Book of Ages (12 page)

The Ladies Library
was a birthday present. Not a tea table, not a spinning wheel: a book, a library.

In 1731, Benjamin Franklin had founded the first
lending library in America, the
Library Company of Philadelphia. In April 1732, a member of the Library Company sailed to London with a list of titles to purchase. A shipment of books—fifty-six titles in 141 volumes—arrived in Philadelphia in October. Franklin printed up charge slips, for borrowers.
²

The first box of books sent to the Library Company did not include
The Ladies Library
. But it did include booksellers’ catalogs.
³
In a catalog printed in London in October 1732,
The Ladies Library
appeared on the same page as
Thomas Fuller’s
Gnomologia
, the source for many of Poor Richard’s
proverbs. In the summer of 1733, Franklin set off on a visit to
Boston.
⁴
He knew what imported books he might try to pick up in
bookshops along the way. “At the time I establish’d myself in Pennsylvania,” he wrote, “there was not a good Bookseller’s Shop in any of the Colonies to the Southward of Boston.”
⁵
He likely bought
The Ladies Library
at a bookstore in Boston run by a bookseller from London who advertised that he sold “the newest and most valuable Books” for “the very lowest Prices.”
⁶

Then he gave it to Jane. “Given her by her Brother,” she wrote on the flyleaf. And then, again, on the title page, she inscribed her name, “Jane Mecom.” She once lent the second volume to Franklin’s wife, writing on a blank page, “borrowed of Sister Mecom,” so that there would be no misunderstanding about who owned it. When she didn’t get it back, she wrote to Deborah, asking her to return it, “as it breaks the sett.” She had her own ideas about lending and her own ways of keeping track of what books belonged to her. People who borrowed her books had to give them back.
⁷

The year Franklin founded the Library Company, he wrote a short essay called “Observations on my Reading
History in Library.”
⁸
There was no history in
The Ladies Library
. Men who recommended books to women only rarely recommended that they read history. “They allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances to Divert us and themselves,”
Mary Astell complained, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” Nor did women themselves seem much interested in reading history, a preference Astell found understandable. “History can only serve us for Amusement and a Subject of Discourse,” Astell remarked. “For tho’ it may be of Use to the Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us, who have nothing to do with such Business?”
⁹

David Hume urged women to read history—“There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history”—but he, too, found women were reticent. He illustrated this observation with a story about “a young beauty” who asked him to send her some novels to read in the country. He sent her, instead, a volume of history,
Plutarch’s
Lives,
“assuring her, at the same time, that there was not a word of truth in them from beginning to end.” She read it avidly, “till she came to the lives of ALEXANDER and CAESAR, whose names she had heard of by accident; and then returned me the book, with many reproaches for deceiving her.”
¹⁰

The Ladies Library
contains no history but plenty of advice. The first volume consists of essays on female
virtues (chastity, modesty, meekness) and vices (envy and pride). The second describes women’s roles: daughter, wife, mother, widow. The third offers instruction in the practices of piety: prayer, fasting, repentance.
¹¹
A lady’s learning was the study not of public affairs but of private pieties.

Franklin once explained what the Library Company of Philadelphia had meant to him. “This Library afforded me the Means of Improvement by constant Study, for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day,” he wrote, “and thus repair’d in some Degree the Loss of the Learned Education my Father once intended for me.”
¹²
Maybe he meant
The Ladies Library
to do the same for his sister. It went only so far. Still, for all its narrowness,
The Ladies Library
stated on the first page of the first volume an astonishing premise: “It is a great Injustice to shut Books of Knowledge from the Eyes of Women.”
¹³

When Neddy was four and Benny was two and a half, Jane took out her Book of Ages and dipped her quill in ink.

Another boy. She named him after the brother she never met, the little boy who drowned in a tub of suds.
¹⁴

Her days were days of flesh: the little legs and little arms, the little hands, clutched around her neck, the softness. Her days were days of toil: swaddling and nursing the baby, washing and dressing the boys, scrubbing everyone’s faces, answering everyone’s cries, feeding everyone’s hunger, cleaning everyone’s waste. She taught her children to read. She made sure they learned to write better than she did.
¹⁵

Pigs rutted in the streets; horses clattered on the cobbles; the blood of butchered chickens dripped to the floor. The house smelled of soap and tallow and leather and smoke, and it smelled, too, of sweat. Each cord of wood had to be ported and stacked. Every bucket of water had to be hauled from one of the city’s wells. Every pot of night soil had to be lugged out the door and dumped in the privy in the yard. Soap had to be boiled and linens scrubbed.

“I am in the midst of a grate wash,” she once wrote, stealing a moment from the endless drudgery to sit down and write, smudging ink upon the page, a different sort of stain. Everyone was used to living in filth—what counted as dirt was different if you were richer—but there was always washing to be done, with soap made by her own hands.
¹⁶

“READY MONEY for old RAGS, may be had of the Printer thereof,” her brother advertised in the pages of the
Pennsylvania Gazette
.
¹⁷
Franklin had a hand in the establishment of eighteen American paper mills. He bought rags to turn into paper. Or, rather, Deborah did this, Franklin wrote, explaining that his wife kept busy “folding and stitching Pamphlets, tending Shop, purchasing old Linen Rags for the Paper-makers.”
¹⁸
Between 1739 and 1747, Franklin sold 166,000 pounds of rags, earning more than £1,000.
¹⁹
Jane’s life was cluttered with a different sort of rags: rags for washing, rags for diapering, rags for catching blood.

The house was close, hot in summer, cold in winter, and dark: windows so small, tallow so dear. With a baby in her arms, now squirming, now slumbering, she stared into kettles and vats and tubs and barrels, cooking, leaching, and washing. She stirred and she watched, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, quietly rocking, the rhythm of soothing.

“This Library afforded me the Means of Improvement by constant Study, for which I set apart an Hour or two each Day,” her brother had written about his gentleman’s library. For her
Ladies Library,
Jane could hardly have set apart one hour each day, nor half, nor even a quarter.

Her nights were unquiet. Her husband reached for her. Her belly swelled, and emptied, and swelled again. Her breasts filled, and emptied, and filled again. Her children waked, first one, and then another, tumbling together, like a litter. She must have had very little sleep.
²⁰

Her Neddy, her Benny, her Eben. They grew like flowers. She pressed them to her heart. The days passed to months, the months to years, and, in her
Book of Ages, she pressed her children between the pages.

In 1736, Benjamin Franklin was elected clerk of the
Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly: he was a keeper of records. That year, his son Franky died of smallpox. Franklin had a gravestone carved in marble: “The DELIGHT of all that knew him.” Franklin counted the days of his son’s life: four years, one month, one day. Then he had a
portrait painted, oil on canvas, thirty-three
inches high, as tall as the boy had been, showing him in the bloom of unblemished health: Franky, his hanging sleeves rolled up to his elbows, waving his little hand, as if in parting.
²¹
Franklin never recovered from this child’s death. No one ever does.

“My Son Franky,” he once wrote Jane, “I have seldom since seen equal’d in every thing.” About him, “to this Day I cannot think of without a Sigh.”
²²

He would always have that portrait. And his sister would always have her Book of Ages.

When Eben was only four months old, Jane was pregnant again.

Her first daughter she named her after her sister. She called her Sally.
²³

The week before Sally was born, Edward Mecom borrowed three pounds from a leather dresser named
David Collson. Collson wrote out a note, which Mecom signed. It read, “I promise to pay or Cause to be paid to David Collson on Order the Sum of three pounds one Shilling & five pence on Demand for Vallow”—value.
²⁴

They lived in a world of
paper credit.
²⁵
The “IOU,” as parlance, dates to the 1610s. The first
paper money in the colonies—the first official paper money anywhere in the Western world—was printed
in Boston in 1690.
Debt might be a crime and, worse, a sin, Cotton Mather preached in a 1716 sermon titled
Fair Dealing between Debtor and Creditor,
but “without some
Debt,
there could be no
Trade
be carried on.”
²⁶
In Philadelphia, the first paper money wasn’t printed until 1723. It was widely regarded as suspicious, until, in 1729, Franklin advocated it in a pamphlet he both wrote and printed:
A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency
.
²⁷
It would be good for trade, he said. In 1729, Franklin began printing forms for borrowing, slips of paper, to be filled out by hand: “Bills of Lading bound and unbound, Common Blank Bonds for Money, Bonds with Judgment, Counterbonds, Arbitration Bonds, Arbitration Bonds with Umpirage, Bail Bonds, Counterbonds to save Bail harmless, Bills of Sale, Powers of Attorney, Writs, Summons, Apprentices Indentures, Servants Indentures, Penal Bills, Promissory Notes, &c. all the Blanks in the most authentick Forms, and corrently printed.” Soon he was printing money, not only for Pennsylvania but also for Delaware and
New Jersey. Between
1729 and 1747, he printed 800,000 paper bills, earning about £1,000. (Eventually, he made more money printing money than he did from the
Pennsylvania Gazette
and
Poor Richard’s Almanack
combined.)
²⁸

While Jane’s brother printed money, her husband fell into debt.
Paper money has its perils, especially in hard times. In 1712, the year Jane Franklin was born, the average daily
wages of a tradesman could buy fifteen pounds of butter. In 1739, the year Edward Mecom’s debts ruined him, those same wages could buy only seven pounds of butter.
²⁹
Tradesmen and
merchants kept
account books, records of wages and prices, lists of credits and debts. (Sometimes, in those same books, they recorded births and deaths.)
³⁰
Trading in paper—paper money, bills of exchange, bills of credit, and promissory notes—people tended to spend money they didn’t have. The trick was to keep track. That meant knowing how to read and write and tally and having a place to store paper. That meant being a bookkeeper.
³¹

In a world of
paper credit, people fell into paper debt, for which they were thrown into prisons of stone. Statutes decreeing
imprisonment
for debt date to the thirteenth century.
³²
For a long time, the colonies had been a debtors’ asylum. Two out of three people who left England for America were debtors; creditors found it all but impossible to pursue debtors across the Atlantic. Defoe’s fictional Moll Flanders, born in London’s Newgate
prison, sailed to
Virginia; Roxana, another of Defoe’s heroines, stayed in London and died in debtors’ prison.
³³
(Defoe was himself twice arrested for debt.)
³⁴
In the seventeenth century, Virginia and North Carolina, hungry for settlers, promised five years’ protection from Old World debts.
³⁵
Connecticut and
Maryland, desperate for labor, forbade the prosecution of debtors between May and October and released prisoners to plant every spring and to harvest come fall.
³⁶

Massachusetts was stricter. A 1641 Massachusetts law known as the
“Body of Liberties” spelled out a rule of thumb: “No mans person shall be Arrested, or imprisoned upon execution or judgment for any debt or fine, If the law can finde competent meanes of satisfaction otherwise from his estaite, and if not his person may be arrested and imprisoned where he shall be kept at his owne charge, not the platife’s till satisfaction be made.” A man was free unless he couldn’t afford to pay what he owed, and then he could be put in prison, the cost of which he had to bear.
³⁷
The idea was that a debtor might be hiding his money and, if he wasn’t, his family would pay his debts to secure his release.