Book of Ages (19 page)

And here is what, according to Richardson, etiquette required a daughter to reply:

Jane could also have learned how to write letters by reading novels. While Richardson was preparing
Familiar Letters,
he had the idea to make a story out of them (that is, he thought to write a kind of book that was new: a novel). “Hence sprung
Pamela,
” as Richardson put it.
²²
Richardson’s first epistolary novel,
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel, To her Parents,
was published in London in 1740. It recounts the breathless story of a girl working as a servant to a wealthy family who finds herself in some peril of seduction from the gentleman of the house after the lady dies. Pamela is fifteen, and knows more than any servant girl should know.

“My Lady’s Goodness had put me to write,” Pamela boasts in a letter to her parents.

“Every body talks how you have come on, and what a genteel Girl you are, and some say, you are very pretty,” her mother writes back. “But what avails all this, if you are to be ruin’d and undone!—Indeed, my dear Child, we begin to be in great Fear for you; for what signifies all the Riches in the World with a bad Conscience?”
²³

(“I hear you are grown a celebrated beauty,” Franklin had written Jane when she was fourteen and in some peril of seduction. “Remember that modesty, as it makes the most homely virgin amiable and charming, so the want of it infallibly renders the most perfect beauty disagreeable and odious.”
²⁴
His letter was as conventional as her danger.)

That Pamela writes so well is among her greatest problems—“I love Writing,” she confesses—as it both raises her expectations for a life above her station and constitutes one of the attractions she holds to the gentleman of the house, who one day happens upon her in a dressing room, writing.

“Why,
Pamela,
” he cries, “you write a very pretty Hand, and spell tolerably, too.”
²⁵

But in the end, knowing how to write a fine letter is what saves this poor fifteen-year-old girl: the gentleman marries her—after having stolen and read her letters.

Franklin printed
Pamela,
beginning in 1742. In the eighteenth century, the cost of
printing a book was generally borne by the author. Of all the
books Franklin printed, only sixteen—less than one a year—were at his own risk and expense.
Pamela
was the only novel among them. He very much admired it.
²⁶
He once gave his daughter a copy of a French translation of
Pamela,
to help her with her French; she must have already read it in English.
²⁷
He especially admired how Richardson had “mix’d Narration and Dialogue, a Method of Writing very engaging to the Reader, who in the most interesting Parts finds himself as it were brought into the Company.”
²⁸
Speeches, if you please
.

Franklin printed
Pamela,
he admired it, and he liked to give it to women whose opinions he wished to mold. Likely, he gave a copy to Jane.
²⁹
What must she have made of it?

Things ended differently for Jane, seduced at fifteen, than they did for Pamela. Jane didn’t have “a very pretty Hand.” Nor could she “spell tolerably.” Nor write a polite letter. She could hardly expect to climb a ladder from tradesman’s daughter to gentleman’s wife on rungs of prose. She was Pamela, unimproved. She was Pamela, undone.

CHAPTER XVII

I
am grown Impatient to hear from you,” Jane once chided her brother.
¹
(Her best letter was the Letter of Reproof.)

“It pains me that I have so long omitted writing to you,” he admitted. (He excelled at the Letter of Excuse.) “And I do not complain that it is so long since I have been favour’d with a Line from you: for being so bad a Correspondent my self, I have no right to complain of others.”
²

She didn’t always have much use for his excuses.

“I was almost Tempted to think you had forgot me,” she wrote him during one of his stays in London, “but I check those thoughts with the consideration of the Difeculties you must Labour under in the station you are in in those difecult times.”
³

In the matter of letters, she kept, she said, “a Dr and Cr account”—a debtor and creditor account; as with books she lent out from her little library, she knew who owed her.
⁴
She was a stern creditor: “Cousin Bache knows she is a Leter in my Debt,” she wrote to Deborah about Deborah’s daughter Sally, who had married a man named
Richard Bache, “& I will not Excuse her.”
⁵

A correspondence really is a kind of account, and not without its price. Posting letters “without Expence or troble” was a situation Jane both envied and lacked. The cost of postage was borne by the recipient. A one-page letter sent from Philadelphia to Jane in
Boston cost her forty cents, a price she could hardly bear.
⁶

For Franklin, letters were free. In 1753, Franklin had been appointed deputy
postmaster general of America, a position he held jointly with
William Hunter, a Virginia planter. Together, Franklin and Hunter made sending and getting letters faster, easier, and cheaper. They fixed postage
rates, ordered post riders to carry all
newspapers for free, discouraged the carrying of mail by anyone other than the official post riders and packet
ships, required the keeping of strict accounts, and warned postmasters that they would lose their places if they were found franking letters for friends. Mail between Philadelphia and Boston, at one time fortnightly, was, by 1755, carried once a week.
⁷

“Do not write; as no Letters can now go free in America but mine,” her brother warned. She asked him whether she might have their letters franked. He refused. “The Privilege of Franking my own Letters,” he explained, was an act of Parliament. “ ’Tis a Trust, which tis expected I will not violate by covering the Letters of others.” Even his wife, he reminded her, had to pay postage.
⁸
He did, however, offer to reimburse Jane: “I expect your Bill, and shall pay it when it appears.”
⁹

Franklin kept very careful track of his correspondence, not only to remind himself of who owed him letters and what letters he owed but to keep track of the postal service. “I have just receiv’d your kind letter of the 2d instant,” he wrote to his sister one April. “I wish you would also acknowledge, when you write the Recipt of those that have come to your hands since you wrote last. By that means I should have the satisfaction of knowing that they have not miscarried. You mention nothing of a letter from me dated Feb. 22, which went by the Post.”
¹⁰

Between Boston and Philadelphia, and across the Atlantic, their letters were often carried by ship, sometimes by
Isaac Freeman, the ship’s captain who, long ago, had told Franklin that his sister had grown a celebrated beauty.
¹¹
“If you send it to my son He will find a vessel to send it by,” Jane told Deborah when her son Benjamin was
in Philadelphia.
¹²
She often wrote in haste, to get a letter into the mailbag on a departing packet. (A “packet” was a paper envelope, but the word had come to mean, too, a ship that sailed from port to port, carrying packets—that is, carrying mail.) “Beg you would forgive my sending you such very bad writing,” Jane once wrote her brother, “but as the vesal is so near sailing this or nor none must go.”
¹³
She sometimes sent her letters to her brother gratis, by way of travelers who offered to deliver a letter of hers in exchange for an introduction to him. (She explained to him that she thought these were usually her worst letters: “I have wrote by perticular persons who have desiered to be Introdused to yr Notice I have wrot in a hurry.”)
¹⁴
Other strangers delivered
letters, too. “Yr Leter was Brought me by a Negro who Did not know the man that gave it Him,” Jane once wrote to Deborah.
¹⁵

In Boston, people seldom used an address and, as Jane reported, few people even knew the names of the streets. “We have Accustomed our Selves so Litle to call the streets by there names that we who Live in them do not know it,” she reported to her brother when he asked.
¹⁶
Letters went astray all the time. Many letters she sent—“I got it in to the bag”—she was disheartened to hear that he never received.
¹⁷
In some ways, the more important Franklin became, the easier it was to get letters to him. The lieutenant governor of Massachusetts was once to carry a letter from Jane to her brother in London. Another time, when Jane wanted to get a letter to Franklin in Paris, she sent it by way of the
Marquis of Lafayette. But Franklin’s public role placed constraints upon his correspondence, too. “My dear Sister, show this to no body,” he warned in one letter. “I write it meerely for your Satisfaction.”
¹⁸
The higher he climbed, the more careful Franklin had to be, even about his most mundane correspondence. “I am apprehensive that the Letters between us, tho’ very innocent ones, are intercepted,” he alerted her from London, warning her that the wax seal on her letters was often broken.
¹⁹
It didn’t take espionage; there were plenty of ordinary ways for letters to go missing, too, especially in houses full of children. After Jane sent a letter to Deborah and didn’t hear back, she concluded that her sister-in-law must have put the letter “under her cushing I sopose in order to Read at more Leasure & Prehaps never thought of it more & won of the children git it & tore it up.”
²⁰

Letters were, very often,
lost. This was truer for her letters than for his. By the time Franklin reached London in 1757, he was by far the most famous man ever to come from the North American continent. “You are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her,”
David Hume wrote Franklin.
²¹
Franklin’s letters were prized. Even his private correspondence circulated; people passed around his letters, lending them out like books from a library. “I have just been reading a beautiful Letter of yours, written Feb. 22. 1756, on the Death of your Brother, which is handed about among us in Manuscript Copies,”
Mather Byles, a poet and a nephew of
Cotton Mather’s, told Franklin, remarking that he wasn’t alone in cherishing Franklin’s letters. “The Superstition with which we size and preserve little accidental Touches
of your Pen, puts one in mind of the Care of the Virtuosi to collect the Jugs and Galipots with the Paintings of Raphael.”
²²