Book of Ages (18 page)

“Let me have a Line from you now and then while I am in London,” Franklin wrote Jane before he sailed.
⁵³
From Boston, from home, she wrote back.

CHAPTER XVI

T
he first letter from Jane that survives is one she wrote not to her brother but to his wife.
¹
It’s dated January 29, 1758. She wrote it when she was forty-five years old. (Franklin first wrote to her when she was fourteen; more than three decades of her end of the correspondence are
lost.) She crammed her words onto one side of a single sheet of paper, six inches by seven. This is her voice: gabby, frank, and vexed.

It needs translating. She was in the middle of a great wash and one of her lodgers, Sarah, was ailing. Her poor son Neddy was sick again—weak and listless and coughing blood. But she had heard from Neddy, who heard it from Dr. Perkins, who heard it from Jonathan Williams Sr., the husband of Jane’s friend Grace, a daughter of her sister Anne, who heard it from another Boston merchant, Thomas Flucker, that Benjamin Franklin had been given a baronetcy. Jane’s husband told her she must send her congratulations, “searly”—surely. She was miffed. If this ridiculous rumor was true, why, for heaven’s sake, was she the last to know about it?

“Your loving Sister” or “Your affectionate Sister” is how Jane usually signed off—not “your Ladyships affectionat Sister & most obedient Humble Servant.”
²
That was a jab. Must she curtsy? She was willing to follow the rules of civility, but only so far. She would not have forgotten the satire Benjamin Franklin had written for the
New-England Courant
when he was seventeen and she was ten, pointing out that there are no
titles of honor in the Old Testament: “Adam, was never called
Master
Adam,” her brother had written then, nor “Lot
Knight
and
Baronet,
nor the
Right Honourable
Abraham,
Viscount Mesopotamia, Baron of Carran;
no, no, they were plain Men.”
³

With Deborah, Jane was frank: plain, honest, sincere, and uncurbed. They were close. Among other things, they shared a love, as Jane once put it, for “my Dear brother & yr Dear Husband.”
⁴
Something else each valued in the other was a kind of epistolary
equality: they both struggled with writing, tacking onto their letters the conventional apologies that were expected of unlettered women. “I have indevered to make as good a letter as I cold,” Deborah wrote Jane, begging, “donte let aney bodey see my letter as I write so bad.”
⁵

They also shared an appetite for gossip. “Cousen willames Looks soon to Lyin,” Jane wrote Deborah, “she is so big I tell Her she will have two.” (This “Cousin Williams” was Jonathan Williams Sr.’s wife, Grace.)
⁶
“Greved to hear Poor Mrs. Smith has Got numb Palsey,” Jane wrote—Mrs. Smith was a friend of Deborah’s, and dying—“Pleas to Present my love & best wishes to her.”
⁷
She could be sweet. And she could be cutting. Of
Mrs. Elizabeth Hubbart Partridge, the daughter of Jane’s brother John’s widow, a woman Jane resented for having proved, Jane thought, insufficiently generous to Jane’s son Peter in a dispute over the family soap recipe, she wrote, “I have not Heared whither she is Like to have another child. The Nabours say she Lay a bed afore with her Hare Poudered & a Grat Plum in it.”
⁸
Powdered hair and a plume. Frippery. Of a younger woman whom Jane found stingy: “she is wise so far as that wisdom Reaches to keep her Dolars to her self.”
⁹

Jane called gossip “trumpery.” “I have fill’d the Paper with such trumpery you will be vexed to give yr self the troble of Reading it,” she wrote Deborah.
¹⁰
But she loved trumpery almost as much as she loved politics. She had great
expectations for letters. Separated from people she loved by hundreds of miles of roads that no woman could travel alone, she cherished scenes and stories. By words on a page, she wanted to be carried away—out of her house, out of Boston, out into the world. The more details, the better. “The Sow has Piged,” her friend Caty Greene reported from
Rhode Island, reminding her, “You told me to write you all.”
¹¹

Jane knew exactly what she wanted in a letter. She once scolded Deborah’s daughter Sarah for writing letters that she found insufficiently chatty. “I want to know a Thousand litle Perticulars about your self yr Husband & the children such as your mother used to write me,” Jane commanded, adding that “it would be Next to Seeing the little things to hear some of there Prattle (Speaches If you Pleas) & have you Describe there persons &
actions tell me who they Look like &c.”
¹²
Stories, likenesses, characters:
Speeches, if you please
.

Jane’s letters are different than her brother’s—delightfully so. He wrote polite letters. She wrote impolite ones. She wrote the way she talked. If she weren’t always so busy, she would have loved to write more; she told Deborah that she found “much Pleasure in conversing with you in this way.”
¹³
In writing, she also found comfort, especially in times of trouble. “Pardon my writing you these aprehentions,” she wrote her brother. “I do not take pleasure in giveing you an uneasy thought but it gives some Releif to unbousom wons self to a dear friend.”
¹⁴

Still, for all that pleasure and comfort, putting talk down on paper was hard, and harder when shaping the very letters was difficult. And she worried, too, that her letters—everything about them, including her penmanship—embarrassed her brother, pleading, “Dont let it mortifie you that such a Scraw came from your Sister.”
¹⁵

Women were expected to disavow their own writing. But, more, Jane had a particular concern: she worried that she had spelled so badly and failed to make herself clear—“my Blundering way of Expresing my self,” she called it—that someone reading a letter she had written wouldn’t be able to understand what she meant to say, wouldn’t be able to
hear
her.
¹⁶
“I know I have wrote & speld this worse than I do sometimes,” she wrote her brother, “but I hope you will find it out.”
¹⁷

To “find out” a letter was to decipher it, to turn writing back into speech.
If I don’t Express my self proper you must Excuse it
. She knew—she understood very well—that letters weren’t supposed to be speech written down; they were supposed to be more formal, more refined, more polite than speech. In her letters to Deborah, Jane was entirely at her ease. Neither of them knew how to write a polite letter, so they made no pretense of it. With her brother, everything was different. He had been her tutor, and she his student. He warned her that she was too free with him. “You Long ago convinced me that there is many things Proper to convers with a Friend about that is not Proper to write,” she confessed.
¹⁸
But then he had also scolded her for not being free enough. “I was allways too Difident” she said he had told her.
¹⁹
Be more discreet. Be less diffident. What she couldn’t be with him was free.

She studied. She had read more books than most women of her station had ever even seen. Two of her brothers were printers, and so were two of her sons. She may, then, have tried to learn the
art of letter writing from one
of the many books of instruction printed for boys and young men, such as
The American Instructor,
also known as
The Young Man’s Best Companion,
and printed by Benjamin Franklin. She could have studied its templates, addressed to writers deficient in the art of letter writing, examples of
“Letters of proffered Assistance, Letters Consolatory, Letters of Thanks, Letters Congratulatory, Ditto of Reproof, Ditto of Excuse, Ditto Accusatory, Ditto of Advice or Counsel, Ditto of Recommendation, Ditto Exhortatory, Ditto of Remonstrance, and Letters of Visit, properly called Familiar Letters, Letters of Business; and lastly, Mixed Letters, that is, on various Subjects, and different Affairs
.
”
²⁰

The manual Franklin printed was addressed to young men. But a handful of
writing manuals offered instruction to young women. The London printer
Samuel Richardson issued a volume titled
Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the most Important Occasions. Directing not only the requisite style and forms to be observed in writing familiar letters; but how to think and act justly and prudently, in the common concerns of human life.
(It was more commonly known by a pithier title,
Familiar Letters on Important Occasions
.) Among the important occasions that demanded the writing of a letter, Richardson counted an attempted
seduction. Here is the letter that etiquette required of “
A Father to a Daughter in Service, on hearing of her Master’s attempting her Virtue
”: