Authors: Jill Lepore
1.
The American Magazine, or General Repository,
August 1769, 243–44.
2.
Joseph Addison, Essay No. 37,
Spectator,
vol. 1, no. 37, April 12, 1711.
3.
Berkeley’s
Ladies Library
is a hodgepodge. Berkeley never acknowledged his sources, and Steele never really even acknowledged that his “library”
was
a compilation of other people’s writing. The identity of the compiler of
The Ladies Library
was the subject of some dispute but was established to have been Berkeley in Stephen Parks, “
George Berkeley, Sir
Richard Steele, and
The Ladies Library,
”
Scriblerian
13 (Autumn 1980): 1–2. On the sources for the compilation, see Richard H. Dammers, “Richard Steele and
The Ladies Library,
”
Philological Quarterly
62 (1983): 530–36;
and especially Raymond Francis McCoy, “A Critical Examination of
The Ladies Library
and Inquiry into Its Authorship” (MA thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1935), and Greg Holhgshead, “Sources for
The Ladies Library,
”
Berkeley Newsletter
[Dublin] 11 (1989–90): 1–19. The “Ignorance” chapter draws from
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies,
part 1, as well as from part 2, chapter 3.
4.
Mary Astell,
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
[part 1] (London, 1694), 30, 37–38; part 2 (London, 1697), 27; part 1, 27. On proposals for women’s academies, see Patricia Springborg’s introduction to Mary Astell,
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Parts I and II
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997). On Astell, see Ruth Perry,
The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
5.
Boston News-Letter,
September 9, 1706.
6.
Boston News-Letter,
March 9, 1712.
7.
E. Jennifer Monaghan, “
Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial
New England,”
American Quarterly
40 (1988): 27.
8.
In one
Massachusetts town in 1709, for instance, there were sixteen girls in a class of sixty-four. On schooling for girls in colonial New England, see Thomas Woody,
A History of Women’s Education in the United States
(1929; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1974), chapter 4. A study of two hundred colonial towns found that only seven admitted girls (Cathy N. Davidson,
Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
[New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 62). A more recent assessment of literacy rates is David Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” in
A History of the Book in America,
1:119–30.
9.
For example,
Samuel Sewall taught his sons to write; he had his five-year-old daughter, Mary, taught “to Read and Knit.” See Graham,
Puritan Family Life,
chapter 6; quotation is from 119.
10.
Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” in
Several Poems,
4. See also Jane Kamensky,
Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially 24–27 and 71–98.
11.
Abiah Folger Franklin to BF, Boston, October 14, 1751. Some and maybe all of Abiah’s other daughters could write, too, maybe about as well as their mother. Jane seems to have been alone among Abiah’s daughters in learning to write with any facility. Sarah Franklin Davenport did write at least one letter, but it does not survive. Nor does any reference to any letter ever written by Mary or Lydia. “Your kind and affectionate Letter of May the 15th, was extreamly agreeable to me,” Franklin wrote to Sarah in 1730, “and the more so, because I had not for two Years before, receiv’d a Line from any Relation, my Father and Mother only excepted.” BF to Sarah Franklin Davenport, Philadelphia, [June?] 1730.
12.
According to Kenneth Lockridge, 70 percent of men and 42 percent of women could sign their names in 1710. Lockridge cited in Hall, “Readers and Writers in Early New England,” 120. Gloria L. Main, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,”
Journal of Social History
24 (Spring 1991): 579–89. See also Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?”
William and Mary Quarterly
48 (1991): 50–67.
13.
Sarah Silsbe, sampler, Boston, 1748, Theodore H. Kapnek Collection of American samplers, reproduced in Ulrich, “Creating Lineages,” 10.
14.
John Langdon Sibley,
Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), ed. Clifford Shipton, 4:120–37. On Colman’s preaching as genteel and urbane and lacking the stridency of the Mathers, see, for instance, Charles W. Akers,
The Divine Politician: Samuel Cooper and the American Revolution
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982), 6. BF the Elder made note
of Colman’s sermons in his commonplace book. See “Common-place Book of Benjamin Franklin (1650–1727),”
Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
10 (1907): 191.
15.
For
Jane Colman Turell’s life, and what is left of her writing, see Ebenezer Turell,
Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Pious and Ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell
(London, 1741), 8, 24, 11. In
Memoirs,
see also Jane Colman, “To My Muse, December 29, 1725.” For Benjamin Colman’s writing advice, see pp. 81–83.
16.
On the novelty and power of this epistolary culture, see Konstantin Dierks,
In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
17.
Ebenezer Turell,
Memoirs of the Life and Death of … Mrs. Jane Turell,
82, 15.
18.
JFM to BF, November 8, 1766.
19.
JFM to BF, July 21, 1786.
20.
JFM to BF, December 30, 1765.
21.
BF to JFM, July 7, 1773.
1.
“With all my own art & good old unkle Benjamins memorandoms I cant make them good colors,” JFM wrote to her brother in 1766, suggesting that, at least at that point, she had his book of memorandums, or recipes. JFM to BF, November 8, 1766. (And she certainly owned his books of poetry, one of which is inscribed with her name.) The original of the recipe book is either lost or in private hands; all that survives is a transcription. See “Dyeing and Coloring” in “Commonplace-Book of Benjamin Franklin (1650–1727),”
Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
10 (1907): 206–25.
2.
BF,
Autobiography,
6.
3.
“A Dialogue between a thriving Tradesman and his Wife about the Education of Their Daughter,”
Boston Evening-Post,
December 10, 1744.
4.
She wrote the recipe down twice. (BF lost it; see Van Doren,
Letters,
129.) JFM, “For Making Crown Soap,” 1772, in
Letters,
130–32. And JFM, “
Recipe for Crown Soap,” 1786,
PBF,
unpublished. I’m not certain that the dates assigned to these recipes are especially plausible. The first seems to have been written down after the death of John Franklin, to whom JFM must have been referring when she wrote, “My Brother in His Life time tould me it could not be conveyd by Recipt” (that is, that you couldn’t write down this recipe; you needed to learn by doing). The original is Jane Franklin Mecom, Recipe for Crown Soap, n.d., Hays Calendar IV, 376, Franklin Papers, vol. 58, folio 19. Van Doren credited the invention of crown soap to John Franklin, without any substantiation. But as Huang has remarked, there is every reason to believe that Josiah, who trained his son, was involved in perfecting the soap (“Franklin’s Father Josiah,” 43–45). And as Lemay argues, Abiah must have been involved (
Life of BF,
1:56) and it’s highly probable that Jane was
intimately involved as well, which would also account for her subsequent frustration at her sons’ being kept out of the soap business. Jane herself gave some credit to her brother John. In one letter to Franklin, she refers to their brother John as “the Inventor” of crown soap, but in the same letter she explains that he had nearly as much difficulty getting it right as she did. “The Labour is Grate, & the operation critical, the Exact knolidg not to be attained without Expearance, my Brother Him self tould me it workd some times not to his mind in a way he could not account for” (JFM to BF, December 29, 1780). When sending her own soap to Franklin in 1786, and apologizing that it wasn’t exactly as fine as she had hoped, she wrote, “I beleve my Brother John Perfectly understood the Exact proportion that would do best” (JFM to BF, May 29, 1786). Yet this letter does not place John so far above herself, as a soap boiler; instead, it substantiates an argument that she and her brother knew very well how to make soap even if, at the age of sixty-four, she was having a hard time remembering the exact proportions to use.
5.
JFM to BF, September 12, 1779.
6.
Keziah Folger was born on
Nantucket on October 9, 1723, when Jane was eleven. Keziah’s father, Daniel Folger, was
Abiah Folger Franklin’s cousin, and her mother, Abigail Folger, was actually another cousin of Abiah Folger Franklin’s. Useful information about Keziah Folger Coffin was gathered by
Jared Sparks in the 1830s. In 1838, William Folger of Nantucket wrote to Sparks, about Franklin, that “her parents being so nearly related to each other the Doctor used to say, that he considered Kezia as an own cousin.” Jared Sparks, “Papers sent to me by
William C. Folger, of Nantucket. Relating to Franklin” in “Papers relating chiefly to Franklin. Used in writing his Life, 1839,” Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 19, Houghton Library, Harvard University. (The papers are filed by manuscript number; all further references to the Sparks Papers in Houghton Library supply this reference number.) Sparks also visited Nantucket, in 1826; see his diary entry for October 10, 1826, in MS Sparks 141c. Keziah Folger married
John Coffin in 1746. She and Jane remained close until the American Revolution. Franklin also corresponded with Keziah, though much less frequently, it appears, than Jane did. On Keziah Folger Coffin, see Nathaniel Philbrick,
Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890
(Nantucket: Mill Hill Press, 1994), 123–33, and Betsy Tyler,
Sometimes Think of Me: Notable Nantucket Women Through the Centuries
(Nantucket: Nantucket Historical Association, 2010), 11–17. No scholar has yet investigated the ties between the Coffins and the Mecoms. William C. Folger’s notes from which he compiled the information he sent to Sparks can be found in William C. Folger, “Minutes from which my letter to Jared Sparks was Compiled and from which the account of the Folgers in Spark’s [
sic
] Life of Franklin is derived,” Peter Foulger (1618–1690), Folder 34, Folger Family Papers, Nantucket Historical Association Research Library.
7.
Grace Harris was born on August 3, 1718, the daughter of Jane’s sister Anne and her husband William Harris of Ipswich (
PBF,
1:lvii). In 1746, Grace Harris married Jonathan Williams of Boston. Jane’s friendship with Grace lasted until Grace’s death in March 1790, and Jane was close to all of the Williams children.
8.
Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:56. On James Franklin as a dyer, see Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:56–57.
9.
BF,
Autobiography,
9, 10.
10.
Ebenezer Turell,
Memoirs of the Life and Death of … Mrs. Jane Turell,
25.
11.
BF,
Autobiography,
11, and BF, “Idea of the English School,” January 1751,
PBF,
4:101. BF, “On Literary Style,” August 2, 1733,
PBF,
1:328. BF,
Autobiography,
10.
12.
BF,
Autobiography,
45, 11.
13.
Daniel Defoe,
Essay on Projects
(London: R.R., 1697), 282–83, 293.
14.
BF,
Autobiography,
11.
15.
JFM to BF, October 21, 1784. This was when she was sixty-two.
1.
John Perkins, Medical Notebook Number 2, n.p., and Medical Notebook Number 3 (“Curiosa Miscellania”), 7, AAS.
2.
On the early history of newsletters, newsbooks, and newspapers in
England, see Joad Raymond,
The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Charles E. Clark,
The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and James Raven,
The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), especially chapter 9. On the early history of American newspapers, see John Hench, ed.,
Three Hundred Years of the American Newspaper
(Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1991); Isaiah Thomas,
The History of Printing in America,
2 vols. (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1874); Clarence S. Brigham,
A History and Bibliography of American Newspapers
(Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1947); David A. Copeland,
Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); John Tebbel
, The Compact History of the American Newspaper,
rev. ed. (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969); Richard D. Brown,
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and David Paul Nord,
Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
3.
On this early history, see Ruth Lapham Butler,
Doctor Franklin, Postmaster General
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928).
4.
David S. Shields,
Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 266. See also Perry Miller, introduction to
The New-England Courant: A Selection
(Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1956); he writes that James Franklin “really desired to recreate
in Boston that standard of wit, elegance, and satire he had learned in the printing houses of London” (6).
5.
See Lawrence C. Wroth,
The Colonial Printer,
2nd ed., rev. and enl. (Charlottesville, VA: Dominion Books, 1964). For more on the time required to set the type see Jeffrey L. Pasley,
“The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 25.
6.
Nord,
Communities of Journalism,
calls the
New-England Courant
“the first overtly heretical newspaper in America” (52). Thomas C. Leonard,
The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), begins chapter 1 with James Franklin. Michael Schudson also credits James Franklin with being “the first journalist in the world to report the vote count on a bill in the legislature” (Schudson in Hench,
Three Hundred Years,
424).
7.
New-England Courant,
December 4, 1721.
8.
Benjamin Franklin the Elder became a member of the
Brattle Street Church on April 7, 1717.
James Franklin followed on July 7, 1717.
The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square, Boston With Lists of Communicants, Baptisms, Marriages, and Funerals, 1699–1872
(Boston: Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, 1902), 97.
9.
Quoted in Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:114. See also James Franklin’s account of this encounter,
New-England Courant,
December 4, 1721.
10.
Quoted in Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:119. More broadly, see Shields,
Civil Tongues,
and Lemay’s chapter on James Franklin in
Life of BF,
vol. 1, ch. 6.
11.
Quoted in Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:131–32.
12.
For example, eleven months after a series of essays about
liberty called
Cato’s Letters
began appearing in London, Franklin extracted them in the
Courant
. Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 43.
13.
New-England Courant,
December 4, 1721.
14.
That same year, one of Josiah Franklin’s apprentices, a twenty-year-old Irishman named
William Tinsley, ran away. “Black hair lately cut off, somewhat fresh-coloured Countenance, a large lower Lip, of a mean Aspect,” Josiah wrote, describing Tinsley in a newspaper ad he placed in his son’s paper.
New-England Courant,
July 9, 1722.
15.
BF,
Autobiography,
15. And, on Franklin’s early printed writing, see also James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass,
Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer
(New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006), chapter 1. Franklin, as Green and Stallybrass point out, not only wrote
for
print but also
about
print (vii).
16.
Silence Dogood, “No. 2,”
New-England Courant,
April 16, 1722;
PBF,
1:13.
17.
Cotton Mather,
Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good
(Boston: B. Green, 1710) and
Silentarius
(Boston: S. Kneeland, 1721). See also Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:145.
18.
Silence Dogood, “No. 1,”
New-England Courant,
April 2, 1722;
PBF,
1:9–11. Emphasis in original.
19.
Silence Dogood, “No. 3,”
New-England Courant,
April 30, 1722;
PBF,
1:14. Silence Dogood, “No. 2,”
New-England Courant,
April 16, 1722;
PBF,
1:13.
20.
Silence Dogood, “No. 4,”
New-England Courant,
May 14, 1722;
PBF,
1:14–21.
21.
While his brother was in jail, from June 12 to July 7, 1722, Benjamin also printed a list of books in the
Courant
’s library. See Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:162–63.
22.
Silence Dogood, “No. 8,”
New-England Courant,
July 9, 1722;
PBF,
1:27–30.
23.
New-England Courant,
December 3, 1722. On BF’s authorship of Hugo Grim’s letter, see J. A. Leo Lemay,
The Canon of Benjamin Franklin, 1722–1776
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 27–28.
24.
Quoted in Miller, introduction to
The New-England Courant
:
A Selection,
5–9.
25.
On the subterfuge, see BF,
Autobiography,
16, and Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:193–95. BF took charge of the paper twice as a teenager: for the first time while James was in jail, in the summer of 1722, and for the second time while James was in hiding, from mid-January to mid-February 1723. On the latter occasion, BF published his “rubs” against the authorities. See Lemay,
Life of BF,
1:187–88, and BF’s essay in the
New-England Courant,
January 28, 1723.
26.
BF,
Autobiography,
15–17.
27.
Ibid., 17.
28.
New-England Courant,
September 30, 1723.