3
It is a truism that one travels to learn about home, but Franklin was young, and consequently it came as a surprise that the most important lesson he learned in going to London was what sort of person William Keith was. The lesson commenced before his ship cleared the Delaware River. Right down to the dock the governor continued to pledge full support for Franklin’s printing project; he would provide not merely the letter of credit for the £100 Franklin’s inventory required but reference letters to friends well placed to see the project profitably started. Repeatedly Franklin called at the governor’s house to receive the letters; repeatedly he was told that the demands of duty had prevented the governor from drafting them. Come again next week and they would definitely be ready.
He did; they were not. He did again; they were not. Understandably, he began to worry. As luck would have it, the departure of the annual ship was several times postponed. Though this afforded more time for the governor to fulfill his pledge, it threw a cloud of additional uncertainty over the entire venture.
Finally on November 5, 1724, the London Hope cast off and drifted down the Delaware. The governor’s promised letters still had not appeared. Franklin boarded at the last moment only on the express assurance of the governor’s personal secretary that the letters would be supplied at New Castle, a downstream destination for which the governor himself was about to depart and which he would reach before the ship did. Even as the ship was tying up at New Castle, Franklin leaped ashore in search of the governor. Once more the governor’s secretary intercepted him, saying again the governor was extremely busy. But he would include the letters with the rest of the official correspondence, to be loaded at the last moment.
This seemed a plausible, if not persuasive, explanation, and was made the more so when Colonel French, the governor’s Delaware friend, personally carried the official packet aboard. He greeted Franklin warmly; this had the double effect of reassuring Franklin about Keith’s bona fides and elevating the young man in the opinion of the other passengers, who heretofore had deemed him unworthy of notice. He would have been even more reassured had he been allowed to see the letters, but the captain, concerned that their numerous delays would place them in mid-Atlantic when the gales of winter began to blow, refused to risk any further delay. Franklin could not go through the packet now. But if he would be patient, he would have any letters meant for his hand long before they landed at London. “I was satisfied for the present,” Franklin recalled, “and we proceeded on our voyage.”
Franklin’s first ocean crossing was a tempestuous one. The winter weather did indeed catch them out; wind, rain, sleet, and snow battered the vessel and kept the passengers below decks most of the way. To his satisfaction—and, as it turned out, his lifelong convenience—Franklin discovered that stormy seas had little effect on his stomach or head. He employed the time and the close quarters to improve his acquaintance with certain individuals who had taken notice of him when Colonel French did. Indeed, these men called him out of steerage to berth with them in the cabin; they shared their victuals and all made merry together. “We had a sociable company …” Franklin said, “and lived uncommonly well.”
As the craft entered the English Channel the captain kept his promise and allowed Franklin to sort through the Pennsylvania pouch. To his surprise he found no letters bearing his name. Thinking this an oversight, he selected several addressed to individuals evidently connected to the governor’s pledge and to the errand that had brought him hither. One such letter was to the king’s printer, another to a London stationer. Franklin could not well open the letters and discover for certain, but he assumed that the governor therein explained this fine young man’s mission and pledged political and financial support.
Upon landing at London on Christmas Eve of 1724, Franklin looked up the addressees. The first he chanced upon was the stationer, to whom he delivered the missive as from Governor Keith. The stationer looked puzzled. I don’t know the man, he said—thereby puzzling Franklin. Opening the letter, the stationer exclaimed, “Oh, this is from Riddlesden.”
William Riddlesden, as Franklin probably did not know, was a convicted felon who had been transported to Maryland in lieu of prison; as Franklin knew full well, Riddlesden had continued in his conniving ways in America, sucking John Read into one of his confidence schemes, to the persisting detriment of Sarah and their children. The Maryland assembly had conferred upon him the distinction of being officially proclaimed “a person of a matchless character in infamy.”
This opinion was shared by the stationer who now read the letter Franklin delivered. “I have lately found him to be a complete rascal,” he said (in Franklin’s reconstruction of the conversation), “and I will have nothing to do with him, nor receive any letters from him.” With this he thrust the letter back into Franklin’s hand and turned to greet a customer.
As he left the stationer’s shop, Franklin looked closely at the other letters. He realized that these were not from the governor either. For the first time he began seriously to doubt whether the mailbag contained any letters from Keith on his behalf, or even whether Keith had ever intended to write any such letters. Consulting Thomas Denham, one of his cabinmates and a prosperous Pennsylvania merchant who had known Keith for some time, Franklin learned that the governor had a habit of promising much and delivering little. Denham laughed aloud when Franklin mentioned the letter of credit Keith was to have sent. Sir William, Denham said, had no credit to give.
This lesson in human nature came as a shock. When he had awakened that morning, Franklin fancied himself an independent artisan about to embark on a brilliant career. Now he was simply an out-of-work journeyman a very long way from home, with no place to stay and no friends within three thousand miles.
Actually, he did have one friend, although this friend soon proved more trouble than any enemy. James Ralph had accompanied Franklin to London, determined, after his success in the small charade he and Franklin had committed against Charles Osborne, to seek artistic fame in the capital of English letters. He did not confide his plans to his wife, who remained in Philadelphia with their small child; instead he told her he was going to London to establish commercial connections that would allow him to set up a merchandising business upon his return. She and her relatives doubtless deemed this an improvement over idle versifying and bade him bon voyage. But no sooner had the London Hope arrived at the city of its name than Ralph informed Franklin he was not going back. He could not abide his in-laws, he said. His future lay in England.
Disappointingly for Ralph, and unluckily for Franklin, that future was slow to unfold. He initially thought to broaden from written art to performance; approaching a local theater troupe, he inquired about acting. The director auditioned him briefly before pronouncing that literature could not spare his gifts. Ralph thereupon proposed to write a weekly paper, a competitor to the Spectator, for a rival publisher. The publisher, however, could not be convinced that Ralph’s talent warranted the terms he was demanding. Ralph lowered his sights again, applying for work as a clerk and copyist for the stationers and lawyers who crowded London’s Temple district. He was told no openings existed.
Ralph had arrived in London with empty pockets, having spent his last on the passage from America. His failure to find work extended his impecunious period. So he imposed on Franklin to underwrite his portion of a room they shared on the street called Little Britain, to the north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One of their neighbors was a young woman they both found attractive; Ralph, the older and more worldly of the two, beat Franklin to her favors. When she moved to other quarters, Ralph moved in with her. For a time he lived off her earnings as a milliner, but when these proved insufficient to support him, her, and her young daughter, he resolved once more to get work. He advertised himself as a schoolmaster and indeed set up an establishment of learning in the countryside, in Berkshire. He acquired some dozen pupils, a modest income—and a new name. He had not abandoned his literary ambitions, and, evidently fearing that such a low post as schoolmaster might be held against a budding genius, he borrowed his friend’s name. Franklin learned this fact upon receiving a letter from Ralph in which the latter explained his circumstances and requested that any reply be addressed to “Mr. Franklin, Schoolmaster.”
His family name was common enough that Franklin did not feel obliged to object to its borrowing—any more than he had objected to Ralph’s borrowing of his money. He calculated that he would eventually get his name back; as for the money, that seemed to have slipped down the same hole that had swallowed the generosity he extended to John Collins.
Yet Ralph was not without collateral of sorts. His absence in Berkshire left his paramour, the madam milliner, in distress both emotional and financial. Her relationship with Ralph had cost her friends and a job. She knew Franklin as an easy mark for a hard tale; with tears, sighs, and doubtless the well-timed coquettish glance, she took up where Ralph had left off fishing in Franklin’s purse.
Yet Franklin was not a complete naïf, at least not on this point. He favored her requests for money, then made a request of his own. As he phrased it later: “Presuming on my importance to her, I attempted familiarities.”
The vigor of his attempt exceeded its welcome. The initiative was “repulsed with a proper resentment,” forcing Franklin to withdraw. The miscue cost him more than embarrassment. The woman informed Ralph of the real Mr. Franklin’s improper advance, prompting Ralph to declare his friendship with Franklin ended and his financial obligations canceled.
Franklin felt himself in no position to make an issue of his loss. As he was learning to do, he philosophized that this was all for the best. He never would have seen the money anyway; nothing had been sacrificed save his good reputation in the eyes of a woman whose own reputation was hardly the finest, and of a friend who was no true friend. “In the loss of his friendship,” Franklin concluded of Ralph, “I found myself relieved from a burden.”
With almost equal ease Franklin dispensed with the burden of his relationship with Deborah Read. Perhaps his eyes were opened by Ralph’s flippant abandonment of his wife and child; perhaps the allure of the millineress distracted him; perhaps London simply enticed him in a way staid Philadelphia never had. Certainly he was stunned by his abrupt return to poverty; after the promises, explicit or otherwise, he had made about his imminent success, he probably did not want to face Sarah Read, let alone Debbie. Finally, as much of his adult life would demonstrate, Franklin possessed a lively libido, which now hindered faithfulness to one so far away, when other females were close at hand. Debbie soon slipped from his mind. During his entire stay he wrote her only once, and then merely to inform her that he would not be returning soon.
London in the early eighteenth century was enough to turn the head of any young man. The city that would play a central role in Franklin’s life still carried scars and memories from its twin scourges of the 1660s, the plague and the great fire. Puritan types (the Cotton Mathers who stayed in old England) attributed the pestilence and the holocaust to the ungodly and often downright lewd celebrations that greeted the restoration of the Stuarts after the death of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. The plague began during the spring of 1665, creeping out of the slums of the city and spreading silently—except for the wailing of friends and relatives, before they themselves succumbed—across every district and neighborhood. By summer thousands of men, women, and children were dying each week. Those who could fled the city for the countryside in hopes of eluding the invisible destroyer. (Isaac Newton, sitting out the plague in Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall from a tree and extrapolated its trajectory into a theory of universal gravitation.) Persons too poor to leave kept to their houses, fearing contact with carriers of the disease. Taverns, inns, and theaters were closed by decree of the frantic civic authorities; a curfew reinforced the popular desire to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone who might be a carrier.
A hundred thousand souls went to their reward, and grass was growing in the streets by the time the great fire of 1666 brought the plague to an end. The sight of this new disaster turned discouragement to despair. “Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!, such as happily the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor be outdone till the universal conflagration of it,” wrote an eyewitness.
All the sky was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame. The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it…. The stones of Paul’s flew like granados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness.
Its horrible destructiveness apart, the fire had two positive consequences. The first was the sterilization of the city against the plague, in what was an inadvertent and extreme but nonetheless successful application of the principle of burning down the house to get rid of the rats. The second was the creation of an elaborate system of men and machines to fight future fires. As Daniel Defoe observed in his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, written during the period of Franklin’s stay in England, “No city in the world is so well furnished for the extinguishing fires when they happen.” Trained firemen, organized into squadrons with special uniforms and insignias, operated pumping engines that drew water from the Thames and other streams and directed it through hoses onto the flames. Iron hooks on ropes were employed to pull down burning buildings; in stubborn cases gunpowder was detonated to blast the fuel beyond the fire’s reach.
The performance of the firefighters obviously impressed Franklin, who after his return to Philadelphia set about organizing similar crews. Other aspects of city life were less worthy of imitation but hardly less fascinating to a lad from the provinces. London afforded endless amusements, some innocuous, others dangerous, still others indicative of the often brutal nature of life in that era. In the category of the at-least-potentially harmful—to body and perhaps to soul—were the prostitutes who put in the shade any on offer in Philadelphia (let alone Boston). “As we stumbled along,” wrote a chronicler of the period, “my friend bid me take notice of a shop wherein sat three or four very provoking damsels, with as much velvet on their backs as would have made a burying-pall for a country parish, or a holiday coat for a physician, being glorified at bottom with gold fringes, that I thought at first they might be parsons’ daughters, who had borrowed their fathers’ pulpit-clothes to use as scarfs, and go a-visiting in; each with as many patches in her market-place as are spots in a leopard’s skin or freckles in the face of a Scotchman.” The writer inquired of his friend who or what these ladies were. He answered that “they were a kind of first-rate punks by their rigging, of about a guinea purchase.” The writer asked his friend how he knew they were prostitutes (“lechery-layers,” was the term he used). “He replied, because they were sitting in a head-dresser’s shop; which, he says, is as seldom to be found without a whore as a bookseller’s shop in Paul’s Churchyard without a parson.”
Leisured gentlemen partook of the services of such entrepreneurs of intimacy; when satisfied in this regard they might, along with persons of lesser means, seek diversion at the justice court at Bridewell, where they would watch assorted transgressors—including women and girls—being flogged for their poverty and related misdeeds. Another favorite stop was the royal hospital at Bedlam—a corruption, in at least two regards, of “Bethlehem”—where guests would laugh at the antics of the lunatics. So popular was mental illness as a spectator sport that rules for visitors had to be posted: “No person do give the inmates strong drink, wine, tobacco, or spirits; nor be permitted to sell any such thing in the hospital.” Public pillories at Charing Cross and executions at Newgate drew consistent and enthusiastic crowds; persons unlucky enough to miss the judicial killings could examine the decorporated heads displayed on Temple Bar, otherwise known as London’s Golgotha.
Spectators who preferred their cruelty inflicted on nonhuman species could take in the combat among various animals at Hockley-in-the-Hole. A handbill forecast the fun:
This is to give notice to all gentlemen, gamesters, and others, that on this present Monday is a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate market, against one from Honylane market … Likewise a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him; also a mad ass to be baited, with variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. Beginning exactly at three of the clock.
Even unintentionally, London life could be cruel. At inns and public houses the guests ate out of a common dish; armed with their own cutlery, they speared for the choicest morsels on what occasionally turned out to be a first-come, first-severed basis. The Grub Street Journal reported, “Last Wednesday a gentleman met with an odd accident in helping himself to some roast chicken. He found that he had conveyed two joints of another gentleman’s forefinger to his plate together with the wing which he had just taken off.”
That the digit-deprived gentleman did not complain more loudly may have owed to the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol in which Londoners swam from morning till night. Like all large cities, London suffered serious problems of public sanitation, exemplified perhaps most odiously, although hardly uniquely, by the Fleet River, which ran as an open sewer to the Thames. The authorities regularly railed against the popular habit of discharging human, animal and vegetable waste into the stream; that they had to do so on such a regular basis betrayed their lack of success at compelling compliance. Not until the 1760s was the problem solved, or at least covered over, when the Fleet River became Fleet Street.
Partly as a health measure—to avoid drinking contaminated water—Londoners quaffed alcoholic beverages of all proofs and flavors. They drank beer with breakfast, perhaps following a dram of sherry as an eye-opener; more beer as the morning progressed, perhaps interspersed with brandy to ward off the English chills; ale with lunch; raisin or elder wine with afternoon tea (which was a relative novelty and the principal alternative to alcoholic beverages, with the boiling of the water serving to kill the microorganisms that infested the water supply); grape wine with dinner, followed by punch and liqueurs of one sort or another—“White and Wormwood,” “Ratafia,” “Nectar and Ambrosia,” “Rosolio”—till bedtime.
Not surprisingly, public intoxication was common. “We continued drinking like horses, as the vulgar phrase is,” wrote one diarist, “and singing till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians. Whether this is inconsistent to the wise saying of Solomon let anyone judge, ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and he that is deceived thereby is not wise.”
Often the sots found their way to the theater, where they behaved no better. Crowded into the galleries and the pit, they made ribald jokes at the expense of the actors and, purchasing apples and oranges from the barker-women strolling the aisles between acts, hurled the fruit onto the stage. Alexander Pope, who was busy editing Shakespeare during Franklin’s London stay, decried the presence of the rabble:
The many-headed monster of the pit,
A senseless, worthless, and unhonour’d crowd,
Who, to disturb their betters mighty proud,
Clatt’ring their sticks before ten lines are spoke,
Call for the farce, the bear, and the black-joke.
Franklin frequented the theater and London’s various other diversions, initially in the company of James Ralph. In his own words, he “spent with Ralph a good deal of my earnings in going to plays and other places of amusement.” The velveted prostitutes were beyond his means, but he evidently engaged in what he afterward characterized vaguely as “foolish intrigues with low women.” (Even this characterization struck him, on second thought, as too concrete: having written it in the first draft of his autobiography, he proceeded to cross it out. That it referred specifically to prostitutes may be gleaned from the rest of the deleted description of his encounters with these “low women”: “which from the expence were rather more prejudicial to me than to them.”) If he visited the bear-baiting dens, it was probably as an onlooker rather than a player; neither then nor later did he manifest a gambling streak. As curious as the next person, he certainly saw prisoners in the pillory and convicts swinging from the scaffold. He retained all his fingers, a fact that attested either to his diffidence in the public pot or his dexterity.
The English affinity for alcohol he encountered on the streets, in the theaters, and especially in the workplace. Upon discovering the emptiness of Governor Keith’s promises, Franklin sought employment in the printing trade. Because London supported far more printers than all the American colonies together, there was no lack of work, and he soon accepted an offer from a man named Palmer, who had a shop in Bartholomew’s Close. There he remained for nearly a year, making a strong and favorable impression on his employer. Yet Palmer was unable to provide Franklin sufficient opportunity for advancement, and he left to take up with another printer, one who did a larger business.
This second house employed more than fifty men, allowing the proprietor, one Watts, to practice the sort of specialization that would be one hallmark of the industrial revolution, about to begin. Certain men specialized in press work, others in composing, still others in collating, binding, and so on. Franklin’s skills were sufficiently obvious that he had his choice of specialties; he initially chose the pressroom as a means of getting the physical exercise he was accustomed to as an everyday aspect of the work of print-shop employees in the less diversified colonial trade.
Partly on account of his youth, partly because of his well-muscled shoulders and back, partly because he sought out the heavy lifting where others did just the opposite, Franklin soon gained a reputation for strength. He typically carried two sets of heavy lead type, one in each hand, running up and down the stairs of Watts’s shop, where the other pressmen carried one at a time. Making this feat all the more remarkable in English eyes was that the young American accomplished it without the fortifying aid of the beer the others considered essential to their work. Franklin’s partner at the press drank a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with breakfast, a pint at midmorning, a pint with the midday meal, a pint in the afternoon, and a pint at day’s end.
Franklin later described this as “a detestable custom”; whether or not he thought it so at the time, he avoided it, on grounds of expense if nothing else. He rejected the argument that hard work required strong beer, saying that this was silly, that the food value of the beer could be no greater than the barley that went into it. And this food value could be obtained far more cheaply by eating bread, washed down with water. He pointed to himself as proof.
Franklin’s fellows in the pressroom could not deny that bread and water worked for him, but they declined to hazard their own health repeating his experiment. For some of them the resistance to change doubtless reflected what they took to be the positive side effects of perpetual semi-inebriation. To a certain extent the resistance revealed an unconscious wisdom that was greater than Franklin’s uninformed theorizing. Both Boston and Philadelphia were much smaller than London and had far fewer problems with public sanitation. Franklin had no idea of the risk he was taking drinking plain London water; those who refused to join him had a better idea, even if it was uneducated and informed by custom rather than science. (No one in London who valued health would have drunk out of the Thames the way Franklin drank out of the Delaware on his first day in Philadelphia.) By the evidence of his long and relatively infection-free life, Franklin had an immune system superior to most of what nature or society could throw in his face; despite the warnings of the other pressmen he thrived on his bread and water. They were not all so blessed; it was probably just as well they stuck to their beer.
Franklin’s arguments did not fail completely of effect. His employer Watts, having decided that as literate a fellow as Franklin was wasted slinging type sets and swinging the handles on the presses, decreed that Franklin must come upstairs to the composing room. Franklin did so, only to be greeted by the request, which soon became a demand, that he contribute five shillings to the common beer fund of the compositors. He refused on the dual ground that he did not drink the beer and that he had already paid below. His new fellows nominally accepted his refusal, not least since it was supported by Watts. But they engaged in constant mischief upon Franklin’s work, inserting errors into pages he had already proofed, misplacing his letters, and generally making his life trying and unproductive. When he complained, as a man they denied knowledge of his misfortunes, beyond attributing it to the “chapel ghost,” a mysterious being that haunted those not fully admitted to the local congregation, or “chapel,” of compositors. And sure enough, as soon as Franklin gave in—“convinced of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually,” his older self said—and paid up, the appeased spirit ceased its vexing.
Yet no sooner was Franklin admitted to full membership in the chapel than he began preaching heterodoxy. He convinced some of his colleagues to join him in swearing off beer (at least at work) and replacing it with hot-water gruel supplied by an inn nearby. (That the gruel was boiled may well have been significant in the success of Franklin’s experiment.) Not only did this save most of the money the men had been spending on beer, it left them clearheaded for their work (a more critical matter for compositors than for the pressmen). Between the muddle of the beer and its expense, those who resisted Franklin’s teaching often fell into debt, with several of them agreeing to pay him interest on money borrowed toward their brew. Thus he gained the twinned benefit of his prudence and their folly, and on Saturday nights collected not only his own wages but substantial portions of theirs. This evidence of his prudence, combined with his reliability (unlike his beer-drinking colleagues he never required a “St. Monday” holiday) and his facility at composition, prompted Watts to put him on the most important printing tasks, which carried a better piece-rate. “I went on now very agreeably,” Franklin remarked.
The impression Franklin made extended beyond the community of printers. At his first job, with Palmer, he received the assignment of setting the type for a new edition of William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. In the dawning Enlightenment, when enthusiasm for Newton was undermining reverence for revelation, Wollaston essayed to defend orthodoxy with the weapons of the skeptics. Nature, far from contradicting the essential teachings of received religion, in fact confirmed them, he said. An ungospeled savage, merely attuned to the natural order, would arrive at a moral code that differed in no fundamental from the code promulgated in the most learned pulpit.
Franklin, weighing Wollaston’s argument while he weighed the letters in which he set the book, judged that it failed at certain points. Not every nineteen-year-old would have felt moved to join such a metaphysical dispute, but Franklin by now clearly did not consider himself an ordinary nineteen-year-old. He wrote and printed an essay—A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain—correcting Wollaston.
Franklin approached his subject syllogistically, after the fashion of philosophers since Aristotle. God was reckoned to be “all wise, all good, all powerful.” “If He is all powerful, there can be nothing either existing or acting in the universe against or without his consent; and what He consents to must be good, because He is good; therefore evil doth not exist.” Franklin did not deny the existence of pain and suffering in the world, but rather than interpreting these as evil, he deemed them essentially figments of the human imagination. In a passage that reflected both his reading and his experience, Franklin dismissed the notion of happiness detached from unhappiness:
It is owing to their ignorance of the nature of pleasure and pain that the ancient heathens believed the idle fable of their Elysium, that state of uninterrupted ease and happiness. The thing is entirely impossible in nature! Are not the pleasures of the spring made such by the disagreeableness of the winter? Is not the pleasure of fair weather owing to the unpleasantness of foul? Certainly. Were it then always spring, were the fields always green and flourishing, and the weather constantly serene and fair, the pleasure would pall and die upon our hands; it would cease to be pleasure to us, when it is not ushered in by uneasiness.
Franklin went on to say something more striking. Not only were pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, indissolubly connected to each other, they were equally allocated among men. “Since pain naturally and infallibly produces a pleasure in proportion to it, every individual creature must, in any state of life, have an equal quantity of each.” From this it followed that no one was happier or unhappier than anyone else. “The monarch is not more happy than the slave, nor the beggar more miserable than Croesus.” More striking still, in the calculus of pleasure and pain the monarch and the slave were both on an equal footing with a rock. “Suppose A, B, and C, three distinct beings; A and B animate, capable of pleasure and pain, C an inanimate piece of matter, insensible of either. A receives ten degrees of pain, which are necessarily succeeded by ten degrees of pleasure; B receives fifteen of pain, and the consequent equal number of pleasure; C all the while lies unconcerned, and as he has not suffered the former, has no right to the latter. What can be more equal and just than this?”
To the obvious objection that the most cursory glance at human society showed some people to be happy while others were unhappy, Franklin rejoined that appearances deceived. “When we see riches, grandeur and a cheerful countenance, we easily imagine happiness accompanies them, when oftentimes ’tis quite otherwise; nor is a constantly sorrowful look, attended with continual complaints, an infallible indication of unhappiness.”
Having disposed of happiness and unhappiness, Franklin attacked the notion of the immortality of the soul. He identified the soul with consciousness and the ability to treat ideas absorbed by the senses (“The soul is a mere power or faculty of contemplating on and comparing those ideas”), and then argued that when consciousness ended, the soul ceased to exist. Perhaps the soul in some way attached itself to a new body and new ideas. “But that will in no way concern us who are now living, for the identity will be lost; it is no longer that same self but a new being.”
If temporal happiness was an illusion, and eternal happiness an impossibility, why should anyone strive for anything? Merely to avoid pain. The soul of an infant did not achieve consciousness (“it is as if it were not”) until it felt pain.
Thus is the machine set on work; this is life. We are first moved by pain, and the whole succeeding course of our lives is but one continued series of action with a view to be freed from it. As fast as we have excluded one uneasiness another appears; otherwise the motion would cease. If a continual weight is not applied, the clock will stop. And as soon as the avenues of uneasiness to the soul are choked up or cut off, we are dead, we think and act no more.
Like most such attempts to prove the unprovable, Franklin’s effort revealed more about the author than about the subject. Indeed, it revealed more about the author than he cared to have revealed. Although his employer, Palmer, was impressed by the ingenuity of Franklin’s argumentation, he decried Franklin’s conclusions as abominable. This reaction prompted Franklin to reconsider. In his autobiography he characterized various mistakes of his life as “errata”; regarding this episode he asserted, “My printing this pamphlet was another erratum.” Long before then he had burned all but the few copies already delivered to friends.
It was meaningful that Franklin said his printing the pamphlet, rather than the reasoning of the pamphlet, was the erratum. The pamphlet was a tour de force of logic, another indication of the emerging genius of the author. Some of its premises were open to question—which simply indicated that the genius was self-taught and lacked some life experience and the judgment it brings. But the reasoning placed Franklin on par with men much older than himself and more versed in the argumentative arts.
In time he would recant his conclusions about the nonexistence of evil and futility of striving for happiness. But at the moment what bothered him was the bad impression his essay made. A young man alone in the world, dependent on the goodwill of others, could not afford the stigma of gross unorthodoxy, however grossly unorthodox his beliefs might be. A reader of the Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity could readily conclude that if the author were not already an atheist, he would be soon. God was less a real presence in this tract than a rhetorical device. In many ways London in the 1720s was more tolerant than Philadelphia, which in turn was more tolerant than Boston. But London’s tolerance had its limits, and Franklin was in no position to push them.
Others were, however, and they found much to praise in Franklin’s pamphlet. A surgeon named William Lyons, who in his spare time practiced philosophy, read Franklin’s essay and at once demanded to meet this brilliant young fellow. On doing so, he escorted Franklin to his favorite alehouse and introduced the lad to his circle of intellectual friends. Among these was Bernard Mandeville—“a most facetious entertaining companion,” in Franklin’s words—who had written The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. This work outraged moralists and made Mandeville a minor hero among those who liked to tweak conventional conscience; not surprisingly, its author saw in Franklin a kindred spirit who might carry the fight forward. Another member of the circle was Henry Pemberton, a friend of Isaac Newton. Pemberton delighted Franklin by promising to introduce him to the great scientist; he disappointed Franklin by failing to fulfill his promise.
Even as he gained a reputation as a philosophical wunderkind, Franklin made friends by his other gifts. One of his printing colleagues at Watts’s was a young man named Wygate, a lover of knowledge after Franklin’s heart and a bit of a linguist as well. But certain practical arts escaped him, including the art of swimming. He engaged Franklin to teach him and another friend. The pupils were apt and in a short time exhibited remarkable proficiency. Word spread of Franklin’s skill as a teacher and his prowess in the water; one day, returning by boat from Chelsea, several acquaintances insisted that Franklin demonstrate. He stripped, dove into the water, and put on a bravura performance. He showed off various strokes and positions, behaving, to all appearances, as though he had been born in the water. Matching the speed of the boat, he covered more than three miles before taking his watery bow.
After this feat word spread still farther about the talented American. A Sir William Wyndham sent for Franklin and offered a handsome fee for teaching his two sons, about to embark on a long journey, to swim. Franklin was flattered and said yes in principle, but a scheduling conflict prevented the lessons from actually taking place. Despite this disappointment, Franklin inferred that if he so wished, he might make a fair living introducing the sons of the gentry to water sports.
Meanwhile Franklin showed a knack for ingratiating himself to the fairer sex—or rather, considering his failure with James Ralph’s lover, to that segment of the sex that had once been fairer but now was less so. After leaving Palmer’s print shop for Watts’s, Franklin moved to a more convenient residence in Duke Street. His landlady was an elderly widow who reduced his rent on account of his being a strong young man whose presence might ward off intruders. She soon became smitten with Franklin. For his part, he found her delightful. She knew “1000 anecdotes as far back as the times of Charles the Second,” he explained. “She was lame in her knees with the gout, and therefore seldom stirred out of her room, so sometimes wanted company; and hers was so highly amusing to me that I was sure to spend an evening with her whenever she desired it.” The two would split an anchovy for dinner, laid out on a piece of bread with butter; they would wash this down with a shared pint of ale. As Franklin gradually formed a plan to return to Philadelphia, he desired to save money for his passage; he told her of cheaper lodgings he knew where he would have to pay but two shillings per week. She would not hear of his leaving, and reduced his rent from three shillings six pence to one shilling six. He stayed.
In the garret of this same house lived another old woman, of seventy years and never married. A Roman Catholic, she had been sent abroad to become a nun—there being no nunneries in England since the time of Henry VIII. But her destination did not agree with her, and she returned home, resolved to be a conventless nun. She donated her inherited estate to the poor and learned to subsist on the scantest pension. Her diet consisted of gruel; the only fire she allowed herself in her chilly attic was that required to cook the gruel. Despite the deprivation, she was healthy and by all appearances quite content. Franklin found her a most pleasing conversationalist. He also found her an object lesson in the virtues of frugality—“another instance on how small an income life and health may be supported.”
Frugality was more on Franklin’s mind than ever as the months passed. London’s undeniable excitements lost their appeal upon continued exposure, and America beckoned. “I was grown tired of London, remembered with pleasure the happy months I had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it.” He began saving every farthing and seeking other means of speeding his return. One of his shipmates from the eastward passage, Thomas Denham, the Quaker merchant, explained that he was about to head back with a cargo of merchandise. Knowing Franklin to be an enterprising fellow with a good head, he offered to employ him as a clerk and potential partner. Initially Franklin would keep the books; later he might venture forth and earn commissions of his own. The prospect appealed to Franklin, both for the future profits and for the sooner arrival home. He quit his printing job at Watts’s and helped Denham gather his goods for export.
They shipped out in late July 1726, aboard the Berkshire, a vessel in which Denham had a half share. Riding down the Thames, they anchored overnight at Gravesend, where Franklin took the opportunity to go ashore and inspect the countryside, which was agreeable and open, and meet the people, who were neither. “This Gravesend is a cursed biting place,” he recorded in his journal of the voyage, “the chief dependence of the people being the advantage they make of imposing upon strangers. If you buy any thing of them, and give half what they ask, you pay twice as much as the thing is worth. Thank God we shall leave it tomorrow.”
The Gravesenders presumably would have disputed Franklin’s characterization; its significance lies less in its accuracy (or inaccuracy) than in the sharpness of its tone. This in turn follows from the fact that the journal of this voyage affords the student of Franklin’s life the first unedited, unfiltered rendition of Franklin’s voice. Save a couple of inconsequential notes, the journal is the oldest surviving work of Franklin’s hand written not for publication but for himself. Most of what is known of Franklin’s early years comes from his autobiography, which, like all memoirs, bears the imprint of subsequent experience, reflection, and reconsideration. Franklin the mature memoirist would have found cause to excuse the Gravesenders’ inhospitability; Franklin the twenty-year-old traveler did not even try.
Franklin’s opinions were not all as harsh as his view of Gravesend. From the Thames the ship turned south through the Strait of Dover.
Whilst I write this, sitting on the quarter-deck, I have methinks one of the pleasantest scenes in the world before me. ’tis a fine clear day, and we are going away before the wind with an easy pleasant gale. We have near fifteen sail of ships in sight, and I may say in company. On the left hand appears the coast of France at a distance, and on the right is the town and castle of Dover, with the green hills and chalky cliffs of England, to which we must now bid farewell. Albion, farewell!
Yet Albion would not release them so readily. For nearly a fortnight the wind blew hard from the west, forcing them to take refuge at various anchorages along England’s southern coast. The delay allowed Franklin the chance to examine the harbor and fortifications at Portsmouth, and to reflect on the nature of military leadership. A recently departed lieutenant governor of Portsmouth had fairly earned a reputation for severity in enforcing military discipline; for the slightest misdemeanor soldiers were thrown into the dungeon, called “Johnny Gibson’s Hole” when said martinet was beyond earshot. Franklin—with the self-assurance of his twenty years and utterly innocent of military life, beyond what he had read—pronounced that fear might indeed be required by lesser commanders to govern such rabble as commonly filled barracks. “But Alexander and Caesar, those renowned generals, received more faithful service, and performed greater actions by means of the love their soldiers bore them, than they could possibly have done, if instead of being beloved and respected they had been hated and feared by those they commanded.”
Another delay allowed a tour of the Isle of Wight; here Franklin heard the tale of a local governor who had been esteemed a saint in most of his lifetime by nearly all men, but who turned out to have been a great villain. What struck Franklin was that the man’s true character had been discerned by a “silly old fellow” Franklin met, who currently kept the castle and otherwise had little sense about life. The moral? No man, though he possessed the cunning of a devil, could live and die a rogue yet maintain the reputation of an honest man; some slip, some accident, would give him away. “Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame that cannot be painted.” While on the subject of reputation, Franklin noted a statue of Sir Robert Holmes, formerly governor of Wight, who built a monument to himself, with an autobiographical, and highly flattering, inscription. Franklin observed wryly, “One would think either that he had no defect at all, or had a very ill opinion of the world, seeing he was so careful to make sure of a monument to record his good actions and transmit them to posterity.”
On this same excursion Franklin and two others took a walk inland, then returned to the coast at nightfall, only to find themselves across a creek from their starting point. A boy operated a ferryboat during the day but now was in bed and refused to get up to put Franklin and his companions across. Franklin thereupon determined to commandeer the boy’s boat and do the job the “lazy whelp” should have done himself. Despite Franklin’s experience with watercraft, he and the others bungled the crossing, breaking an oar and thoroughly soaking and chilling themselves. As a belated gesture to the owner, they tied up the boat on the opposite shore, less the ruined oar.
Not till the twentieth day out from London did the Berkshire leave the Lizard—the promontory that marks England’s southmost point—and enter the open ocean. The Atlantic treated the vessel hardly better than the Channel had; the winds of August held stubbornly out of the west, making every league toward America a struggle. Franklin was in too much of a hurry, too much the improver, at this stage of his life to waste time playing games while ashore, but aboard the slow-moving vessel he joined the other passengers in whatever diversions came to hand. He developed a theory of draughts (checkers) that in turn revealed more of his thinking on human nature. “The persons playing, if they would play well, ought not much to regard the consequence of the game, for that diverts and withdraws the attention of the mind from the game itself…. I will venture to lay it down for an infallible rule, that if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money most shall lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.”
One of Franklin’s shipmates accused another of cheating at cards. The accused was English, the accuser Dutch; Franklin accounted the national difference partly responsible for the fraud. “We are apt to fancy the person that cannot speak intelligibly to us, proportionately stupid in understanding…. Something like this I imagine might be the case of Mr. G—n; he fancied the Dutchman could not see what he was about because he could not understand English, and therefore boldly did it before his face.” An ad hoc court of justice heard the matter; the accused was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of two bottles of brandy and to be placed in the round top for three hours, there to be subject to public ridicule. The prisoner resisted his punishment, prompting one of the sailors to lower a rope from aloft, which was forcibly fastened about the prisoner’s waist and used to hoist him off his feet. Suspended above the deck, the man kicked and pitched wildly, cursing in a loud voice. After about fifteen minutes he began to turn black in the face. Murder! he cried. Concerned that death, if not murder precisely, might indeed be the consequence, the others relented and lowered him. Yet they excommunicated him from their company till he consented to pay his fine. He held out for a few days, then gave in and was received back into the group.
This outcome elicited another Franklin reflection on human nature:
Man is a sociable being, and it is for aught I know one of the worst of punishments to be excluded from society. I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude, and I know ’tis a common boast in the mouths of those that affect to be thought wise, that they are never less alone than when alone. I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind; but were these thinking people obliged to be always alone, I am apt to think they would quickly find their very being insupportable to them.
He contradicted another bit of conventional wisdom, one he placed in the mouths of “the ladies,” that alcohol provided the best test of men’s true nature and disposition. “I, who have known many instances to the contrary, will teach them a more effectual method…. Let the ladies make one long sea voyage with them, and if they have the least spark of ill nature in them and conceal it to the end of the voyage, I will forfeit all my pretensions to their favor.”
Franklin did not confine his observations of nature to the human species. On this voyage he commenced his study of the natural sciences, discovering an interest that would make him famous in middle age. Now, as in some of his other early intellectual endeavors, his inexperience showed beneath his analytical power. When a storm stirred up some seaweed, he employed a boat hook to pull samples aboard; among the tangled branches (in some cases attached to the branches) he found tiny crabs. No one in that era knew much about the life cycle of crabs, and Franklin guessed—incorrectly—that the crabs were in fact the progeny (“a fruit of the animal kind”) of the seaweed. He attempted to test his hypothesis by taking some seaweed without crabs and placing it in a bucket of seawater on board the ship. He watched to see whether new crabs emerged. Unfortunately, the seaweed died, terminating the experiment.
He made numerous observations of the finned fish of the Atlantic. Most striking were the flying fish and the dolphins (the gilled kind, not the mammals). The reason the flying fish took to the air was to escape the dolphins, which raced beneath them, ready to gobble them up as soon as they touched down. Franklin confirmed this by noting that whenever dolphins were caught by persons on the ship—for food, and tasty food at that—they invariably had flying fish in their bellies. Moreover, the dolphins responded to no other bait the shipboard fishermen had to offer.
Franklin observed the heavens as well. A night with a full moon and intermittent rain showers yielded the first rainbow-by-moonlight he had ever seen. He witnessed two eclipses: a nearly complete one (“at least ten parts out of twelve”) of the sun, and a half-eclipse of the moon. Not till late in Franklin’s life would precise chronometers allow regularly accurate measurements of longitude at sea; in 1726 eclipses furnished one of the few methods by which a ship’s east-west position might be charted. Franklin sat up the night of September 30 to time the eclipse. A calendar informed him that the eclipse would reach its maximum extent at 5 A.M. London time; his own measurement indicated the maximum at half-past midnight local time. From this he deduced that the ship was four and a half hours, or 67 degrees 30 minutes, west of London. By subtraction, landfall lay little more than one hundred leagues to the west.
This news prompted all aboard to scan the western horizon for any sign of shore. “I cannot help fancying the water is changed a little, as is usual when a ship comes within soundings,” Franklin wrote on October 2, before adding a disclaimer: “But ’tis probable I am mistaken, for there is but one besides myself of my opinion, and we are very apt to believe what we wish to be true.” When five more days brought no sight of land, Franklin employed irony to alleviate the anticipation: “Sure the American continent is not all sunk under water since we left it.”
Finally, on October 9, the call “Land! Land!” came from the lookout. “In less than an hour we could descry it from the deck, appearing like tufts of trees. I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.” Even calculating latitude, while in principle far easier than longitude, was imprecise enough that the captain could not initially tell just what part of the coast the ship had reached; soon, however, someone suggested that the promontory in view was Cape Henlopen at the mouth of Delaware Bay, a judgment confirmed by a pilot-boat that came out to greet them. The pilot brought aboard a peck of apples. “They seemed the most delicious I ever tasted in my life,” wrote Franklin, weary of a diet of salt meat, biscuit, and dolphin.
The Berkshire ran up the Delaware toward Philadelphia. Most of the passengers, eager to end their confinement as soon as possible—it was now nearly twelve weeks since they had left London—jumped ship at Chester to finish the journey on land. Franklin, reckoning that the long voyage had weakened him, preferred to stay with the vessel. But even he changed his mind at Redbank, where the ship anchored just six miles out from Philadelphia. A pleasure boat bound for the city offered him and the three other remaining passengers a ride. “We accepted of their kind proposal, and about ten o’clock landed at Philadelphia, heartily congratulating each other upon our having happily completed so tedious and dangerous a voyage. Thank God!”