Book of Ages (9 page)

Spinning between the Hours of Reading:
while the schoolmaster was teaching boys to write, girls had nothing to do. They might as well spin.

That was Boston. In the more lurid corners of London that Franklin had been frequenting, the battle of the furniture was smutty: the wanton
tea table versus the virginal spinning wheel was a commonplace of early-eighteenth-century English satire. In
Edward Ward’s 1702 poem
The City Madam, and the Country Maid,
the city madam is “ripe to be undone:/Loosing at last, so little is her Care,/Her Virgin Treasure on a Founder’d Chair,” and all because she does not spin: she’d been “bred,/Scarce knowing Hemp from Flax, or Yarn from Thread.” By contrast, the
virtuous country maid does naught
but
spin: “Her Needle, Bobbins, Knitting Pins, or Reel,/Some new Device, or the old Spinning Wheel/Are still Employ’d, and with Content Caress’d.”
²⁴
A
spinster was a virgin. A 1714 pamphlet called
Adam and Eve Stript
included a chapter on “the Huswifry of the Spinning-Wheel”; it describes a spinster who “waddles, like a Duck, with her Toes inwards, in due Observance of her Mother’s good Counsel, who bid her always be careful, before she was marry’d, to keep her great Toes together, lest some Clown or other should tumble in between them.”
²⁵
A spinster kept her toes together.

Franklin himself once wrote a satire about a tea table and a spinning wheel, in the guise of “Anthony Afterwit,” a tradesman saddled with a wife whose
vanity and taste for finery leads her to buy “a
Tea-Table
with all its Appurtenances” and who, before he can stop her, goes on to buy, on credit, a clock, a horse, and a maid. To save himself from debtors’ prison, Afterwit rids himself of the maid, swaps the clock for an hourglass, trades in the horse for a milch cow, and disposes of the tea table by putting a spinning wheel in its place.
²⁶

And so: when Benjamin Franklin, on the day he turned twenty-one, wrote to fourteen-year-old Jane, a “celebrated beauty,” that he considered sending her a tea table but then thought better of it and promised instead to send her a spinning wheel, as better befitting her, he was warning her to keep her toes together.

In writing to her, he had been free with her, but more frank he could not be. He knew their parents would read his letter, and he knew, too, that his quick-witted sister would read every word with care. “Every hint of yrs appeared of two much consequence to me to be neglected or forgoten,”
she once wrote him. “I all ways knew Everything you said had a meaning.”
²⁷

He closed with an apology.

J. Franklin tucked this letter away. And then, she picked up her pen.

CHAPTER X

H
er paper was made from rags, soaked and pulped and strained and dried. Her thread was made from flax, combed and spun and twisted and dyed. On a table, she laid down a sheet of foolscap and smoothed it with the palms of her hands. She creased it and folded it, and folded it again. She pressed it open. With a needle made of steel, she stitched a seam.

It made the slimmest of volumes, no thicker than a patch of burlap. She dipped the nub of a pen slit from the feather of a bird into a pot of ink boiled of oil mixed with soot.
¹
And then, on the first page, she wrote three words:

The
handwriting is unlike anything else she ever wrote: a lavish, calligraphic letter
B,
a graceful, slender, artful
A.
She wrote these three words, and only these three words, in a loopy and Italian round hand, known as the “Flourishing Alphabet.”

She could have learned it out of a
writing manual.
A very Useful Manual; or, The Young Mans Companion,
printed
in London in 1681, was first advertised for sale in Boston in 1694.
²
By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were dozens of “young man’s companions.”
In Philadelphia, her brother printed
The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion
.
It included “Directions to Beginners.” How to make a pen: “before you begin to cut the Quill, scrape off the superfluous Scurf with the Back of your Pen-knife.” How to hold a pen: “the Fore Finger lying straight on the Middle Finger.” Then came “Instructions to write a Variety of Hands,” including
alphabets of “the most usual fashionable, and commendable Hands for Business.”
³

She chose her words with care. Book of Age’s. There is no article; it’s neither “The Book of Ages” nor “A Book of Ages.” The apostrophe must have been an error; she had no idea how to punctuate, and it’s not, really, age’s book. At first, the meaning seems plain: this book contains a record of people’s ages—it contains a list of dates, a record of births and deaths. But, looking closer, the meaning isn’t plain at all. The phrase sounds common, but it’s not. It’s not in the
Bible; it’s not in Shakespeare. It’s not in Milton or Bunyan. It’s not in anything she ever seems to have read. It only very rarely appeared in any seventeenth- or eighteenth-century English or American book, pamphlet, broadside, song sheet, or newspaper, at least before 1791, when it turned up—as a synonym for the Bible—in a catechism: “Thus learn to read my child the word of God. It speaks by words and by deeds. It is a book of ages.”
⁴

Maybe the phrase came not from something she read but from something she heard: a
hymn. Sometime about 1250,
Thomas of Celano, an Italian monk, wrote “Dies Irae,” a poem about the day when the dead shall be judged, their lives written in a book.

This stanza was sometimes translated into English as:

“Dies Irae” formed part of the Roman Catholic Requiem; it is a song sung for the dead. A book of ages was a book of the dead.

Maybe there is some family story here, some family hymn about a book of ages. Jane Franklin’s grandmother had loved to sing and had loved to recite
Malachi to her children, telling them of how “a booke of remembrance was written.” Her uncle Benjamin wrote
psalms and sang them over dinner. Her father had a beautiful voice; maybe he had sung to his daughter a song he had learned from his mother, a song about a book of ages, in which all the records are written, of the living and the dead. But unless someone wrote them down, no one can know what songs anyone sang.

When Jane was a girl, whether songs ought to be written down had been much disputed. In meeting, deacons would call out songs, line by line, for the congregation to repeat; the result was something short of tuneful. In 1721, Benjamin Colman argued for singing psalms from printed books. Taking Colman’s side, James Franklin printed
The Grounds and Rules of Musick Explained,
⁶
and, in the
New-England Courant,
offered this squib: “I am credibly inform’d, that a certain Gentlewoman miscarry’d at the ungrateful and yelling Noise of a Deacon in reading the first Line of a Psalm; and methinks if there were no other Argument against this Practice (unless there were an absolute necessity for it) the Consideration of it’s being a Procurer of Abortion, might prevail with us to lay it aside.”
⁷

Still, that a girl growing up in
Puritan Boston in the early years of the eighteenth century could have heard an English translation of a hymn sung at a Catholic Mass is hard to believe. More likely, she simply made up “book of ages.” Not a copy: an original. A Jane Franklin invention.

If the phrase was odd, the keeping of a chronicle of births and deaths was not.
Genealogy was everywhere. Bibles printed
genealogies tracing
Christ’s ancestry back to Adam. Schoolbooks listed the kings and queens of England, back to Henry VIII.
⁸
Parish registers were patchy. Records kept by town clerks were spotty. There were no birth certificates. The only way to be sure who was born when was to write it down, on scraps of paper pressed between the pages of the family Bible—a book was a good place to store a piece of paper—or scribbled on its endpapers.
⁹
Only a book would last.

Instead of using a Bible, Jane Franklin made her own book. “Book of Age’s,” she wrote on the front. Then she turned the page. At the top of the next recto, in a small and unflourishing hand, she began her chronicle, a book of dates.

The Book of Age’s:
her
age.