, he was a person of the printed word. He made his name as a printer, editor, and author, and through print he contributed to broad technological and cultural changes in Western culture. Despite his many‐sided nature, he thought of himself to the very end of his long life primarily as a printer. Today, we are still learning to appreciate the significance of his many achievements in the arena of print culture. The historical portrait of Franklin the printer, editor, and author is terrifically complex and richly fascinating. Although we have yet to grasp fully the significance of all of his achievements, his life and works are supremely instructive for understanding the transition of Western culture into the modern world.

Franklin’s Writings

The size of Franklin’s oeuvre is astonishing. In 1954, a group of scholars under the auspices of Yale University and the American Philosophical Society undertook to collect, edit, and publish Benjamin Franklin’s papers. The previous standard edition of Franklin’s works, in 10 volumes, had been published early in the twentieth century by Albert Henry Smyth. The Yale edition is expected to run to 47 volumes! Forty‐three of them had been published by 2018.

From his first appearance in print in 1718 to his death in 1790, Franklin immersed himself in the written word, especially the printed word. In 1770, he noted in his Autobiography that as a young man he once saved on his room and board by maintaining a vegetarian diet. The money saved was “an additional Fund for buying Books” (1987: 1320), he commented, refashioning Jesus’ statement that “man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Franklin seems to have lived on books and other printed matter that came from the hands of men: reading and writing texts, as well as printing, editing, importing, buying, refuting, and recommending them. Thus one major task of twentieth‐century scholars was simply to fix the Franklin canon, to determine what he actually wrote and published, and to make that work accessible to modern readers.

Beyond size, however, Franklin’s oeuvre is remarkable for its range of interests. Franklin wrote and published in nearly every area available to him as a largely self‐taught individual in the eighteenth century: politics, science, morality and ethics, journalism, economics, music, urban planning, education, and monetary policy, to name just a few of his interests. He wrote in dozens of different genres and modes, including the almanac, memoir, satire, bagatelle, polite essay, philosophical essay, mathematical puzzle, and letter. And this dizzying quantity and variety is complicated by other factors. For example, Franklin often published anonymously or pseudonymously, in keeping with eighteenth‐century ideas about authorship. Some published works attributed to him cannot be proven definitively to have been written by him; some now‐unattributed, anonymously published works in his newspaper probably were written by him. Much of Franklin’s writing has been considered extra‐literary by traditional literary scholars who value single‐authored works of fiction, poetry, and drama. He wrote no fiction (in our modern sense of novels and short stories), lyric poetry, or drama, genres that since the nineteenth century have been understood to be especially literary.

For many scholars and teachers of American literature, Franklin’s diverse output has often been reduced to his Autobiography, written in four different installments late in his life and never really finished in the sense that he authorized its publication as a book. In every single anthology of American literature, one can be sure to encounter the Autobiography (in whole or in part) as Franklin’s most representative work. In the nineteenth century, his Autobiography was published in hundreds of different editions, and it was usually read as a faithful representation of his actual virtue and industry. Many early readers strove to emulate his work ethic, his moral sense, and his socially upward mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, writers like D.H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, and Charles Angoff began to take a more skeptical view of Franklin’s self‐portrait, seeing in the memoir, as Lawrence put it, an “unlovely, snuff‐coloured little ideal, or automaton, of a pattern American” (1923/1977: 27).

In the 1960s, in part because of the publication of the first volumes of the Yale edition and in part because of the emergence of new methods of literary study, scholars began a wholesale reconsideration of the Autobiography. Robert Freeman Sayre (1963) was one of a handful of scholars who argued that Franklin’s narrative was not a statement of fact, but a complicated, nuanced, constructed self‐portrait that was in its own way a kind of fiction. Together, these scholars opened several lines of inquiry still being pursued: the relationship between and significance of the text’s four different manuscript parts, the roles of gender and class in the narrative, the narrative’s place in the history of autobiographical writing, Franklin’s rhetoric of self‐fashioning, and the relevance of key eighteenth‐century ideas (like civility, federalism, and the public sphere) to the text. Franklin’s memoir is now an acknowledged literary classic with a rich body of critical scholarship. It is read by students of literature interested in early America, autobiographical writing, and the history of the book, but also by students of history, politics, and culture. As Douglas Anderson (2012) suggests, Franklin in his autobiography intended to challenge his readers with a disrupted, nuanced, complex text, provoking them to “complete” the text in the act of reading. The richness of critical responses over the last half century attests to the success of that challenge. But to understand Franklin, one must read beyond the dense, layered, often wily self‐portrait of the Autobiography.

Franklin’s Life

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. He attended grammar school for two years, but had to withdraw when his family could no longer afford the tuition. He was apprenticed to his brother, James, who owned and operated a printing press in Boston. At the age of 17, he abandoned his apprenticeship and set out for New York, and then Philadelphia, where he found employment as a printer. He traveled to and worked in London for 18 months (1724–1726), returned to Philadelphia, and in 1728 opened his own printing business. In 1729 he began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette; within a decade, it had become the most successful and widely read newspaper in the colonies. He diversified his interests in the 1730s and 1740s, designing an effective fireplace, publishing a best‐selling almanac, becoming postmaster of Philadelphia, and experimenting with electricity. In 1748, he retired from the printing business, turning the day‐to‐day operations over to his partner.

Had Franklin died in 1748, he would still be an important figure in colonial American history and culture. At the age of 42, he had risen from the working class to become a citizen of property, moderate wealth, and social standing. He had built a prosperous business that included a wide network of correspondents, agents, and reporters. He imported and sold important books from England and Europe; some, he reprinted on his own press. His best‐selling publication, Poor Richard’s Almanac, sold approximately 2000 copies each year, spreading his influence throughout the American colonies. He himself had published significant pamphlets on the need for a paper currency, the usefulness of a philosophical society, the need for a stronger defense of Philadelphia against the French and the Spanish, and other topics. He was the clerk of the Philadelphia assembly, organized the city’s first fire company, and corresponded with the Royal Society in London. Still, had he died in 1748, he would not be discussed more than two centuries later in histories or encyclopedias of American literature, like this one.

But by 1748 he had lived only half his life. In the 42 years that remained to him, Franklin fully became the public figure most of us recognize: the world‐renowned scientist, the outspoken revolutionary, the founding father, the witty international diplomat, the author of the famous Autobiography. By the time he died in 1790, Joyce Chaplin has written, Franklin “was one of the most recognized people in the Western hemisphere” (2006: 1). He was known by rich and poor, educated and uneducated, Europeans and Americans. He was painted, sculpted, copied, quoted, loved, hated, imitated, and admired. Ever since, he has seemed central to many interpreters’ understanding of what “America” became in the eighteenth century, and beyond – despite the fact that he was (by far) the oldest of the founding fathers, that he lived nearly half of his adult life in Europe, and that he self‐identified for much of his life as a British colonist. Something in him or his work has seemed quintessentially American.

Franklin as Printer

Franklin’s career as a printer began in 1718, when at the age of 12 he was apprenticed to his brother. As an apprentice, he would have learned the entire process of producing a printed text: designing a layout, choosing type, manually setting type from a manuscript (or composing on the fly), locking the form that would print one or four or eight or twelve or sixteen pages with each impression, inking the form, pulling the lever on the wooden screw press to impress the inked typefaces on the clean paper, folding the now‐dried printed pages into a “gathering,” and stitching the gatherings together if a book was the intended product. Eventually, Franklin even learned to cast his own metal type, make his own paper (from cloth rags), and bind his own books. More than most authors, he understood the material processes of printing. It is in fact important to note that Franklin began his career as an indentured servant, an unfree workingman. His “school” was the print shop, where he could read books and meet intelligent citizens, but where he was bound by law through an indenture to work until the age of 21 for room, board, and very little pay. When he illegally broke his indenture in 1723, moved to Philadelphia, and found work as a journeyman printer, Franklin was still part of the working class. Even when he started his own press in 1728, he was still working class. “Gentlemen” in the eighteenth century did not work for pay; they did not work with their hands. But Franklin intimately knew printing and print culture as a manual laborer who produced the finished, material products. Later in life he sometimes referred to the printing process as a way to explain ideas, as when in his Autobiography he referred to his youthful mistakes as “errata,” or mistakes in typesetting, reminding us of his origins as a workingman (1987: 1337).

Most workers in the print trade in the eighteenth century were unable to aspire beyond their status as laborers. However, Franklin in his early twenties became an entrepreneur. With the financial support of a friend’s father, he set up his own printing business in 1728. Within several years the young master printer had started his own newspaper, landed government contracts for print jobs, and created a very successful almanac. He drove some of his competitors out of business. In 1737 his growing reputation led to his assignment as the postmaster of Philadelphia, a position that allowed him to control the flow of news in the city and to distribute newspapers (including his own). As an entrepreneur, Franklin always had to balance risk and reward. The bulk of his effort as a printer went into the newspaper, the almanacs, and the government contracts, as well as pamphlets, broadsides, and various legal/business forms for business and personal use. There was a steady profit in those productions. On the other hand, he published only a small number of books. They were more risky, requiring a larger capital investment and not always finding a ready market. He published books that would sell, like collections of sermons by the itinerant evangelist George Whitefield and, in 1742, the first English novel to be reprinted in the colonies, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (London, 1740).

Franklin was a savvy entrepreneur. When his paper supply became precarious, slowing production, he set up paper mills of his own and invested in new mills operated by friends. He collected rags to sell to other papermakers in the colonies. Noticing that other printers profited by having agents and connections in other colonies, he began in 1733 to send trusted employees to other British colonies to set up as printers. He funded their startup costs and kept part of the profits, creating what some scholars have called “a sophisticated intercolonial communications network” (Green and Stallybrass 2006: 42). Ralph Frasca notes that Franklin’s innovation in this area was “a substantial departure from the European system,” in which “master craftsmen used apprenticeships to limit the growth of their trades” (2006: 20). Franklin expanded the printing trade in the colonies through this early “franchising” strategy.

Franklin’s ability to retire from the printing trade in 1748 was remarkable. Very few persons in the eighteenth century journeyed so far. He succeeded in and through the world of print: producing printed material, selling it, importing it, marketing it, enabling others to produce it. In the second half of the century, he would maintain close contacts with printers and the printing industry, and even begin printing himself again on a small press in his lodgings in Passy, France, in the 1780s. But he became much more than a printer.

Franklin as Writer

Franklin’s own earliest surviving publication dates from 1722 when, at the age of 16, he wrote a series of satirical essays for his brother’s newspaper. Using the pseudonym of “Silence Dogood” and submitting the essays anonymously, Franklin adopted the pose of a widowed mother of three children who offered her observations on education, Harvard College, politics, women’s rights, the freedom of the press, drunkenness, and other issues. From April to October of that year, the essays appeared bi‐weekly, brought to an end only when the young apprentice revealed his identity to his brother.

The Silence Dogood essays were a remarkable performance for a young writer with little traditional education. In form, they were imitations of two innovative London journals, The Tatler, a thrice‐weekly journal founded in 1709 by Richard Steele, and The Spectator, a daily journal founded by Steele and Joseph Addison in 1711. Steele and Addison were experienced writers when they undertook this new form of periodical writing. In their journals, they adopted personas from the perspective of which they could analyze society and culture with the supposedly‐distanced eye of a certain type of (male) citizen. They wrote with the goals of correcting middle‐class manners, cultivating taste in the public mind, and advancing Whig political views. The young Franklin would have known both periodical series from bound volumes imported to Boston. In the Autobiography, he reported that he actually improved his writing skills by rewriting individual Spectator papers from memory, and then comparing his version with the original.

As was typical of Franklin, he innovated on the model he had at hand. Addison and Steele adopted male personas; Franklin adopted a female one. The name of “Silence Dogood” played saucily on the work and person of one of Boston’s leading ministers, the well‐known Cotton Mather. Mather had published a collection of essays entitled Bonifacius: Essays to do Good in 1710; and he was known to be anything but silent as a minister and public leader. The pseudonym emphasizes the fact that Franklin was able to see the Puritanism of Boston with an ironic eye, at the same time that, like his Puritan forebears, he did believe in doing good in the world. For the first (but not last) time, Franklin wrote with the intent to unmask hypocrisy and ignorance, to set “Deceivers in a true Light, and undeceiv[e] the Deceived” (1987: 28).

Franklin contributed other short, less memorable pieces to his brother’s newspaper. In London from 1724–1726, he worked for two different printing shops, and wrote and published a pamphlet arguing against free will. This pamphlet precociously demonstrated that Franklin was able to find his footing quickly in complex philosophical debates. But he soon abjured his argument in the pamphlet, noting later that it “might have [had] an ill tendency” (1987: 1016), that is, that it might have led others astray. He decided to focus on productive moral and social issues, arguing in 1729 in his paper, “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” that a paper currency “is highly convenient and beneficial to Mankind”; proposing in 1749 in his paper, “The Education of Youth,” an academy for the youth of Pennsylvania because education is “the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common‐wealths”; explaining to Parisians in 1767 in his paper, “Of Lightning and the Method (Now Used in America) of Securing Buildings and Persons from Its Mischievous Effects,” the usefulness of lightning rods to protect houses and towns from the “mischievous effects” of lightning strikes; lecturing Europeans in 1784 in his essay, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” on the true nature of the new United States, where land was cheap and persons of moderate fortune and industrious habits could be successful (1987: 125, 324, 600, 979). Near the end of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant would argue that the motto of the Enlightenment was “Sapere aude!” (“dare to know!”) (1995: 1). In the new secular age, Kant argued, philosophers were courageous enough to use reason to see things clearly and objectively, without the aid of external guides like religion. As a writer, Franklin repeatedly took this stance, long before Kant’s formulation. He repeatedly stated what his use of reason and empirical evidence led him to discover.

Franklin wrote across a startlingly broad range of genres and modes. To give some shape to his oeuvre and without being exhaustive, I will discuss his writing in five different areas: journalism, the almanac, humor, social policy, and science.

Franklin was most productive as a journalist in the 1730s and 1740s. From 1729 until 1748, he was the owner and managing editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became in his hands the most important newspaper in the colonies. He wrote editorials, political commentary, and satires and spoofs. He reported on crimes and on business and commerce. He found or composed “filler” material, and campaigned for social reforms. Scholars have shown that the Gazette contained more news than other colonial newspapers, and that it was innovative in design and scope. Because he often wrote without a byline, we will never know for sure exactly which material in the Gazette was his. Much of it certainly was. It is also important to recognize that even after his retirement from the printing business, Franklin continued to write fugitive, ephemeral works that were published in newspapers and journals, for example, his “Causes of the American Discontents Before 1768,” which was published as a letter to the editor in the 7 January 1768 edition of the London Chronicle. There is a sense in which Franklin was always, first and foremost, a “journalist”: a writer interested in the gathering, composing, and dissemination of news, things that have happened recently (“journalism,” from the French journalisme, from the word jour or “day”) or things that readers need to know now in order to live their lives productively. Franklin is in this sense unlike systematic thinkers like Kant or G.W.F. Hegel. He thought and wrote pragmatically, not systematically. Like Cotton Mather before him and Ralph Waldo Emerson after him, Franklin “essayed” to do good in the world as a writer. He always wrote to address a purpose or topic, whether he did so to inform, to persuade, to convince, or to provoke a laugh.

For many years, Franklin was especially committed to a useful mode of writing that seems less than literary to many modern readers: the almanac. At least four different almanacs were published yearly in Philadelphia in 1728, when Franklin went into business as a printer. By 1729, he himself was publishing two almanacs each year for other writers. In 1732, he joined the field with the publication of his first Poor Richard’s Almanac. He published a new edition each year for the next 25 years. Early American almanacs provided a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household advice, proverbs, solar and lunar tables, and poetry and articles reprinted from London books and from various colonial sources. Franklin independently compiled or wrote some of this information; some of it he simply selected from elsewhere, and arranged; and some of it he selected from elsewhere and revised to fit his own ends. For example, many of the sayings that he made famous as “Poor Richard” were pithy restatements of common sayings, or were older sayings that he brought back into print without changing a word. Some of the sayings passed into colloquial use and are still with us: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” for example, and “Little strokes fell great oaks.” We need to understand his work on the almanac as a particular kind of early modern authorship, revealed in part in Alexander Pope’s claim in The Essay on Criticism (1711) that “True wit is nature to advantage dress’d; / What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d” (1993: 27). Like Pope, Franklin understood truth as belonging to nature or to the external world, not to the mind that apprehended it. Ideas – literary, scientific, political – were not owned by individuals, but belonged to mankind in common. Truths were expressed by writers of varying talents, however; and the best writers “dressed” ideas in beautiful or effective ways. Thus, what Franklin presented in the almanac was not “his” in the sense that he invented it, at least in the way that, say, Emily Dickinson invented her lyric poetry and Nathaniel Hawthorne invented a novel titled The Scarlet Letter. The title page of his almanac in fact lists “Richard Saunders” (“Poor Richard”) as the “author,” while Benjamin Franklin is merely the printer and seller. Though he did not invent most of its content, however, the almanac was Franklin’s: he identified his audience, selected the material, designed the format, expressed convincingly ideas that others had written. The fact that we remember Poor Richard’s Almanac is a testament to the saying that “Poor Richard” offered in the 1738 edition of the almanac: “If you wou’d not be forgotten / As soon as you are dead and rotten, / Either write things worth reading, / or do things worth the writing” (1987: 1208). Franklin did many things “worth the writing,” and wrote many, many things that are worth the reading.

Humor was one specific strategy that Franklin made use of to give value to his writing. He certainly knew the value of a good laugh. Throughout the many volumes of his collected works, a certain Franklinian voice recurs: witty, sly, suggestive, wry. Humor was central to the way that Franklin saw the world. Some scholars have suggested that his humor was a product of his shyness, a way of engaging the world while keeping his distance from it. Others argue that his particular brand of humor, especially his use of satire and verbal wit, was a key eighteenth‐century attitude, aligning him with writers like Jonathan Swift who also wrote in a range of modes from gentle amusement to savage sarcasm. Franklin’s humor could be comically indecent, as when in 1781 (while minister to France) he wrote and published a “Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels” in which he pondered (tongue firmly in cheek) whether our diets might not be altered in order to make our farts smell pleasing. Surely, his fictional scientist wrote, “such a Liberty of Expressing one’s Scent‐iments, and pleasing one another, is of infinitely more Importance to human Happiness than [the] Liberty of the Press” (1987: 954). It could be irreverent, as when in “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747) he defended a (fictional) young woman who had given birth to five bastard children by having her critique the laws that permitted the fathers to ignore their responsibilities. It could be witheringly sarcastic, as when in 1773 he listed “The Rules By Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One,” identifying actions by Parliament and King George that did, in fact, lead over the next decade to Britain’s loss of the North American colonies.

The key to Franklin’s humor is ironic distance. He repeatedly adopted fictional personas, and let those persons speak. “Their” words revealed a gap between the world as it might be and the world as it is. Polly Baker spoke truth to power when she pointed out that a man could simply walk away from an unwanted pregnancy. Why punish the female partner who could not do so? Franklin sounds uncannily like a feminist in that essay. The fictional scientist experimenting on flatulence reveals a disconnect between those things that are truly important to us (like the “Liberty of the Press”) and those things that are ephemeral. The reader can see the gap between what is important and what is frivolous and can laugh at the scientist’s ignorance. In “The Ephemera” (1778), Franklin adopts the persona of a fly whose life span is one day to put into perspective all human endeavors. Foreseeing his death before sundown, the fly ponders what is truly valuable in this transitory world, and in doing so reveals to the reader that we sometimes mistake our “long” human lives for something like permanence (Franklin 1987: 924). Franklin labeled some of his humorous writings “bagatelles,” or “trifles.” As he wrote in a different context in his Autobiography, “Some may think [such] trifling Matters not worth minding or relating,” but he understood that they could do serious work in the world, reframing his readers’ perspectives and challenging traditionally held beliefs (1987: 1428).

Yet another kind of writing that Franklin engaged in can be subsumed under the heading of the social sciences, those branches of knowledge that would be developed in the nineteenth century and later as sociology, political science, and economics. Franklin was interested in fundamental questions about how society functioned. He critiqued numerous areas of the social sciences, including population growth, immigration, tariff policy, economic theory, monetary policy, welfare, and slavery. Often, he came to conclusions about ideas and then felt compelled to advocate for social change: for a university in Pennsylvania, a stronger militia to protect Philadelphia, and the regulation of the city watch. His writing in these areas was published in a variety of formats. To take one example, Franklin in 1751 circulated among his friends the manuscript of the essay, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, People of Countries, Etc,” in which he speculated on the growth of population in the colonies compared to England. The essay was published in Boston in 1755 as an addendum to another of Franklin’s essays, and was then independently reprinted a dozen times over the next 20 years. It influenced a number of political economists and population theorists, including Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. One social need identified by Franklin was that of an intercolonial “Society […] of Virtuosi or ingenious Men” (1987: 295) who could share new ideas and advance knowledge. In “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations of America,” published as a broadside in 1743, Franklin proposed the creation of such a society, with representation from the different disciplines. Settlement in the colonies was scattered, he argued, and many good ideas were lost to mankind because communication among scientists was infrequent and undependable. After a series of fitful beginnings, this American Philosophical Society took firmer root in the 1780s, fulfilling for many years in the new United States the functions of a national academy of science.

Franklin’s own writings on science date from 1726, when he kept a journal of his observations at sea during his return trip from London. Throughout his life, in all areas of his thinking, Franklin was an empiricist, and this early journal demonstrates his keen observations of the world around him. In it, he records taking up some gulf weed from the Atlantic Ocean, and then studying the shell fish attached to it. Pondering the crustacean’s method of reproduction, he remembered that he had seen similar shellfish in Boston and Portsmouth, England (1993: 214–215). He was making connections. More than 40 years later, he would begin to write and publish his ideas about the Atlantic Ocean, in particular about the currents associated with the Gulf Stream. In an October 1768 letter to Anthony Todd, secretary of the Post Office in London, Franklin used data he collected from ship captains (including some of his own relatives in Nantucket) about travel times across the Atlantic to argue that the Gulf Stream could be used or avoided, as necessary, to shorten the travel time between North America and London. He included a chart that he co‐authored with his cousin, Timothy Folger. After the American Revolution, Franklin produced a second chart, and then followed it up with a third chart and a letter published in the Transactions (1787) of the American Philosophical Society.

This was groundbreaking research, and typical in many ways of Franklin’s method as a philosopher, or lover of knowledge: empirically based; logical in process and practical in application; grounded in observation; articulated in manuscript, revised via feedback, and formally published in book or pamphlet; further revised in later editions or through the research of others. While the 1726 Journal offered an early glimpse of Franklin as a scientist, he truly developed as a scientist in the 1730s and 1740s, using instruments purchased by the Library Company of Pennsylvania, attending scientific lectures, reading in the scientific literature, and attempting his first experiments. In 1744 he published his first contribution to scientific literature, “An Account of the New Invented Pennsylvanian Fire‐Places,” in which he promoted his design of a fireplace that used convection to circulate heated air through a room more abundantly. The result was a practical device, but it was based on Franklin’s reading on material phenomena and his own experiments. Later in life, he directed his reading and experiments to other inventions like bifocals, the glass armonica, and the flexible urinary catheter.

His research on electricity was his most important scientific work, not simply because it revolutionized the field but because it established his credentials as the first New World scientist of note. It is difficult for us to conceive how revolutionary Franklin’s work on electricity was. In the backwoods of the British empire, using tools that were invented to fit the need, without a laboratory, without a formal education, he deduced the nature of a phenomenon that could not be seen (except in its disappearing aftereffects on the eye) or held or measured. Beginning in 1747 and working with a group of collaborators, Franklin demonstrated that the electrical “fluid” existed in two states (positive and negative), that it could be repulsed or attracted by different objects, and that it was the same phenomenon as lightning, a fact that (along with his experiments on “drawing” the electrical fluid) enabled him to invent the lightning rod, a typically practical outcome of his intellectual work (1987: 600–604). Also, typically, Franklin first stated his ideas on electricity in manuscript, in this case in letters to his London patron Peter Collinson. Collinson had provided Franklin with some scientific apparatuses, and he served as Franklin’s point of contact and spokesperson in the Royal Society of England, which until then had little interest in the work of colonial scientists. Collinson enabled the publication of Franklin’s letters as Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America (1751), four editions of which would be published before Franklin’s death.

As a product of print culture, Experiments and Observations is typically Franklinian. It exists as a book, but it was actually written as a series of letters recounting his experiments. (In a similar fashion, as mentioned earlier, Franklin’s Autobiography looks to us like a book, but Franklin never oversaw its production as a unified text.) This book exists in multiple versions: manuscript letters, first edition, expanded later editions. Not only was electricity “fluid” for Franklin, ideas were too. And finally, from the perspective of literary studies, this book appears to be extra‐literary. It is science, not literature. But as is true in the other areas I have demarcated, Franklin’s scientific writing rewards critical analysis as literature, as the scholarship of Joyce Chaplin (2006) and Laura Rigal (2011) has shown. In ways I have already discussed, Franklin’s work as a writer is always situated in a rhetorical framework; he was always writing to someone or to address a topic. For that reason alone, his written work always requires interpretation. As well, however, it is open to a variety of theoretical approaches that scholars and critics have only recently begun to employ. Much of Franklin’s work as a writer is still waiting to be read.

Franklin and Print Culture

Franklin was a printer, editor, and writer for all of his adult life. One might say he was saturated in and by print culture. Franklin himself makes this point repeatedly in his Autobiography. He mentions reading a book on swimming, and then he not only learns the strokes described by the author, but also invents his own strokes. He reads books arguing against Deism and is convinced instead by the strength of the arguments being refuted. He impresses older men who serve as his patron because he owns a lot of books, or because he has read a lot of books. When he recounts running away to Philadelphia at the age of 17, he mentions a drunken Dutchman who happened to fall out of a boat in which they were traveling. The most interesting thing is that the Dutchman happened to have in his pocket a copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progess, “my old favourite” (1987: 1326).

His immersion in the world of print took many forms, besides printing, writing, and editing. In 1731, Franklin and some friends formed the Library Company of Philadelphia, a joint‐stock venture in which the capital raised from shares was used to buy books, which could be borrowed by the subscribers. Franklin did not invent this concept of a subscription library, but it was an effective strategy for a young entrepreneur on a limited budget. We also know from his letters that Franklin often borrowed books from friends and acquaintances, and that he read books owned by the printing houses at which he worked and by booksellers whom he knew. As he grew wealthier in the 1740s, he began to purchase more and more books. He visited booksellers, ordered books from abroad, and attended book auctions. When he returned to Philadelphia for the final time in 1785, he had to build an addition to his house in order to make room for his library of more than 4000 volumes.

Franklin’s fine library was a visible sign of his immersion in the world of print. At the same time, it and the Library Company gesture toward a world beyond or beside print, the “republic of letters,” the imagined international community of authors and readers who idealized the free exchange of ideas, beliefs, and convictions. Franklin’s library contained many books written by people with whom he worked, conversed, and corresponded outside the world of print. I have already pointed out how Franklin’s published work was sometimes the product of exchanged letters and revised editions, as his ideas developed outside of print culture. The world of print and the republic of letters were not equivalent, although each informed the other. Franklin inhabited both.

Thus his subscription library itself grew out of the Junto, the social and intellectual club for mutual improvement formed by Franklin in 1727. The Junto met weekly, debating on morals and politics, exchanging knowledge about business affairs, and discussing civic improvements. Like many other such groups in Europe in the eighteenth century, the Junto cultivated the modes of communication favored by men who belonged to the loose republic of letters: conversation, conviviality, wit. The letter was the preferred mode of written communication. We see in Franklin’s book on electricity the convergence of the two realms: letters written to a friend and intended for broader circulation among the cognoscenti; those letters then arranged and published as a book for purchase by the broader public.

Franklin belonged to other clubs, although belonging was not always a requisite. Men passed in and out of towns, and since towns of any size were likely to have a club, they used their friends to network when traveling. Franklin probably belonged to a club in Philadelphia as early as 1724; he visited several clubs in London during his first trip there (1724–1726); he founded the Junto in 1727; and he joined the Philadelphia branch of the Freemasons in 1731. There were many others in his life in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. These clubs were always social and depending on membership they might be more or less intellectual or business‐oriented. They are, of course, simply versions of intellectual societies like the American Philosophical Society, proposed by Franklin in 1743. When Franklin was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in London in 1756 it was on the strength of his printed work, but his election meant that from then on he could participate in the meetings of the Royal Society. In time, Franklin would be elected to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, the Royal Society in Gottingen, and the Batavian Society in Holland.

Franklin in Contemporary Scholarship

Scholars like David Shields (2008) have taught us to read Franklin in the context of the republic of letters. Indeed, in light of the ongoing publication of the Yale edition of Franklin’s works, scholars have reassessed Franklin from a number of intriguing perspectives. Joyce Chaplin (2006) has analyzed his work as an innovator in the new science of experimentation. Ralph Frasca (2006) has studied Franklin’s printing networks, tracing in the lines of affiliation maintained by Franklin a strategy for spreading virtue through the American colonies. Edwin Wolf and Kevin Hayes (2006) have reassembled Franklin’s library in bibliographic form, rediscovering Franklin’s method of arranging books on his shelf and tracking down the titles of books he owned. James Green and Peter Stallybrass (2006) have used book history and bibliography to consider Franklin’s remarkable career as a printer, the job he first held and the one that early formed him, but one that is sometimes forgotten in the glare of his later achievements. Carla Mulford (2015) has read Franklin’s writings on politics, economics, and society to argue that Franklin’s youthful reading prepared him to see the logical ends of empire – the continued subjugation of the colonies – as early as the 1750s.

There are several broad patterns in this recent scholarship on Franklin. Many scholars continue to build upon our long‐standing interest in his biography. Because of the tercentenary of Franklin’s birth in 2006, a number of traditional biographies appeared around that time (Morgan 2002; Wood 2004). But scholars have taken many other innovative biographical approaches, utilizing a wide range of approaches such as cultural studies, anthropology, and feminism. So, for example, scholars have studied Franklin in the context of his enemies (Middlekauff 1998), in his relations with his little‐known sister (Lepore 2013), as an electrical experimenter (Schiffer 2003), and as a religious thinker who forwarded a kind of broad theistic perspectivism (Walters 1999). Another group of scholars has reread Franklin through the lens of identity politics. For example, David Waldstreicher (2004) has reread Franklin in the context of freedom, slavery, and indentured servitude in eighteenth‐century America. Franklin himself was, of course, an indentured servant at one point; he was the only founding father to have experienced servitude. Yet, Waldstreicher (2004) argues, Franklin was not simply the stout defender of freedom and liberty that he claimed to be; throughout his career, he used the labor of others (free and unfree), framed questions of liberty as if they were separate from slavery, and participated in the creation of a capitalist system that depended upon unfair labor practices. Another example is Susan Kalter’s (2005) edited and annotated edition of the eighteenth‐century treaties between the British colonies and the Indigenous Indian nations, originally printed and sold by Franklin. Long out of print, these treaties in historical context reveal Franklin as a complex negotiator and mediator between cultures.

Almost all of this scholarship on Franklin depends on the work of bibliographers and book historians. We are still learning about how Franklin did business as a publisher and how he was embedded in the network of publishers, editors, and writers in the eighteenth century. Frasca’s (2006) intriguing study of Franklin’s printing networks is one of example of this kind of work, as is Green and Stallybrass’s (2006) short study of Franklin as a printer and editor.

From a political perspective, another group of scholars continues a long‐standing effort to assess where Franklin stands in political‐historical contexts. Was he a liberal? A republican? A conservative? Mulford (2015), for example, reads Franklin as an early modern liberal, and sees him as questioning the ends of empire as early as the 1750s. But for several reasons, including the fact that Franklin did not write systematically about politics, his views can be difficult to pin down. Indeed, another group of scholars, working from the perspective of philosophy, has read Franklin as an early pragmatist. Scholars like James Campbell (1999) emphasize the way that Franklin approached many topics attuned to specific circumstances, willing to negotiate and compromise, and determined to achieve pragmatic solutions. These scholars note that Franklin often wrote about morality and moral choices, but seldom about religion. They see him as a philosopher, first and foremost, and specifically as an early pragmatist, initiating a mode of thinking that aligns his work with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.

From different perspectives, scholars like Mulford (2015), Campbell (1999), and many others have in a sense taken up the question of Franklin’s “American‐ness.” Born in Boston, often self‐identifying as a Philadelphian, for most of his life a subject of Great Britain, living much of his adult life abroad in London and Paris, Franklin seems more global than many of the founding fathers, some of whom never left North America. What makes him an American? Is it more useful to think of him as a cosmopolitan citizen of the Atlantic world? As a provincial early American colonist? Or is this sense of Franklin being an “American” a result of a later rereading of him and his work (by Americans)? One of the tercentenary biographies takes this question as its title (Wood 2004).

These questions about Franklin’s identity have also been taken up by a number of scholars interested in the fundamental question of who Franklin “really” was. Franklin has seemed very slippery to many readers in the last half century. Prior to the 1960s, readers were more confident in pinning him down. Earlier, I cited D.H. Lawrence’s confident assertion about Franklin’s character in the Autobiography. Beginning with the rereading of Franklin’s Autobiography in the 1960s, however, scholars have been fascinated by the sense that Franklin was always projecting a fictional persona, not simply in the different parts of his memoir, but in all of his written work – and, perhaps, in all of his dealings with his contemporaries. As his work continues to be published in more fulsome and better‐edited volumes, his identity has seemed to sprawl. He had a hand in dozens of enterprises, wrote in many different genres and formats and modes, made intriguing statements about the differences between written and spoken words, and seldom published definitive statements, or even books that offer a sense of weighty finality. He seems, to some, to have no center. With the emergence of postmodern theory in the 1960s and 1970s, Franklin has even appeared presciently postmodern to some readers. Scholars like Ed Cahill (2008) have utilized the methods of cultural studies to try to understand that slippery self; others have used psychoanalysis.

These approaches offer still‐productive avenues for scholars of Franklin and his writings that have not yet been played out. One fruitful future direction is certainly the broader reading of his writings as fictions, constructs in language, or literature. Literary scholars have been dazzled by the Autobiography, emphasizing it in articles, books, and anthologies at the expense of the hundreds of other works in Franklin’s oeuvre – letters, pamphlets, satires, bagatelles, scientific treatises, and on and on. It is easy to understand why. The memoir is a remarkable work of art, both in its parts and in its larger (unfinished) whole. It stands as a key work in the emergence of autobiography as a genre in Western literature. And it engages students remarkably well. Franklin as he presents himself in his memoir is witty, engaging, self‐deprecating, and relatively succinct, virtues when one reads Franklin in the context of a contemporary like Jonathan Edwards.

But the Autobiography represents only a very small proportion of Franklin’s written and published work. A much broader range of Franklin’s writing deserves to be read as literature. At the very least, as I remarked above, Franklin was always writing within rhetorical situations, and all of his work demands to be read as a form of rhetoric. Add to that his penchant for using pseudonyms, adopting playful or serious personas, using humor or satire to create particular effects, alluding to or challenging or refuting other writers and texts, testing ideas in manuscript conversations, and tinkering with the ideas of others. Though his writing is different from the fictions of the novel as it was developing in the eighteenth century and from the formal literariness of poetry and drama, it is always a construct open to the tools of literary and cultural analysis. We have yet to truly appreciate Franklin’s work as literature.

References

  1. Anderson, D. (2012). The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  2. Cahill, E. (2008). “Benjamin Franklin’s Interiors.” Early American Studies, 6(1): 27–58.
  3. Campbell, J. (1999). Recovering Benjamin Franklin. Chicago: Open Court Press.
  4. Chaplin, J. (2006). The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. New York: Basic Books.
  5. Franklin, B. (1987). Benjamin Franklin: Writings, ed. J.A. L. Lemay. New York: Library of America.
  6. Franklin, B. (1993). “1726 Journal.” In Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. O. Seavey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 190–221.
  7. Frasca, R. (2006). Benjamin Franklin’s Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
  8. Green, J.N. and Stallybrass, P. (2006). Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press.
  9. Kalter, S. (ed.) (2005). Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations: The Treaties of 1736–1762. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
  10. Kant, I. (1995). “What is Enlightenment?” In The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. I. Kramnick. New York: Penguin, pp. 1–7.
  11. Lawrence, D.H. (1923/1977). Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Penguin.
  12. Lepore, J. (2013). Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. New York: Knopf.
  13. Middlekauff, R. (1998). Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  14. Morgan, E. (2002). Benjamin Franklin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  15. Mulford, C. (2015). Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  16. Pope, A. (1993). Alexander Pope, ed. P. Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  17. Rigal, L. (2011). “Benjamin Franklin, the Science of Flow, and the Legacy of the Enlightenment.” In A Companion to Benjamin Franklin, ed. D. Waldstreicher. New York: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 308–334.
  18. Sayre, R.F. (1963). “The Worldly Franklin and the Provincial Critics.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4(4): 512–524.
  19. Schiffer, M.B. (2003). Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  20. Shields, D.S. (2008). “Franklin in the Republic of Letters.” In The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin, ed. C. Mulford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 50–62.
  21. Waldstreicher, D. (2004). Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution. New York: Hill & Wang.
  22. Walters, K. (1999). Benjamin Franklin and his Gods. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  23. Wolf, E. and Hayes, K.J. (2006). The Library of Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society.
  24. Wood, G.A. (2004). The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin.

Further Reading

  1. Franklin, B. (1959–). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. L. Labaree et. al. 41 vols. to date. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. The superbly edited modern edition of Franklin’s papers.
  2. Franklin, B. (2006–). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. https://franklinpapers.org/ (accessed 9 May 2019). Online, searchable edition of the texts of the Papers, but without annotation or notes.
  3. Mulford, C. (ed.) (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  4. Van Doren, C. (1938/1991). Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin. Dated, but still the best one‐volume biography.
  5. Waldstreicher, D. (ed.) (2011). A Companion to Benjamin Franklin. New York: Wiley Blackwell.

See also: chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 8 (migration, exile, imperialism); chapter 15 (writing lives); chapter 21 (manuscripts, manufacts, and social authorship); chapter 22 (cosmopolitan correspondences); chapter 23 (revolutionary print culture, 1763–1776); chapter 24 (founding documents); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods).