Book of Ages (11 page)

I
am sorry to hear of Sister Macom’s Loss,” Franklin wrote to their sister Sarah after Jane’s first baby died, “and should be mighty glad of a Line from her.”
¹

He hadn’t written to Jane, or maybe he had, but she hadn’t written back to him, and he wished she would.

“I have wrote & spelt this very badly,” she often apologized to him, “but as it is to won who I am shure will make all Reasonable allowances for me and not let any won Els see it I shall venter to send it.”
²

He worried that his sisters were embarrassed to write to him, as he was such a fine writer, and they such poor ones. He sent reassurance.

You “need be under no Apprehensions of not writing polite enough to such an unpolite Reader as I am,” he insisted. “I think if Politeness is necessary to make Letters between Brothers and Sisters agreeable, there must be very little Love among ’em.” And then he added, as if it were an afterthought: “I am not about to be married as you have heard.”
³

About this last, Franklin was lying. (Letters are full of lies.) He was about to be married, if without ceremony. He lied because he didn’t want his sisters to know that he had fathered a bastard.

Franklin once wrote a satire of a gentleman’s conduct manual, in the form of a letter advising a young man suffering from “violent natural Inclinations” but unwilling to seek marriage as a remedy for what ailed him to take only older women for
mistresses. “There is no hazard of Children.” Also, older women are wiser, better talkers, better at intrigue, and better at other things, too, “every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement”; not to mention, “They are
so grateful
!!”
⁴

But his dalliances had not been without consequence, even if the consequences
were, for him, far different than they were for his sister. About the time Jane Franklin married Edward Mecom, Benjamin Franklin took a mistress
in Philadelphia who soon gave birth to a son. They named him William. Historians don’t know what year William was born. Franklin kept it a secret, and kept it well, because he hoped to make it seem as though the boy were not a bastard and, to do that, he had to hide the boy’s age. Franklin never recorded his son’s birth in a book of ages. William’s age is exactly what Franklin needed to hide.

He also had to find a wife, quickly: a woman worthy enough to yoke himself to for life but desperate enough for a husband that she’d be willing to pretend that William was hers. Fortunately for Franklin, Deborah Read’s husband, a man named Rogers, had abandoned her. There were rumors, too, that Rogers had another wife. “I pitied poor Miss Read’s unfortunate Situation,” Franklin wrote.
⁵
But, in truth, her situation was, for him, an excellent bit of luck. On September 1, 1730, Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Read Rogers set up house; there was never any wedding; theirs was a
common-law marriage. They simply moved in together, and William came to live with them. Then they told everyone he was their son. If you were a man, such things could be done.

Franklin was, by now, not just any man but one of the most important men in Philadelphia. In 1727, he had founded a literary society called the Junto. In 1729, he had purchased the
Pennsylvania Gazette
. Most printers were booksellers, and stationers, too, as well as paper merchants and book publishers. In his shop, Franklin sold ink, pens, pencils, blotters, paper, and blank books. He cast type (a rare skill for a printer) and carved his own engravings. He was also an editor and, strangest of all for a printer, a writer. He admitted that much of his success was a result of his “having learnt a little to scribble,” but he still liked best to sign himself “B. Franklin, Printer.”
⁶

The most successful printers were also
postmasters; Franklin, at first, was not. Philadelphia’s postmaster
Andrew Bradford, who printed a rival newspaper, the
American Weekly Mercury,
forbade Franklin to distribute the
Gazette
by post, leaving him to bribe the post riders to carry his papers.
⁷
In the
Gazette,
Franklin fought for the liberty of the press. In a 1731 “
Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being
heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
⁸

Franklin and his sister differed in their opinions. But what she had to say went not only unwritten but also unprinted and unsaved. In May 1731, Jane, nineteen, wrote her brother a letter. It’s known that she wrote it only because he mentioned it: the letter itself is
lost; all of Jane’s letters from these years are lost. This might have been her first letter to him, but, more likely, she had been writing to him since 1727, or even before. It’s impossible to know, because, for these years, only his letters remain.

She told him their sister Sarah had died in
childbirth at the age of thirty-one.

“She was a good woman,” he wrote back.
⁹

She told him that their sister Mary, who had three children, was dying of
breast cancer.

“I know a cancer in the breast is often thought incurable,” he returned, “yet we have here in town a kind of shell made of some wood, cut at a proper time, by some man of great skill (as they say,) which has done wonders in that disease among us, being worn for some time on the breast.” He promised to send some along if he could. If he did, it didn’t help. Mary died later that year. She was thirty-seven.

But Jane had sent him good news, too: after the loss of her first son, she had given
birth to another. She had gotten pregnant less than three months after burying baby Josiah. She recorded the birth in her Book of Ages.

She named the new baby after her husband. She called him Neddy.
¹⁰
She swaddled him and nursed him and hugged him close.

“I had before heard of the
death of your first child,” Franklin wrote her, “and am pleased that the loss is in some measure made up to you by the
birth of a second.”
¹¹

He, too, soon had a second son. Deborah Franklin gave birth to a boy on October 20, 1732. They named him Francis Folger Franklin; they called him Franky.

By the time Franky was born, Jane was seven months pregnant. She had gotten pregnant before Neddy was a year old. She named her third son after her brother.

She called him Benny.
¹²

She was a gentle mother and tender. When toddlers fall, she once wrote, they need you “to Kiss the Dear Lip after it was Hurt” for “the Litle Rogues all want to be Pityed by them that Loves them.”
¹³
She was demanding. “Perhaps I am two Severe with Every won,” she mused, “& I am tould with my Self two.”
¹⁴
She could be hard. But she admired a woman who was “an Indulgent mother.” And she could tell when a mother was “much Pleasd” with her children, “as we all are with our litle wons.”
¹⁵

She was frank in her affections. Her children were her pleasure, her little ones, her little rogues. She adored them.

The day before Jane gave birth to her third son, her brother advertised his first
Poor Richard’s Almanack
.

Almanacs, issued just before the New Year, were calendars—books of days—listing tides, holidays, and the phases of the moon. They sold better than everything except
Bibles and were bought, as Franklin pointed out, by “the common People, who bought scarce any other Books.”
¹⁶
In the middle of the eighteenth century, about fifty thousand almanacs were printed in the colonies every year, for a population of about nine hundred thousand (that is, one almanac for every eighteen people). Franklin sold about ten thousand
Poor Richard’s
a year, five pence each.
¹⁷
Deborah called them
Poor Dicks.
In the shop, she could barely keep them in stock.
¹⁸

Franklin filled the pages of his almanacs with
proverbs, most of which he didn’t write. “Not a tenth Part of the Wisdom was my own,” he admitted.
¹⁹
The rest he found in books, mostly anthologies like
Thomas Fuller’s
Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British,
a book printed
in London in 1732. But Franklin was a deft editor. Where Fuller had written, “A Man in Passion rides a Horse that runs away with him,” Franklin outpaced him:
A Man in a Passion rides a mad Horse
. And where Titan Leeds, author of the deathless prose in
The American Almanack,
blathered, “Many things are wanting to them that desire many things,” Franklin pegged it:
If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few
.
²⁰

“He had wit at will,”
John Adams once wrote about Franklin. “He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic,
Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable.”
²¹
He also had a taste for counterfeit. He loved a pen name. He pretended that his almanacs were written by a hapless, witless, befuddled astrologer named Richard Saunders—poor Richard—who had picked up his pen because his wife, Bridget, had threatened to burn his books if he didn’t earn a few more farthings and because, as Franklin wrote, “The Printer has offer’d me some considerable share of the Profits.”
²²

Saunders once complained that rumors had circulated “
That there is no such a Man as I am;
and have spread this Notion so thoroughly in the Country, that I have been frequently told it to my Face by those that don’t know me.” Some fiends had even suggested that Benjamin Franklin was
really Poor Richard. For this, Saunders had an answer. “My Printer, to whom my Enemies are pleased to ascribe my Productions,” he protested, “is as unwilling to father my Offspring as I am to lose the Credit of it.”
²³
Poor Richard’s almanac was a bastard.

CHAPTER XII

O
n March 27, 1733, Jane turned twenty-one. She had come of age. That year, her brother gave her the
gift of a book: a copy of
The Ladies Library,
a duodecimo, in three volumes, the fourth edition, printed
in London in 1732.
¹
On the flyleaf she wrote,