Book of Ages

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Appendices

A.
Methods and Sources

B.
A Franklin Genealogy

C.
A Jane Genealogy

D.
A Calendar of the Letters

E.
The Editorial Hand of Jared Sparks

F.
Jane’s Library

G.
A Map of Jane’s Boston

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustration Credits

A Note About the Author

Other Books by This Author

A Calendar of Letters (Large Images)

Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane thought of her brother as her “Second Self.”
¹
He was the youngest of ten sons; she was the youngest of seven daughters. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little. No two people in their family were more alike.

Their lives could hardly have been more different. He ran away from home when he was seventeen. She never left. He taught himself to write with wit and force and style; she never learned how to spell. The day he turned twenty-one, he wrote her a letter—she was fourteen—beginning a correspondence that would last until his death sixty-three years later. He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name. He loved no one longer. She loved no one better. He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone. All her life, she wrote back: letter after letter filled with news and recipes and gossip and, when she was truly, sorely vexed, and only then, with her blistering opinions about politics.

He wrote the story of his life, a well-turned tale about a boy who runs away from poverty and obscurity in cramped, pious Boston and leaves all that behind—leaves home behind, leaves his sister behind, leaves the past behind—to become an enlightened, independent man of the world: a free man. It is one of the most important autobiographies ever written. It is also an allegory about America: the story of a man as the story of a nation.

In that story, he left her out. Never once did he so much as mention her name. All the same, little of what Benjamin Franklin wrote—not the Silence Dogood essays, not
Poor Richard’s Almanack,
not
The Way to Wealth,
not the autobiography—can be understood without her. This
book, a history of the life and opinions of Jane Franklin, contains with it a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother. But more, it tells her story. Like his, her life is an allegory: it explains what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost. “One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives,” Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

She never wrote the story of her life. This would scarcely have occurred to her.
²
But she did once write a book. She stitched four sheets of foolscap between two covers to make sixteen pages. On its first page, she wrote,

She called it her Book of Ages.
³
It is a record of the
births and
deaths of her children, a litany of grief.

I once held it in my hands. It was so small, so fragile, so plain, her handwriting so tiny and cramped. Sixteen pages and, as I turned them, I discovered that she had left the last pages blank. Had she nothing more to say?

Virginia Woolf once asked, “What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith”? Woolf gave herself permission to invent this Judith Shakespeare—“Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by”—and conjured a girl as brilliant and daring as her brother:

What, Woolf wondered, would have been Judith Shakespeare’s fate?

Judith Shakespeare did break her father’s heart: she ran away. “The force of her own gift alone drove her to it,” Woolf wrote. “She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen.” In London, she was seduced by an actor, after which “she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night.”
⁴

Judith Shakespeare is a figment of Virginia Woolf’s imagination, a heroine trapped, skirts aflutter, in a modern, manly idea of the self, and of the author as solitary and unencumbered: a free man. No American writer did more to mold that idea of authorship than Benjamin Franklin. Judith Shakespeare could not reconcile a life of the mind with the life of a mother. Neither could Virginia Woolf.

The facts of Jane Franklin’s life are hard to come by. Her obscurity is matched only by her brother’s fame. If he meant to be Everyman, she is everyone else. Most of what she wrote is lost—the first letter in her hand to survive is one she wrote when she was forty-five years old—and what scant record of her life is left has been saved only because she was Benjamin Franklin’s sister.

But Jane Franklin is not a figment of my imagination. She was flesh and blood and milk and tears. Her brother ran away and broke their father’s heart; she would not, could not. She never gave herself that much rope. She didn’t kill herself one winter’s night. She never gave herself that kind of rope, either. She had too many people to look after. She never left anyone behind. She hardly ever left the house. She didn’t have a room of her own until she was sixty-nine years old. “I write now in my own litle chamber…& nobod up in the house near me to Desturb me,” she wrote, delighted.
⁵
She was very happy to have it, but not having that room sooner isn’t why she didn’t write more or better.

Whether a poet’s heart beat inside her woman’s body I leave it to the reader to decide, but sitting in that archive, holding those sheets of foolscap
stitched together with the coarsest of threads, I began to think that Benjamin Franklin’s sister had something to say after all, something true, something new. Very delicately, I once more turned the brittle pages of the Book of Ages, and in them I saw an
unwritten story: a history of books and papers, a history of reading and writing, a history from reformation to revolution, a history of history. This, then, is Jane Franklin’s story: a book of ages about ages of books.

CHAPTER I