Book of Ages (5 page)

When Benny and Jenny were very young, they dressed alike. They wore loose, long gowns with what were called “hanging sleeves,” flouncy and full. At seven, boys got to wear pants. “Never had any bride that was to be drest upon her weding night more handes about her,” one grandmother wrote of the day her grandson put on pants.
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Jenny was not quite one, a toddler taking first steps, when Benny was breeched. On that day, he was given a halfpence coin. He spent it on a whistle.
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The year Benny put on pants he started writing poetry (“wretched Stuff,” as he remembered it). “My Father discourag’d me,” he wrote, “telling me Verse-makers were generally Beggars; so I escap’d being a Poet, most probably a very bad one.”
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But Josiah did send the boy’s poems to Uncle Benjamin, who, in turn, sent back a poem of his own, full of admiration for the young sprite:

Benny dressed like a man; he even rhymed like man. He was a startling, brilliant, adventurous boy. He kept pigeons; swam in the Mill Pond; flew kites; tussled with neighborhood boys; boxed; threw his best friend,
John Collins, into the Charles River; and used his father’s tobacco pipe to blow bubbles with soapsuds, a trick that must have enchanted his baby sister.
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Benny was precocious, the very bud bearing grain. About that, everyone agreed. What was to be done with such a child?

Josiah inquired of his pastor, his neighbors, his brother, and his friends. “My early Readiness in learning to read,” Franklin recalled, “and the Opinion of all his Friends that I should certainly make a good Scholar” convinced his father to send him to school, “intending to devote me as the Tithe of his Sons to the Service of the Church.” Josiah had put his other sons to trades, but he would give one, a tenth of his sons, to the church. In 1714, when Jenny was two, Benny, at the age of eight, entered the South Grammar School, where he studied Latin and Greek.
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The next year, Uncle Benjamin emigrated from
England and came to live at the Blue Ball. He was sixty-five, and sickly. Jenny adored him; “good old unkle Benjamin,” she called him. “A good humour’d Child,” he called her. He meant to stay only till he found a place of his own. His visit lasted four years. As Poor Richard says,
Fish and Visitors stink in 3 days
.
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About this, Uncle Benjamin wrote a poem:

Then sea-legged Josiah Jr. turned up, smelling of pitch and tar, after nine years at sea, during which he had sent not a letter, not a word. Of his father’s seventeen children, Benjamin wrote, “I remember 13 sitting at one time at his Table.” This can only have been the day, in 1715, that Josiah Jr. was there for dinner. Uncle Benjamin wrote a psalm of thanksgiving and sang it at the table:

But the seafaring Franklin had no taste for
psalms. He disappeared, and was never heard from again.

Then Josiah pulled his son out of school. Franklin later explained that his father had become aware of “the Expense of a College Education which, having so large a Family, he could not well afford.” But Josiah had known all along how much Harvard would cost. Maybe, instead, he had come to understand that his son would make a poor preacher. At dinner one night, the boy begged his father to bless the whole winter’s worth of salted meat all at once, to avoid the tedium of having to say grace before every meal.

Or maybe Abiah, whose father had no use for Harvard men, steered her youngest son away from the college in Cambridge. There was also this:
Josiah had paid a considerable sum to send his son James to London to buy a printing press and type.
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At first he sent Benny to a much cheaper school, one run by
George Brownell on Hanover Street, two blocks from the Blue Ball. But after Benny had spent a while at Brownell’s, Josiah took him out of that school, too, and kept him at the shop. “I was employed in cutting Wick for the Candles, filling the Dipping Mold, and the Molds for cast Candles, attending the Shop, going of Errands,” Franklin remembered. He hated it. “I dislik’d the Trade and had a strong Inclination for the Sea, but my Father declar’d against it.” Something had to be done.
Virtue and a Trade are a Child’s best Portion,
Poor Richard says.
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“
NOW
O Young People is
your chusing time,
”
Benjamin Colman, the liberal pastor of Boston’s
Brattle Street Church, preached. “Now you commonly chuse your
Trade;
betake your selves to your business for life, show what you incline to, and how you intend to be imploy’d all your days.”
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About his son’s choosing time, Josiah was painstaking. He took him for walks all over town, to “see Joiners, Bricklayers, Turners, Braziers, &c. at their Work.”
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At last, he determined to apprentice him to his nephew Samuel, a blacksmith turned cutler who plied his trade at the sign of the Razor and Crown. But when Samuel asked for money for the boy’s keep—the fees a father ordinarily paid to have his son apprenticed—Josiah stormed across town and brought Benny home. Hadn’t he been lodging and feeding Samuel’s father, Benjamin, for years, at his own expense?

It was at this uncomfortable juncture, when Benny was eleven and Jenny was five, that Uncle Benjamin tried to find some quiet in the busy rooms of the Blue Ball. He bent his creaky self and sat down in a chair. He picked up his pen.

“A short account of the Family of Thomas Franklin of Ecton,” he wrote, by way of title. Behold, the historian. He wrote about his grandfather Henry and about his father, Thomas, and about his mother, Jane, “whose name as much as his,” he wrote, “I shall ever love.”

He wrote about his own life, and about the births of his ten children and the deaths of nine. He lingered on the death of his wife. “In her I Lost the delight of mine Eyes, the desire of my heart, and the comfort of my life.” He came, at last, to the family of his youngest brother. He listed the dates of the births of Josiah’s children with Abiah.

And then: he put down his pen.

In 1712, the history of the Franklins of Ecton ended with the
birth of a girl named Jane.
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CHAPTER VI

J
ane Franklin learned to read. Everyone needed to learn to read, even girls. But that didn’t mean they needed to learn to read well. A taste for books could ruin a girl; when she grew up, she’d make a poor helpmeet. “I am one of those unfortunate tradesmen who are plagued with a reading wife,” lamented one essayist. “My wife does hardly one earthly thing but read, read, read.”
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Reading too much spelled trouble.

“Beware the bookish woman” was an adage of the age. In 1711, in the first volume of the English gentleman’s magazine the
Spectator,
Joseph Addison told the story of visiting a house and being asked to wait for the lady in her library. “The very sound of a
Lady’s Library
gave me a great Curiosity to see it.” The “library,” he discovers, is ridiculous: beautiful, gilt-edged books, arranged not by subject or author but by size and color, set on shelves cluttered with gewgaws. When he meets the lady, he finds that she has read indiscriminately—history alongside fiction—with no capacity to tell the difference between them. He determines “to recommend such particular Books as may be proper for the Improvement of the Sex.”
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If a woman were to read, a man had to tell her what.

Three years later, Addison’s partner,
Richard Steele, published a three-volume anthology called
The Ladies Library,
compiled by the Reverend
George Berkeley. Berkeley gathered excerpts from conduct manuals, sermons, and philosophy.
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For a chapter called “Ignorance” he printed excerpts from
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies,
a treatise about girls’ education written in 1694 by the Englishwoman of letters
Mary Astell. “From our Infancy we are nurs’d up in Ignorance and Vanity,” Astell complained; girls’ “very Instructors are Froth and Emptiness.” Women were no better educated than the beasts: “tho we Move and Speak and do many such
like things, we live not the Life of a Rational Creature but only of an Animal.” Reminding parents that “the Sons convey the Name to Posterity, yet certainly a great Part of the Honour of their Families depends on their Daughters,” Astell pleaded with parents: Please, give your daughters learning.
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Jane Franklin’s parents could not easily have obliged. They couldn’t have sent her to school, even if they’d wanted. No public school in Boston enrolled girls. In 1706, “Mistress Mary Turfrey at the South End of Boston” announced that “If any Gentlemen desires their Daughters should be under her Education; They may please agree with her on Terms.”
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But Jane Franklin was not a gentleman’s daughter. She was the daughter of a tradesman. And at
George Brownell’s school, as at the rare private schools to which females were admitted, those few girls who enrolled were allowed to attend only after the boys had finished for the day, and what they learned was different: boys learned to write; girls learned “English and French Quilting, Imbroidery, Florishing, Plain Work, marking in several sorts of Stitches.”
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Everyone needed to learn to read, but there was no need for a girl to learn to write. Massachusetts’s
poor laws required that boys be taught to write and girls to read.
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For most girls, book learning ended there. At home and at school, when boys were taught to write, girls learned to stitch.
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Boys held quills; girls held needles.
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A female writer was worse than unnatural; she was monstrous. Observed
Anne Bradstreet:

Jane’s mother could write, if not well—“Pray excuse my bad riting,”
Abiah Folger Franklin once begged Benjamin, in the sole letter in her hand that survives—but, after all, Abiah’s father was a schoolmaster, and she had been an unusually venturesome girl.
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In 1710, three in five women in
New England could not even sign their names. Signing is mechanical.
Writing—putting ideas down on paper—is something more. Most of those two in five women who could sign their names could do no more than that, at least with pen and quill.
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Sometimes, with needles, they stitched their stories, copying lines from books onto scraps of silk, like a sampler that read: