Book of Ages (64 page)

  
1.
  “History of the Life and Character of Benjamin Franklin,”
Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine,
May 1790, pp. 268–72. On the early editions, see Benjamin Franklin,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text,
ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), xlviii–lviii. And see also Green and Stallybrass,
Benjamin Franklin,
chapter 8.

  
2.
  “Self-biography,” a writer for London’s
Monthly Review
mused in 1797, was probably not a legitimate word. “It is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet
autobiography
would have seemed pedantic.” W. Taylor,
Monthly Review,
2nd ser., vol. 24, p. 375; quoted in the
Oxford English Dictionary
.

  
3.
  As the editors of the
American Museum
explained, what they printed was “taken from his own private memoirs.” “Memoirs of the late Dr. Franklin,”
American Museum, or Universal Magazine
(July 1790): 12–20.

  
4.
  The best account of the manuscript—of which there seem to have been five copies—is
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text,
xxxvii–xlvii.

  
5.
  BF to Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, Philadelphia, November 13, 1789. See also BF to
Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, Philadelphia, November 13, 1789.

  
6.
  BF to
Benjamin Vaughan, Philadelphia, November 15, 1789.

  
7.
  Richard Price to BF, ca. May 30, 1790. On June 6, 1790, in his journal, Price noted, “Received last Friday in a letter from Dr Rush” the news of Franklin’s death, adding, “I had lately finished the perusal of his life written by himself which he had sent to Mr. Vaughan to be read by him and me … In consequence of reading it I had writ to him about a week ago”; Price mourned the loss of a man “whose name will live in all future
annals
” (Richard Price, “Richard Price’s Journal for the Period 25 March 1787 to 6 February 1791,”
National Library of Wales Journal
21 [1979–80]: 394; Price’s letter to BF, which is not in
PBF,
is reproduced on pp. 397–98.

  
8.
  Le Veillard was executed by guillotine in 1794; the manuscript Franklin had sent him was kept by his widow and, upon her death, by his daughter. In 1834, it passed into the hands of M. de Senarmont, Le Veillard’s grandnephew. It was bound sometime
in the 1830s. A title stamped on its spine, in gold, on a red leather label, reads, “The Life of Francklin.” It remained in the Veillard family’s hands until 1867, when John Bigelow, a historian and the American minister to France, purchased it and brought it back to the United States. BF,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,
ed. John Bigelow (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868), Introduction. It is now in the Henry E. Huntington Library.

  
9.
  Temple Franklin proved a poor editor. Benjamin Franklin had originally written:

This Franklin himself had revised to read:

Temple Franklin made it fussy:

Franklin thought fame went too far and demoted his achievement to reputation; Temple promoted him to celebrity.
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text,
liii–lviii.

10.
  WTF to the printer of the [London]
Star,
June 16, 1793,
General Advertiser
(Philadelphia), November 28, 1793.

11.
  A proposal for printing the first edition by subscription appeared in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1793: “Proposal for Printing by Subscription,”
Oracle of the Day,
November 13, 1793. An edition was offered for sale in
New Jersey in June 1794 (
New-Jersey Journal,
June 25, 1794), but this was likely the London edition, as the New York printer announced that the American edition was “In the Press and speedily will be Published” only in September:
New-York Daily Gazette,
September 16, 1794.

12.
  In 1790, JFM had written to Sally Franklin Bache, congratulating her on the news that Benny had started a
newspaper and adding, “I hope he will remember his old aunt, with a present of some of his papers, when convenient by a vessel.” JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, September 6, 1790. This letter is a corrected copy.

13.
  Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, April 1, 1790.

14.
  Jonathan Williams Jr. to BF, Boston, November 7, 1789.

15.
  JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, October 20, 1790.

16.
  JFM to BF, August 29, 1789.

17.
  JFM to Jonathan Williams Jr., Boston, August 11, 1792. Four documents signed by JFM after BF’s death concern his bequest: a conveyance, dated June 23, 1791; JFM to Henry Hill (one of BF’s executors), August 6, 1791; JFM to Henry Hill, August 2, 1792; and JFM to Henry Hill, July 29, 1793. All four of these documents are written
in a hand other than Jane’s; she merely signed them. A letter by JFM to Edward Duffield (another of Franklin’s executors), dated September 24, 1791, was auctioned in 1895.
Catalogue of the extraordinary collection of rare and valuable American history belonging to M. Polock, Esq., of Philadelphia … and an unique collection of Franklin imprints…
(Philadelphia: S. V. Henkels, 1895). I have not been able to find the original.

18.
  Benjamin Mecom, “Fine Crown Soap,”
General Advertiser,
February 12, 1793. The notice also appeared twice in March and once in May, and then never again. The advertisement claimed that Mecom had
apprenticed with Jane’s brother John Franklin in 1751, which Benjamin Mecom never did; it was Jane’s son Peter who apprenticed with John Franklin.

19.
  Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(Boston: Peter Edes, 1792). On the serialization in Boston, see Skemp,
First Lady of Letters,
217. “Extracts from the Rights of Woman,”
Massachusetts Magazine
4 (October 1792): 598–99.

20.
  Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
chapter 13, pp. 321–22.

21.
  Adams quoted in Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters,
251.

22.
  Richard Price to Benjamin Rush, Hackney, June 19, 1790, in BF,
Works of the late Dr. Franklin
(New York: Tiebout and Obrian, 1794), 1:6–7.

  
1.
  
Jane Austen, “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st [1791]” is transcribed in Jane Austen,
The History of England,
with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1993). On women as historians, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in
Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past,
ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 153–82; Bonnie G. Smith,
The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
(New York: Knopf, 2007); and D. R. Woolf, “A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,”
American Historical Review
102 (1997): 645–79. A related discussion about the “body” of historical knowledge can be found in Natalie Zemon Davis, “History’s Two Bodies,”
American Historical Review
93 (1988): 1–30. On women as eighteenth-century readers of history, see Mark Salber Phillips, “ ‘If Mrs. Mure Be Not Sorry for Poor King Charles’: History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader,”
History Workshop Journal
43 (1997): 111–31. For a related discussion of the relationship between fiction and history, see Jill Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,”
New Yorker,
March 24, 2008.

  
2.
  This, like Austen’s title—“by a Partial, Prejudiced, & Ignorant Historian”—parodied Hume, who had written, “The first quality of an historian is to be true and impartial; the next to be interesting” (
Letters of David Hume,
1:210 [Hume to Mure, October 1754]).

  
3.
  Jane Austen, “The History of England.”

  
4.
  Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey
(written in 1798 but published only posthumously, in 1818), chapter 14.

  
5.
  Jane Austen,
Persuasion
(1818).

  
6.
  
BF,
Poor Richard 1734, PBF,
1:355; JFM to BF, May 29, 1786.

  
7.
  Regarding the genre in America, Davidson writes, “Until well into the nineteenth century, virtually every American
novel somewhere in its preface or its plot defended itself against the charge that it
was
a novel, either by defining itself differently (“Founded In
Truth
”) or by redefining the genre tautologically, as all those things it was presumed not to be—moral, truthful, educational, and so forth” (
Revolution and the Word,
40). Beck argues that the heyday of the “pseudo-
historical novel” in England was 1740–1780. It lagged longer in the United States, into the first decade of the nineteenth century. See Beck, “The Novel,” 409.

  
8.
  Charles Gildon,
An Epistle to Daniel Defoe
(1719), reprinted in Williams,
Novel and Romance,
57–63.

  
9.
  See Mayer,
History and the Early English Novel,
3.

10.
  Henry Fielding,
The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling
(London, 1748). Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(London, 1759–67).

11.
  William Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding” (1751); reprinted in Williams,
Novel and Romance,
150.

12.
  William Godwin, “Of History and Romance” (unpublished essay, written in 1797); reprinted in
Caleb Williams,
ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Toronto: Broadview, 2000).

13.
  On Brown’s philosophy of history, see Mark L. Kamrath, “
Charles Brockden Brown and the ‘Art of the Historian’: An Essay Concerning (Post)Modern Historical Understanding,”
Journal of the Early Republic
21 (2001): 231–60, and Peter Kafer, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Pleasures of ‘Unsanctified Imagination,’ 1787–1793,”
William and Mary Quarterly
57 (2000): 543–68.

14.
  Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference Between History and Romance,”
Monthly Magazine and American Review
(April 1800): 251–53.

15.
  Charles Brockden Brown, “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature,”
Literary Magazine and American Register
(February 1806): 32–36.

16.
  John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, May 5, 1811.

17.
  Brown, “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature.”

  
1.
  JFM, Last Will and Testament, February 17, 1794, Suffolk County Probate files, Mass. Arch. It begins, “The time must arrive when I shall be called upon to resign this decaying frame to its parent dust and my spirit to the God who gave it.” It is reproduced in Van Doren,
Letters,
350–54. The day Jane signed her will, CRG’s obituary appeared in the
Boston Gazette
. “Deaths,”
Boston Gazette,
February 17, 1794: “At Warwick, Mrs. Catharine Green, consort of Gov. Green of Rhode Island.” It might have been Greene’s death that spurred Jane to finalize her will.

  
2.
  Monaghan, “
Literacy Instruction and Gender,” 27. John Eliot to Jeremy Belknap, 1782; quoted in Woody,
History of Women’s Education,
146. In 1789, Boston public schools began admitting girls, but they were allowed to attend for only half the year. Discussions of girls’ education in the late eighteenth century include Keith
Pacholl, “ ‘Let Both Sexes Be Carefully Instructed’: Educating Youth in Colonial Philadelphia,” in
Children in Colonial America,
191–203. Literacy rates for both men and women rose considerably in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and the gap between male and female literacy narrowed, although just how high they rose, how much the gap closed, and how reliable the measures are remain the subjects of considerable debate. A useful summary of the debate up to 1986 is in Davidson,
Revolution and the Word,
chapter 4. Ross W. Beales and E. Jennifer Monaghan present more recent data in “Literacy and Schoolbooks,” in
The History of the Book in America,
1:380–87.

  
3.
  Jane described it as “my Silver Porringer mark’d P
^F
M.” A silver porringer marked S
^F
H, belonging to Jane’s cousin Samuel Franklin and his wife Hannah, and dated 1742, can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession no. RES.34.6, a gift of the Franklin family. In the inscription, the
S
is for Samuel, the
H
for Hannah, and the joint
F
for Franklin.
Peter Franklin’s wife was named Mary Harman. The inscription on his porringer reads:
P
for Peter,
M
for Mary, and joint
F
for Franklin. I have therefore concluded that this porringer must have come to Jane from her brother. Van Doren mistakenly thought the porringer belonged to Jane’s son
Peter Franklin Mecom. See editorial comment, Van Doren,
Letters,
350. My thanks to Caitlin Hopkins and Kelly L’Ecuyer.

  
4.
  The ring is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  
5.
  This seems to have been the Wedgwood medallion Franklin sent to Jane from London in 1775. See BF to JFM, February 26, 1775, and Sellers,
Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture,
62.

  
6.
  Benjamin Franklin, “The Folly of Making War,”
Boston Gazette,
March 3, 1794.

  
7.
  JFM to BF, May 22, 1787. Lathrop might have been involved in this. Before his death in 1816, he founded the Massachusetts Peace Society.

  
8.
  
Susanna Rowson,
Charlotte: A Tale of Truth
(Philadelphia: D. Humphreys, 1794).
Charlotte
was the first best-selling novel written by an American. The only other novels, in the eighteenth century, to qualify as bestsellers were English:
Pamela, Clarissa,
and
Gulliver’s Travels
. Frank Luther Mott,
Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best-Sellers in the United States
(New York: 1947), 303–5.

  
9.
  On the academy, see Ellen B. Brandt,
Susanna Haswell Rowson: America’s First Best-Selling Novelist
(Chicago: Serbra, 1975), chapter 8. Rowson also wrote a notable history textbook,
Exercises in History, Chronology and Biography
(Boston, 1822).

10.
  Readers had so much sympathy with the novel’s heroine that they made pilgrimages, for decades, to
Trinity Churchyard in New York—where Charlotte, in the story, is buried—to weep and place flowers over a grave. The best discussion of both the author and the text is to be found in the introduction by Cathy N. Davidson in Susannah Haswell Rowson,
Charlotte Temple
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). And on the expansion of the republic of letters in the new nation, see
A History of the Book in America,
vol. 2:
An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840,
ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 54–171.

11.
  I have found no gravestone, and no obituary lists the day on which she died, but the date of her death is mentioned in a letter from her minister: John Lathrop to unknown, Philadelphia, June 10, 1794, Smith Family Papers, 1678–1937, vol. 11
(1792–97), LCP. The letter appears to be a draft. It might have been addressed to
Benjamin Smith, the husband of Jane’s granddaughter Sarah Mecom, or, far more likely, to Henry Hill, one of the executors of Franklin’s estate. The letter survives at the LCP in a collection of papers handed down through the Philadelphia family of John Smith, who was a trustee of the LCP in the 1750s and whose grandson was the librarian from 1829 to 1851. Benjamin Smith might possibly have belonged to this family, but the Smith family married into the family of Henry Hill. Jane corresponded with Hill regularly, regarding her annuity. (John Smith’s son John Smith Jr. married Guliema Maria Morris in 1784; Henry Hill was Morris’s grandmother’s brother.) As Lathrop’s letter concerns Franklin’s bequest, and because the majority of the letters in this volume of the Smith papers are either to or from Henry Hill, it seems extremely likely that Lathrop addressed this letter to Hill.

12.
  John Lathrop, Record Book, 1768–1815, Second Church Records, Box 1, vol. 7, MHS. In this entry, Lathrop gives the date of death as May 10, 1794, but May 7, supplied in the Lathrop letter to Henry Hill, cited above, must be right, given that an obituary appeared in a newspaper dated May 9. Also, in the Record Book, it appears that Lathrop initially wrote “7” and then crossed it out and wrote “10.” Why is uncertain. May 10 was the date of the funeral.

13.
  For Edes’s report, see “Deaths,”
Boston Gazette,
May 12, 1794. The obituary with the notice of the funeral ran in the
Massachusetts Mercury,
May 9, 1794, and in the
Columbian Centinel,
May 10, 1794. A briefer obituary appeared in the
Massachusetts Spy,
May 15, 1794.

14.
  John Lathrop,
Consolation for Mourners
(Boston: White and Adams, 1779), 15. On Lathrop, see Chandler Robbins,
A History of the Second Church, or Old North, in Boston
(Boston, 1852), 125–30, and Sibley,
Biographical Sketches,
15:428–36. Two sermons Lathrop preached in May 1794 do survive. One is on charity and one is on false prophecy. John Lathrop Sermons, Box 6 (1789–94), MHS.

15.
  The record of the administration of her estate is reprinted in Van Doren,
Letters,
354–59.

16.
  Franklin probably wrote this
epitaph in 1728, when he was twenty-two. Three texts are known, all different. See editorial comment,
PBF,
1:109–10; for a transcription, see 111. At some point, he wrote out a copy for Jane. She must have kept it with her, all her life, because when she packed her things to flee Boston in 1775, she brought it with her. When
Ezra Stiles met her in Rhode Island in 1779, he recorded, in his diary, that she “shewed me his Epitaph in his own hand.” Stiles,
Literary Diary
, 2:375.

17.
  JFM to BF, February 21, 1786.

18.
  JFM to BF, May 29, 1786. She closed this letter with “but oh may I not Live to hear of the Departure of My Dear Brother.”

19.
  Benjamin Franklin the Elder’s “The Chiding” is an undated poem, and Jane’s copy of it (“this is won of my Good old Unkl Franklins Poims”) is in the Jane [Franklin] Mecom Collection at the APS. It, too, is undated. Van Doren writes that Jane made the copy “presumably in her later life” (
Letters,
348–50). There is no evidence on the paper itself to suggest that, except for the wobbliness of Jane’s hand, suggesting that she was fairly old at the time.

20.
  This is usually supposed. E.g., Charles Chauncey Wells and Suzanne Austin Wells,
in
Preachers, Patriots and Plain Folks: Boston’s Burying Ground Guide
(Oak Park, IL: Chauncey Park, 2004), report, “She was probably buried in Granary because she was born 2 blocks away and her boarding house was near the State House” (130).
Copp’s Hill, the burial ground closest to Jane’s house, would have seemed another likely place for her to be buried. But in 1851, when
Thomas Bridgman inventoried the
epitaphs on
gravestones there, he did not record one for Jane. See Thomas Bridgman,
Epitaphs from Copp’s Hill Burial Ground
(Boston: James Munroe, 1851). Nor does Bridgman record any stone for Jane in his inventory of the Granary Burying Ground, published in 1856, but chances are good that, if Jane had been buried in the Granary, near her parents, her grave would have been disturbed by the erection of the Franklin monument in 1827. This fate, however, did not befall Jane’s uncle’s gravestone, because in 1856 Bridgman did find, “about four feet west of the Franklin monument,” stones for
Benjamin Franklin the Elder (Jane’s uncle) and for Mrs. Hannah Franklin (the wife of Jane’s cousin Samuel). See Bridgman,
The Pilgrims of Boston
(New York: D. Appleton, 1856), 332–35.

21.
  That the original inscription was “nearly obliterated” is asserted on the inscription that replaced it in 1827, the text of which is reproduced in
Historical Sketch and Matters Appertaining to the Granary Burial-Ground
(Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1902), 14–15.

22.
  Daniel Webster, “The Bunker Hill Monument, an Address Delivered … on the Seventeenth of June, 1825,” in
Daniel Webster’s First Bunker Hill Oration
, ed. Fred Newton Scott (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902), 25.

23.
  The proposal to rename the Granary Burying Ground “Franklin Cemetery” was made in 1830, three years after the erection of the monument.
Historical Sketch and Matters Appertaining to the Granary Burial-Ground,
4.

24.
  Ibid., 14–15. The graves of Jane and Benjamin’s parents were found, during excavation; they were not moved. The original tablet, said to have been “defaced,” was enclosed within the obelisk. Boston
Centinel,
June 23, 1827, reprinted as “Franklin Monument,”
Pittsfield Sun,
July 12, 1827.