The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (14 page)

Disappointingly for Ralph, and unluckily for Franklin, that future was slow to unfold. He initially thought to broaden from written art to performance; approaching a local theater troupe, he inquired about acting. The director auditioned him briefly before pronouncing that literature could not spare his gifts. Ralph thereupon proposed to write a weekly paper, a competitor to the
Spectator,
for a rival publisher. The publisher, however, could not be convinced that Ralph’s talent warranted the terms he was demanding. Ralph lowered his sights again, applying for work as a clerk and copyist for the stationers and lawyers who crowded London’s Temple district. He was told no openings existed.

Ralph had arrived in London with empty pockets, having spent his last on the passage from America. His failure to find work extended his impecunious period. So he imposed on Franklin to underwrite his portion of a room they shared on the street called Little Britain, to the north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One of their neighbors was a young woman they both found attractive; Ralph, the older and more worldly of the two, beat Franklin to her favors. When she moved to other quarters, Ralph moved in with her. For a time he lived off her earnings as a milliner, but when these proved insufficient to support him, her, and her young daughter, he resolved once more to get work. He advertised himself as a schoolmaster and indeed set up an establishment of learning in the countryside, in Berkshire. He acquired some dozen pupils, a modest income—and a new name. He had not abandoned his literary ambitions, and, evidently
fearing that such a low post as schoolmaster might be held against a budding genius, he borrowed his friend’s name. Franklin learned this fact upon receiving a letter from Ralph in which the latter explained his circumstances and requested that any reply be addressed to “Mr. Franklin, Schoolmaster.”

His family name was common enough that Franklin did not feel obliged to object to its borrowing—any more than he had objected to Ralph’s borrowing of his money. He calculated that he would eventually get his name back; as for the money, that seemed to have slipped down the same hole that had swallowed the generosity he extended to John Collins.

Yet Ralph was not without collateral of sorts. His absence in Berkshire left his paramour, the madam milliner, in distress both emotional and financial. Her relationship with Ralph had cost her friends and a job. She knew Franklin as an easy mark for a hard tale; with tears, sighs, and doubtless the well-timed coquettish glance, she took up where Ralph had left off fishing in Franklin’s purse.

Yet Franklin was not a complete naïf, at least not on this point. He favored her requests for money, then made a request of his own. As he phrased it later: “Presuming on my importance to her, I attempted familiarities.”

The vigor of his attempt exceeded its welcome. The initiative was “repulsed with a proper resentment,” forcing Franklin to withdraw. The miscue cost him more than embarrassment. The woman informed Ralph of the real Mr. Franklin’s improper advance, prompting Ralph to declare his friendship with Franklin ended and his financial obligations canceled.

Franklin felt himself in no position to make an issue of his loss. As he was learning to do, he philosophized that this was all for the best. He never would have seen the money anyway; nothing had been sacrificed save his good reputation in the eyes of a woman whose own reputation was hardly the finest, and of a friend who was no true friend. “In the loss of his friendship,” Franklin concluded of Ralph, “I found myself relieved from a burden.”

With
almost equal ease Franklin dispensed with the burden of his relationship with Deborah Read. Perhaps his eyes were opened by Ralph’s flippant abandonment of his wife and child; perhaps the allure of the millineress distracted him; perhaps London simply enticed him in a
way staid Philadelphia never had. Certainly he was stunned by his abrupt return to poverty; after the promises, explicit or otherwise, he had made about his imminent success, he probably did not want to face Sarah Read, let alone Debbie. Finally, as much of his adult life would demonstrate, Franklin possessed a lively libido, which now hindered faithfulness to one so far away, when other females were close at hand. Debbie soon slipped from his mind. During his entire stay he wrote her only once, and then merely to inform her that he would not be returning soon.

London in the early eighteenth century was enough to turn the head of any young man. The city that would play a central role in Franklin’s life still carried scars and memories from its twin scourges of the 1660s, the plague and the great fire. Puritan types (the Cotton Mathers who stayed in old England) attributed the pestilence and the holocaust to the ungodly and often downright lewd celebrations that greeted the restoration of the Stuarts after the death of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. The plague began during the spring of 1665, creeping out of the slums of the city and spreading silently—except for the wailing of friends and relatives, before they themselves succumbed—across every district and neighborhood. By summer thousands of men, women, and children were dying each week. Those who could fled the city for the countryside in hopes of eluding the invisible destroyer. (Isaac Newton, sitting out the plague in Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall from a tree and extrapolated its trajectory into a theory of universal gravitation.) Persons too poor to leave kept to their houses, fearing contact with carriers of the disease. Taverns, inns, and theaters were closed by decree of the frantic civic authorities; a curfew reinforced the popular desire to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone who might be a carrier.

A hundred thousand souls went to their reward, and grass was growing in the streets by the time the great fire of 1666 brought the plague to an end. The sight of this new disaster turned discouragement to despair. “Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!, such as happily the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor be outdone till the universal conflagration of it,” wrote an eyewitness.

All the sky was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame. The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it…. The stones of Paul’s flew like granados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness.

Its horrible destructiveness apart, the fire had two positive consequences. The first was the sterilization of the city against the plague, in what was an inadvertent and extreme but nonetheless successful application of the principle of burning down the house to get rid of the rats. The second was the creation of an elaborate system of men and machines to fight future fires. As Daniel Defoe observed in his
Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain,
written during the period of Franklin’s stay in England, “No city in the world is so well furnished for the extinguishing fires when they happen.” Trained firemen, organized into squadrons with special uniforms and insignias, operated pumping engines that drew water from the Thames and other streams and directed it through hoses onto the flames. Iron hooks on ropes were employed to pull down burning buildings; in stubborn cases gunpowder was detonated to blast the fuel beyond the fire’s reach.

The performance of the firefighters obviously impressed Franklin, who after his return to Philadelphia set about organizing similar crews. Other aspects of city life were less worthy of imitation but hardly less fascinating to a lad from the provinces. London afforded endless amusements, some innocuous, others dangerous, still others indicative of the often brutal nature of life in that era. In the category of the at-least-potentially harmful—to body and perhaps to soul—were the prostitutes who put in the shade any on offer in Philadelphia (let alone Boston). “As we stumbled along,” wrote a chronicler of the period, “my friend bid me take notice of a shop wherein sat three or four very provoking damsels, with as much velvet on their backs as would have made a burying-pall for a country parish, or a holiday coat for a physician, being glorified at bottom with gold fringes, that I thought at first they might be parsons’ daughters, who had borrowed their fathers’ pulpit-clothes to use as scarfs, and go a-visiting in; each with as many patches in her market-place as are spots in a leopard’s skin or freckles in the face of a Scotchman.” The writer inquired of his friend who or what these ladies were. He answered that “they were a kind of first-rate punks by their rigging, of about a guinea purchase.” The writer asked his friend how he knew they
were prostitutes (“lechery-layers,” was the term he used). “He replied, because they were sitting in a head-dresser’s shop; which, he says, is as seldom to be found without a whore as a bookseller’s shop in Paul’s Churchyard without a parson.”

Leisured gentlemen partook of the services of such entrepreneurs of intimacy; when satisfied in this regard they might, along with persons of lesser means, seek diversion at the justice court at Bridewell, where they would watch assorted transgressors—including women and girls—being flogged for their poverty and related misdeeds. Another favorite stop was the royal hospital at Bedlam—a corruption, in at least two regards, of “Bethlehem”—where guests would laugh at the antics of the lunatics. So popular was mental illness as a spectator sport that rules for visitors had to be posted: “No person do give the inmates strong drink, wine, tobacco, or spirits; nor be permitted to sell any such thing in the hospital.” Public pillories at Charing Cross and executions at Newgate drew consistent and enthusiastic crowds; persons unlucky enough to miss the judicial killings could examine the decorporated heads displayed on Temple Bar, otherwise known as London’s Golgotha.

Spectators who preferred their cruelty inflicted on nonhuman species could take in the combat among various animals at Hockley-in-the-Hole. A handbill forecast the fun:

This is to give notice to all gentlemen, gamesters, and others, that on this present Monday is a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate market, against one from Honylane market … Likewise a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him; also a mad ass to be baited, with variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. Beginning exactly at three of the clock.

Even unintentionally, London life could be cruel. At inns and public houses the guests ate out of a common dish; armed with their own cutlery, they speared for the choicest morsels on what occasionally turned out to be a first-come, first-severed basis. The
Grub Street Journal
reported, “Last Wednesday a gentleman met with an odd accident in helping himself to some roast chicken. He found that he had conveyed two joints of another gentleman’s forefinger to his plate together with the wing which he had just taken off.”

That the digit-deprived gentleman did not complain more loudly may have owed to the anesthetizing effect of the alcohol in which Londoners swam from morning till night. Like all large cities, London suffered serious problems of public sanitation, exemplified perhaps most odiously, although hardly uniquely, by the Fleet River, which ran as an open sewer to the Thames. The authorities regularly railed against the popular habit of discharging human, animal and vegetable waste into the stream; that they had to do so on such a regular basis betrayed their lack of success at compelling compliance. Not until the 1760s was the problem solved, or at least covered over, when the Fleet River became Fleet Street.

Partly as a health measure—to avoid drinking contaminated water—Londoners quaffed alcoholic beverages of all proofs and flavors. They drank beer with breakfast, perhaps following a dram of sherry as an eye-opener; more beer as the morning progressed, perhaps interspersed with brandy to ward off the English chills; ale with lunch; raisin or elder wine with afternoon tea (which was a relative novelty and the principal alternative to alcoholic beverages, with the boiling of the water serving to kill the microorganisms that infested the water supply); grape wine with dinner, followed by punch and liqueurs of one sort or another—“White and Wormwood,” “Ratafia,” “Nectar and Ambrosia,” “Rosolio”—till bedtime.

Not surprisingly, public intoxication was common. “We continued drinking like horses, as the vulgar phrase is,” wrote one diarist, “and singing till many of us were very drunk, and then we went to dancing and pulling of wigs, caps, and hats; and thus we continued in this frantic manner, behaving more like mad people than they that profess the name of Christians. Whether this is inconsistent to the wise saying of Solomon let anyone judge, ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and he that is deceived thereby is not wise.”

Often the sots found their way to the theater, where they behaved no better. Crowded into the galleries and the pit, they made ribald jokes at the expense of the actors and, purchasing apples and oranges from the barker-women strolling the aisles between acts, hurled the fruit onto the stage. Alexander Pope, who was busy editing Shakespeare during Franklin’s London stay, decried the presence of the rabble: