Book of Ages (52 page)
Authors: Jill Lepore
1758
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
.
Father Abraham’s Speech
.
J
OHN
M
AYLEM
.
The Conquest of Louisburg
.
———.
Gallic Perfidy
.
New-England Magazine
.
New-England Psalter
.
The Prodigal Daughter
.
J
OSEPH
S
TEWARD
.
Poor Joseph
.
1759
J
AMES
B
URGH
.
Britain’s Remembrancer
.
J
OHN
C
USHING
.
Gospel Ministers to Preach Christ
.
T
HOMAS
J
ONES
.
The Religious Remembrancer
.
I
SAAC
W
ATTS
.
Christian Discipline
.
1760
All Canada in the Hands of the English
.
W
ILLIAM
B
ALCH
.
Simplicity and Sincerity
.
W
ILLIAM
B
URKE
.
Remarks on the Letter
.
W. H. D
ILWORTH
.
Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World
.
Directions Concerning Inoculation
.
J
OHN
D
OUGLASS
.
A Letter Addressed to Two Great Men
.
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
.
The Beauties of Poor Richard’s Almanack for the Year 1760.
———.
Father Abraham’s Speech
.
———.
The Interest of Great Britain Considered
.
J
AMES
J
ANEWAY
.
A Seasonable and Earnest Address
.
R
ICHARD
L
UCAS
.
Rules relating to Success in Trade
.
J
OHN
M
ELLEN
.
A Sermon Preached at the West Parish.
A New Thanksgiving Song Revised.
J
AMES
O
TIS
J
R
.
A Dissertation on Letters
.
———.
The Rudiments of Latin Prosody
.
T
HOMAS
W
ALTER
.
The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained
.
S
AMUEL
W
OODWARD
.
The Offices, Duties, and Qualifications of a Watchman of Israel.
———.
A Sermon Preached October 9, 1760
.
F
RANCIS
W
ORCESTER
.
Sabbath-Profanity
.
1761
An Account of the Voyages and Cruizes of Capt. Walker.
W
ILLIAM
B
URKE
.
Remarks on the Letter
.
A
LEXANDER
C
UMMING
.
A Sermon
.
A Curious and Authentic Account of the Remarkable Behaviour of Francis David Stirn
W. H. D
ILWORTH
.
Lord Anson’s Voyage Round the World
.
J
AMES
J
ANEWAY
.
Heaven Upon Earth
.
The New-England Psalter
.
J
OHN
P
ERKINS
.
An Essay on the Agitations of the Sea
.
D
AVID
R
OWLAND
.
Ministers of Christ
.
S
OCIETY OF
F
RIENDS
.
A Letter from a Meeting of the Brethren Called Quakers.
1762
J
OSEPH
B
UCKMINSTER
.
Ministers to be Pray’d For
.
Debtor and Creditor
.
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
.
Advice to a Young Tradesman
.
W
ILLIAM
L
IVINGSTON
.
Philosophic Solitude
.
J
OSEPH
S
ECCOMBE
.
The Ways of Pleasure
.
A Serious-comical Dialogue
.
A Map of Jane’s Boston
Heartfelt thanks to the generous librarians, archivists, collectors, and curators who helped me write this book. People taught me how to stitch books. People showed me how to boil soap. People pored over old pages of manuscript. People wrote me the most unbelievable letters. Thank you.
The institutions to which many of these people belong are: the American Antiquarian Society; the American Philosophical Society; the Baker Library, Harvard Business School; the Beaman Memorial Public Library, West Boylston, Massachusetts; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Firestone Library, Princeton University; the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Yale University; the Franklin Public Library, Franklin, Massachusetts; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Nantucket Historical Association Research Library; the National Portrait Gallery; the New England Historic Genealogical Society; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; Old North Church; Old Sturbridge Village; the Paul Revere House; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Rhode Island Historical Society; the Rosenbach Museum and Library; the Thayer Memorial Library, Lancaster, Massachusetts; Widener Library, Harvard University; and the Worcester Art Museum.
Thanks as well to everyone who answered more questions and suffered through more stories about Benjamin Franklin’s sister than anyone ever ought: Elise Broach, Steven Bullock, Heather Caldwell, Ellen Cohn, Nancy Cott, Amy Davidson, Roy Goodman, James Green, Charles Greifenstein, David Hall, John Hannigan, John Hench, Caitlin Hopkins, John Huffman, Julie Staples Johnson, Walter Johnson, Benjamin Kruskal, Shane
Landrum, Kelly L’Echyer, Susan Lehman, Bruce Mann, Martha McNamara, Liz and Zoe McNerney, Latif Nasser, Todd Pattison, William Reese, Charles Rosenberg, Anne Firor Scott, Gabriel Swift, Charles Van Doren, Gloria Whiting, Emily Wilkinson, Caroline Winterer, and Karin Wulf. Ellen Feldman, Maggie Hinders, and Jillian Verrillo at Knopf heroically shepherded through production a manuscript riddled with Jane’s spelling errors. Julie Miller was astonishingly shrewd, always. Special thanks to the unerringly judicious Janet Hatch. Most particular thanks to Tim, and to our little rogues.
This is a book about reading. Deepest thanks, then, to the people who, very kindly, read it: Adrianna Alty, Tina Bennett, John Demos, Dan Frank, Henry Finder, Jane Kamensky, Leah Price, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who taught me how to sew, and of my father, who once wrote the story of his life. He called it “The Diary of an Unknown.” On its last page, he wrote, “Everyone leaves a mark.” It turns out that he was right.
People
| BF | Benjamin Franklin |
| BM | Benjamin Mecom |
| CRG | Catharine Ray Greene |
| DRF | Deborah Read Franklin |
| JFM | Jane Franklin Mecom |
| WF | William Franklin |
| WTF | William Temple Franklin |
| AAS | American Antiquarian Society |
| APS | American Philosophical Society |
| HSP | Historical Society of Pennsylvania |
| LCP | Library Company of Philadelphia |
| LC | Library of Congress |
| Mass. Arch. | Massachusetts Archives |
| MFA | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
| MHS | Massachusetts Historical Society |
| NEHGS | New England Historic Genealogical Society |
| NHARL | Nantucket Historical Association Research Library |
| Princeton | Firestone Library, Princeton University |
| Rosenbach | Rosenbach Museum and Library |
| SCHS | South Carolina Historical Society |
| Thayer | Thayer Memorial Library, Lancaster, Massachusetts |
| Yale | Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University |
| BF, Autobiography | Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: An Authoritative Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986). |
| Duane, Letters | William Duane, ed., Letters to Benjamin Franklin from his Family and Friends, 1750–1790 (New York: Richardson, 1859). |
| Duane, Works | William Duane, ed., The Works of Dr. Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: W. Duane, 1808–18). |
| PBF | The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Labaree et al., 40 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–2011). |
| Roelker, BR and CRG | William Greene Roelker, ed., Benjamin Franklin and Catharine Ray Greene: Their Correspondence: 1755–1790 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1949). |
| Smyth, Writings | Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Macmillan, 1905. |
| Sparks, Familiar Letters | Jared Sparks, ed., A Collection of the Familiar Letters and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: C. Bowen, 1833). |
| Sparks, Works | Jared Sparks, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin (Boston: Tappan and Whittemore, 1836–40). |
| Van Doren, Letters | Carl Van Doren, ed., The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950). |
1.
JFM thinking of her brother as her “Second Self” is mentioned in CRG to BF, Warwick, RI, June 24, 1781. Similarly, in a letter to JFM, CRG referred to Franklin as “your other Self.” CRG to JFM, June 21, 1776. The likeness between Jane and Benjamin Franklin has not gone unobserved. Jared Sparks, one of Franklin’s earliest biographers, wrote of Jane, “She was remarkable for her strength of mind and character, her good sense and practical views of life, resembling in these respects, more than any others of the family, her brother Benjamin” (editorial comment in Sparks,
Works,
7:515). Or as JFM’s biographer Carl Van Doren put it, “She was the only one of the many Franklins who can be compared with him” (
Letters
, 3). The sole biography of JFM is Carl Van Doren,
Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin: Her Life Here First Fully Narrated from Their Entire Surviving Correspondence
(New York: Viking, 1950). But see also a brilliant and landmark essay by Anne Firor Scott in
Making the Invisible Woman Visible
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 3–13. And see Jeremy A. Stern, “Jane Franklin Mecom: A Boston Woman in Revolutionary Times,”
Early American Studies
4 (2006): 147–91. JFM is sometimes included in biographical encyclopedias—e.g.,
American National Biography, Notable American Women,
and Carole Chandler Waldrup,
More Colonial Women: Twenty-five Pioneers of Early America
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).
2.
There is a substantial amount of scholarly literature on
women and autobiography. Some scholars have argued that autobiography, a genre that took its recognizably modern form in the eighteenth century, was a masculine form of writing. Others insist that to see autobiography this way is to recapitulate the canon’s own bias;
these scholars generally argue that other forms of women’s “life writing,” including diaries, letters, conversion narratives, and even family records like JFM’s “Book of Ages,” need to be counted as “
autobiography.” See especially Estelle C. Jelinek, ed.,
Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), and Estelle C. Jelinek,
The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present
(Boston: Twayne, 1986). A useful overview of the field in its heyday can be found in the editors’ introduction to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds.,
Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). Much of the work in this field is poststructuralist in its orientation—e.g., Leigh Gilmore,
Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)—or heavily indebted to
Michel Foucault—e.g., Felicity A. Nussbaum,
The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Nussbaum, like Foucault, sees autobiography as a “technology of the self” (46): “I read the autobiographical texts as crucial to the formulation of a gendered bourgeois subjectivity that learns to recognize itself” (xiii).
3.
JFM, “Book of Ages,” NEHGS. Transcribed in “Letters of Dr. Franklin, Mrs. Jane Mecom, Josiah Flagg, Richard Bache, &c.,”
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
27 (1873): 253–54; and in Van Doren, ed.,
Letters,
100–101. All of my quotations and descriptions refer to the original manuscript. Henceforward, when quoting from the Book of Ages, no endnotes will be provided, as the source is clearly identified in the text. An interesting contrast with JFM’s “Book of Ages” is “The
Family Book” of
Hester Salusbury Thrale, reprinted in Mary Hyde,
The Thrales of Streatham Park
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Thrale, who also had twelve children, began her “Family Book” in 1764. It begins, formulaically, much like JFM’s “Book of Ages”: “Hester Maria Thrale born on the 17: Septr 1764 at her Father’s House, Southwark” (21). But Thrale, a well-educated and wealthy Englishwoman, friend to Samuel Johnson, turned her “Family Book” into a detailed chronicle of her family’s lives and especially of her children’s emotional, intellectual, and physical development. It runs to nearly two hundred pages. Thrale’s notion of a self has more in common with Benjamin Franklin’s than with his sister’s.
4.
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
(London: Hogarth, 1929), 64–67.
5.
JFM to BF, June 13, 1781.
· J
ANE
, 1537–1727
Chapter I Lady Jane
1.
Roger Ascham,
The Scholemaster
(London: John Daye, 1570), 11–12.
2.
Transcribed in John Gough Nichols, ed.,
Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth
(London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1857), 2:209.
3.
Derek Wilson,
The People’s Bible: The Remarkable History of the King James Version
(Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2010), 8.
4.
John Foxe,
Actes and Monuments
(London: John Daye, 1563), 514, 519.
5.
“Instructions given by the Kinges hieghnes unto his trusty and welbiloved servauntes,” in
Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth,
1:xxviii.
6.
Arthur Meredythe Burke,
Key to the Ancient Parish Registers of England and Wales
(London: Sackville, 1908), 7, 11; J. Charles Cox,
The Parish Registers of England
(London: Methuen, 1910), 1–24.
7.
Roger Ascham to Johannes (Jean) Sturm, December 14, 1550, in
The Scholemaster,
ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Bell and Daldy, 1863), 213.
8.
Foxe,
Actes and Monuments,
918–19.
9.
Josiah Franklin to BF, Boston, May 26, 1739.
10.
T. P. Taswell-Langmead,
Parochial Registers: A Plea for Their Preservation
(London: Samuel Palmer, 1872), 68.
1.
BF to DRF, New York, June 6, 1758; BF to Mary Franklin Fisher, London, July 31, 1758; and BF,
Autobiography,
3. The first entry for the Franklin family is the record of the birth of
Thomas Francklyne’s son Robert, in 1563, the year the register begins; the entry for
Jane Francklyne is the second appearance of the family name. See also John W. Jordan, “Franklin as a Genealogist,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
23 (1899): 1–22. And on the genealogical impulse in early America, see the essays in
The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England
, ed. D. Brenton Simons and Peter Benes (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), especially Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Creating Lineages,” pp. 5–11.
2.
Thomas Gray,
An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard
(London, 1751), 6, 8.
3.
Among ordinary people,
gravestones were rare in sixteenth-century England. Even for the nobility and the gentry, monuments to the dead did not usually last long, as was decried by
John Weever in his
Ancient Funeral Monuments within the United Monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland, and the Islands adjacent
(London: Thomas Harper, 1631). Weever was involved in the project of turning what was carved in stone into ink pressed on pages. For a history of ancient burial practices, see Weever’s chapter 2.
4.
Josiah Franklin to BF, Boston, May 26, 1739.
5.
BF,
Autobiography
, 3–4.
6.
Benjamin Franklin the Elder, “A short account of the Family of Thomas Franklin/of Ecton in Northampton Shire,” 1717, Franklin Manuscripts, Uncatalogued Manuscript Vault, “Materials by, to, and about Franklin, 1699–1750,” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. It is reprinted in Nian-Sheng Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah: Life of a Colonial Boston Tallow Chandler, 1657–1745,”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
90 (2000): 106–13. On the keeping of this sort of account, see Karin Wulf, “Bible, King, and Common Law: Genealogical Literacies and Family History Practices in British America,” unpublished manuscript, 2011.
7.
BF the Elder, “A short account,” 107–8.
8.
BF the Elder, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 7, American Antiquarian Society. See Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah,” 3.
9.
Arthur Bernon Tourtellot,
Benjamin Franklin: The Shaping of Genius; The Boston Years
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 27.
10.
“Dyeing and Coloring,” in “Common-place Book of Benjamin Franklin (1650–1727),”
Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
10 (1907): 214, 212, 208.
BF the Elder copied many of his recipes from
The Secretes of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piedmont,
an English translation of a recipe book originally published in Italian under the pseudonym Alessio Piedmontese (206).
11.
Gravestone inscriptions at Ecton and Banbury, in
PBF,
8:119.
12.
BF,
Autobiography,
3. Thomas Franklin and BF had the same birthday. BF then apparently became quite interested in birthdays. See BF, “List of Franklin Birthdays,” 1759,
PBF,
8:454.
13.
BF,
Autobiography,
1.
14.
Ibid.
15.
Ibid., 4.
16.
Geoffrey Chaucer,
Canterbury Tales
(Westminster: William Caxton, 1477). William Shakespeare,
King Lear
(London: Nicholas Okes, 1608), act 3, scene 4;
Henry V
(London: Thomas Creede, 1600), act 1, scene 2.
17.
Josiah Franklin to BF, Boston, May 26, 1739. See also Tourtellot,
Benjamin Franklin,
13.
18.
Thomas Carlyle to
Henry Thomas Wake, Chelsea, England, November 24, 1853; Thomas Carlyle to
Edward Everett, Chelsea, December 2, 1853; and Thomas Carlyle to H. T. Wake, Chelsea, December 19, 1854, in
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle,
Duke-Edinburgh edition, ed. Kenneth J. Fielding (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 28:322–23, 330–31; 29:218–19. The bound volume is stamped on the spine: “Small Tithes: Ecton Parish Northamptonshire, 1646–1700.” A frontispiece reads, “Presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society at the Dedication of the Douse Library, April 9th, 1857, by the Hon. Edward Everett.” Everett’s correspondence with Carlyle is copied out, by hand, in the first pages of the volume. Wake’s letters, in which he advertised the importance of the tithe book and its interest to Carlyle, are bound within the pages of the tithe book. Henry Thomas Wake to unknown, November 23, 1853, and Henry Thomas Wake to Thomas Carlyle, November 26, 1853. On the title page of the tithe book, Wake has written, “Henry Thomas Wake purchased this Account Book of Mr. J. R. Smith, Bookseller, 4 Oed. Compton Street, Soho, 8/6 price. Saturday, October 4th, 1851.” Parish of
Ecton Tithe Book, MHS.
19.
BF,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
…
1751,
in
PBF,
4:88.
20.
BF to Mary Franklin Fisher, London, July 31, 1758.