Authors: Jill Lepore
Book of Ages (20 page)
Jane circulated her brother’s letters, too. A letter he sent her in 1758 was read by a Philadelphia friend of the wife of one of Jane’s sons who, in 1759, copied it, word for word, into her diary.
23
What had been his letter became part of her book.
What remains of anyone’s life is what’s kept. Jane kept the letters she got in the mail in a special place. “To go into the Litle Trunk,” she wrote on the back of one of them.
24
But of the letters she herself wrote, she explained, “I keep no coppies.”
25
Writing letters once took her long enough; she could never find time to write them twice. Very many people bothered to keep what Franklin wrote—as if the ink that came from his pen were paint from the brush of an Old Master. But for Jane’s correspondence to have survived, both her brother and the people in charge of his papers after his death would have had to care enough about her letters to keep them. Generally, they did not. One year, Franklin in London sent to Jane in Boston at least four letters and she sent him at least six. In his letters to her, which survive because she kept them, he mentioned her letters to him, so that she would know which of her letters had reached him: “I received duly yours of Jan. 19., Apr. 20., May 5 and May 15”; “I received your kind Letter of June 28”; and, again, “I received your kind Letter of Dec. 11.”
26
He received her letters, but the letters themselves are
lost. His four letters to her survive; her six to him are gone.
CHAPTER XVIII
You and I OnlyD
ear Sister,” he wrote her on September 16, 1758. “I received your Favour of June 17.”
A letter was a favor. The word comes from Middle English, and it means kindness, an act of goodwill: to send a letter is an act of mercy.
In her favor of June 17, she had complained that she had not received a single line from him since he had left America. In his favor of September 16, he explained that he had written to her long since, and more than once:
I wonder you have had no Letter from me since my being in England. I have wrote you at least two and I think a third before this; And, what was next to waiting on you in Person, sent you my Picture. In June last I sent Benny a Trunk of
Books and wrote to him. I hope they are come to hand, and that he meets with Incouragement in his Business.
He had sent her two letters and a likeness: a miniature painted by Charles Dixon, which he had sent to Deborah with this instruction: “When you write to Boston, give my love to sister Jenney—as I have not often time to write to her. If you please you may send her the inclosed little picture.”
1
He had sent Benny a trunk of books for the shop Benny was setting up in Boston.
Franklin told Jane she had no right to scold him. So he scolded her for scolding him, by telling her the story of how, over the summer of 1758, he had traveled to
Ecton “and found some Relations in that part of the Country Still living.” He had even found one of her namesakes.
Our Cousin Jane Franklin, daughter of our Unkle John, died but about a Year ago. We saw her Husband
Robert Page, who gave us some old Letters to his Wife from unkle Benjamin. In one of them, dated Boston July 4. 1723 he writes “Your Unkle Josiah has a Daughter Jane about 12 years Old, a good humour’d Child.”
“So Jenny keep up your Character,” Franklin teased his sister, “and don’t be angry when you have no Letters.”
2
Then he told her how their uncle Benjamin had sent this Jane Franklin, their cousin, “a little Book” of his poems, in which Franklin had found “an Acrostick on her Name, which for Namesakes’ Sake, as well as the good Advice it contains, I transcribe and send you” (with
I,
again, doing service for
J
):
I lluminated from on High,
A nd shining brightly in your Sphere
N ere faint, but keep a steady Eye
E xpecting endless Pleasures there
F lee Vice, as you’d a Serpent flee,
R aise Faith and Hope three Stories higher
A nd let Christ’s endless Love to thee
N -ere cease to make thy Love Aspire.
K indness of Heart by Words express
L et your Obedience be sincere,
I n Prayer and Praise your God Address
N ere cease’ till he can cease to hear.
But Jane knew a great deal about their uncle’s poetry; she even owned a volume of his poems. Maybe he had given it to her, before he died, on her fifteenth birthday. On its flyleaf, she had written,
Jane Mecom
Her Book.
This volume of their uncle’s poetry is full of wordplay: mazes, anagrams, and abecedaries, as well as acrostics for Franklins named Benjamin, Hannah,
Samuel, Josiah, and Thomas but not one for Jane.
3
Maybe, when they were children, Benny and Jenny had read that book together. Maybe it had been a sore spot with Jane, that their uncle had never written an acrostic for her.
Her brother now copied this one down—JANE FRANKLIN—and sent it to her, as a
gift and an apology. And then he did more. He amused himself. “After professing truly that I have a great Esteem and Veneration for the pious Author,” he wrote her, “permit me a little to play the Commentator and Critic on these Lines.” As much tutor as critic, he undertook a close reading of the line at the letter
R
—“Raise Faith and Hope three Stories higher”—with an eye to teasing his sister about their differences of opinion about
religion. “The Meaning of
Three Stories
higher seems somewhat obscure,” he began. This he then explained:
Faith, Hope
and
Charity
have been called the three Steps of Jacob’s Ladder, reaching from Earth to Heaven. Our Author calls them
Stories,
likening Religion to a Building, and those the three Stories of the Christian Edifice; Thus Improvement in Religion, is called
Building Up,
and
Edification
.
Faith
is then the Ground-floor,
Hope
is up one Pair of Stairs.
He made sure she didn’t miss his meaning: “My dearly beloved Jenny, don’t delight so much to dwell in these lower Rooms, but get as fast as you can into the Garret; for in truth the best Room in the House is
Charity
.” Don’t dwell on your floor, Faith, but rise to mine, Charity.
For my part, I wish the House was turn’d upside down; ’tis so difficult (when one is fat) to get up Stairs; and not only so, but I imagine
Hope
and
Faith
may be more firmly built on
Charity,
than
Charity
upon
Faith
and
Hope
.
(“When one is fat”—this was a joke between them, about how they had both grown fat in middle age.) He went on:
However that be, I think it a better reading to say Raise Faith and Hope
one Story
higher correct it boldly and I’ll support the Alteration. For when you are up two Stories already, if you raise your Building three Stories higher, you will make five in all, which is two more than there should be, you expose your upper Rooms more to the Winds and
Storms, and besides I am afraid the Foundation will hardly bear them, unless indeed you build with such light Stuff as Straw and Stubble, and that you know won’t stand Fire.
He had another edit to make, of the line at the letter
K:
“Kindness of Heart by Words express.”
Stricke out
Words
and put in
Deeds
. The world is too full of Compliments already; they are the rank Growth of every Soil, and Choak the good Plants of Benevolence and Benificence, Nor do I pretend to be the first in this comparison of Words and Actions to Plants; you may remember an Ancient Poet whose Words we have all Studied and Copy’d at School, said long ago,
A Man of Words and not of Deeds,
Is like a Garden full of Weeds.
This poem is an English nursery rhyme—it turns up later in Mother Goose—that Jane and her brother might both have learned as children, though Jane was never at school. He gave, next, a sermon, about
sermons:
’Tis pity that
Good Works
among some sorts of People are so little Valued, and
Good Words
admired in their Stead; I mean seemingly
pious Discourses
instead of
Humane Benevolent Actions
. These they almost put out of countenance, by calling Morality
rotten Morality,
Righteousness,
ragged Righteousness
and even
filthy Rags;
and when you mention
Virtue,
they pucker up their Noses as if they smelt a Stink; at the same time that they eagerly snuff up an empty canting Harangue, as if it was a Posie of the Choicest Flowers. So they have inverted the good old Verse, and say now
A Man of Deeds and not of Words
Is like a Garden full of———
I have forgot the Rhime, but remember ’tis something the very Reverse of a Perfume. So much by Way of Commentary.
He closed, that is, with a joke about shit.
· · ·
She didn’t mind the coarseness. “You are very good in not resenting some Part of my Letter of September 16. which I confess was a little rude,” he wrote her after receiving her reply (which is
lost), “but you fatfolks can’t bear Malice.”
4
She did, though, worry that he was scolding her for her lack of charity.
He insisted that he was not. “If I were dispos’d to reprove you, it should be for your only Fault, that of supposing and spying Affronts, and catching at them where they are not. But as you seem sensible of this your self, I need not mention it; and as it is a Fault that carries with it its own sufficient Punishment, by the Uneasiness and Fretting it produces, I shall not add Weight to it. Besides, I am sure your own good Sense, join’d to your natural good Humour will in time get the better of it.”
5
He wrote to her, too, about having come across a
gravestone with the words “Thomas Foulger” engraved on it. It wasn’t just that trip to
Ecton. There was something more going on in his mind—a casting back, a wondering about where he came from. He copied out the inscription and sent it to her with a request.
“I have never in my Life met with or heard of any Foulgers but those of our Family. Pray ask Cousin Abisha Foulger if he or any in Nantucket can tell what Part of England our Grandfather Peter Foulger came from. I think I have heard our Mother say he came out of Suffolk, but am not certain.”
6
Jane had kept up with the Folgers, especially her cousin Keziah Folger Coffin.
7
She knew, or found out for Franklin, that this Thomas Folger was not a relative; their grandfather Peter had come not from Suffolk but from Norfolk.
This wouldn’t be the last time he would ask her about their family history. For the final quarter century of their lives, Benjamin and Jane were the last of Josiah Franklin’s seventeen children still living.
“You & I only are now Left,” she wrote him.
8
The farther he, the closer she. She was, all his life, his anchor—and, in the end, his only anchor—to his past.
CHAPTER XIX