Book of Ages (17 page)

On November 1, 1752, Jane watched the house she had lived in for forty years being emptied of its beds and tables and chairs.
¹⁵
Edward Mecom, so far from being able to buy the house, remained in debt to the estate.
¹⁶
There were things in that house that Jane decided ought not to be sold. Privately, she made her own disquisitions. Her brother’s daughter Sally had, at the age of five, made a pocketbook for her grandmother. “It was done in cross-stitch and was very beautiful,” Jane wrote. She gave it to her Nantucket cousin Keziah Folger Coffin.
¹⁷
(Coffin, who often visited Jane in Boston, “was many years Like a Sister to me & a grat friend to my children,” Jane said.)
¹⁸
These things belonged to women.

“I hear every thing is now sold,” Franklin wrote their brother John at
the beginning of 1753. “Who bought the House, and what did it sell for?” Franklin asked.
¹⁹

But no one had bought the house yet; the Mecoms were still living there in the summer of 1753 when Franklin came to Boston to accept an honorary master of arts degree from Harvard.
²⁰
In prosperous fortunes be modest and wise,
Poor Richard says.
The greatest may fall, and the lowest may rise.
²¹
The college he had been too poor to attend as a boy granted him its distinction for his “great Genius” and for “the high Advances he has made in Natural Philosophy, more especially in the Doctrine and Experiments of
ELECTRICITY, whereby he has rendered himself justly famous in the Learned World.” The honors would keep coming. Franklin received an honorary degree from Yale that same year. Not long after, he became “Doctor Franklin,” when he received an honorary doctor of laws from the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.
²²

During his visit to Boston in 1753, Franklin also attended to business ties in town. His seventy-five-year-old sister, Elizabeth, had married a ship’s captain named Berry, and when he died, she had married another, named
Richard Douse. She and her husband had been living in the North End, in a small brick house that she had inherited from her first husband. To support the widow Douse, Franklin had purchased the mortgage.
²³
He charged Jonathan Williams Sr., the husband of his niece
Grace Harris Williams, with handling the care of the Douse house.
²⁴
Maybe he helped the Mecoms find a new house, too.

After Franklin left, Jane’s family moved to a brick house on Hanover Street. In November 1753, an ad appeared in the
Boston Gazette:

The Orange Tree was an inn at the foot of Hanover Street, four blocks from the Blue Ball. The stagecoach stopped there. It was a good place to entertain gentlemen: a boardinghouse and a tavern. But Edward Mecom wasn’t paying the rent.

When Franklin had sent Benny Mecom to
Antigua, he had at first made the same arrangement with his nephew that he had made with Parker and
Smith: Franklin supplied the printing house and the type in exchange for one-third of the profits. But he soon arranged for different terms: Benny need send his uncle no more than a small amount of
sugar and rum so long as he would pay his mother’s rent.
²⁶

Meanwhile,
in Antigua, Benny endured hurricanes. The wind blew cracks in his house; it broke canes of sugar as if they were reeds. And he suffered illness. Late summer was the worst. “Tis generally reckoned a sickly Time, for while People die much faster than usual,” he wrote his aunt Deborah. “I can number about a Dozen, whom I was lately personally acquainted with, seemingly in good Health, that are now dead.”
²⁷

Somehow, he steadied himself. But who, at such a distance, was to keep him steady? Franklin scarcely propped him up. “I take him to be a very honest industrious Lad,” he wrote, recommending him to
William Strahan, a
bookseller in London who had supplied Smith with books and stationery, and had done the same with Mecom. But Benny faltered. He printed very little, and sold even less. He fell into debt. It wasn’t long before Franklin began warning Strahan not to front Mecom too much inventory. “Pray keep him within Bounds,” Franklin cautioned in April 1754, “and do not suffer him to be more than Fifty Pounds in your Debt.” Franklin apologized: “He is a young Lad, quite unacquainted with the World.”
²⁸

During Franklin’s visit to Boston, his brother John, a soap boiler, was married to a widow named Elizabeth Hubbart, who had a son named Thomas, who was married to a woman named Judith Ray. Judith’s sister Catharine had come to Boston, where she met both Benjamin Franklin and Jane Franklin Mecom.
²⁹
Franklin and Caty Ray began a flirtatious correspondence; it lasted long after Caty Ray married William Greene, the son of Rhode Island’s governor. But Jane and Caty exchanged visits, and letters, too. Caty would become one of Jane’s closest friends.
³⁰

John Franklin died in 1756. “I condole with you on the loss of our dear brother,” Franklin wrote Jane in February. “As our number grows less, let us love one another proportionably more.” And then he added: “Benny, I understand, inclines to leave Antigua.”
³¹

“I shall be very glad to hear he does better in another Place, but I fear he will not for some Years be cur’d of his Fickleness,” Franklin wrote a few months later.
³²
Benny sailed to Philadelphia sometime after June; in December, Franklin gave him a horse, and Benny, determined to begin business again, rode to Boston.
³³
“As he will keep a bookseller’s shop, with
his printing house,” Franklin wrote his sister in February 1757, “I don’t know but it might be worth his while to set up
in Cambridge.”
³⁴

Meanwhile, Franklin prepared to sail to London. On April 4, 1757, he left Philadelphia by carriage, with his son William and two slaves, Peter and King.
³⁵
They reached New York four days later, ready to depart. Instead, Franklin found himself stuck in the city for more than two months.
³⁶
Jane sent him three letters, and he wrote three letters back.

She wanted advice about Elizabeth Franklin Douse. Jane thought her sister ought to move out of her little brick house in the North End. Franklin disagreed. “As
having their own Way,
is one of the greatest Comforts of Life, to old People, I think their Friends should endeavour to accommodate them in that, as well as in any thing else,” he advised. “When they have long liv’d in a House, it becomes natural to them, they are almost as closely connected with it as the Tortoise with his Shell, they die if you tear them out of it. Old Folks and old Trees, if you remove them, tis ten to one that you kill them. So let our good old Sister be no more importun’d on that head.”
³⁷
Douse stayed in her house.

Jane begged her brother’s advice about her sons. She had known how to care for them when they were little. She had raised them and taught them their letters and breeched them. She had even found them
apprenticeships. In choosing a trade, Jane’s sons took the places their mother’s brothers and cousins offered them, as charity; she had no money to pay their fees. Neddy was twenty-six and, having been trained by his father, had set up his own saddler’s shop in Boston. But he was strangely sickly and found it hard to work. She was worried. Would he turn out as bad as his father? “As Neddy is yet a young man, I hope he may get over the disorder he complains of, and in time wear it out,” Franklin answered.
³⁸
Benny, twenty-four, was by this time in Boston. He had married Elizabeth Ross, a girl from New Jersey. “I don’t doubt but Benny will do very well when he gets to work,” Franklin offered, vaguely.
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Eben, twenty-two and soon to be married, was living in Gloucester and hoping to open his own bakery; he had apprenticed with his uncle James Davenport, a baker on Fleet Street who had been married to Jane and Benjamin’s sister Sarah.
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“It gives me pleasure to hear, that Eben is likely to get into business at his trade,” Franklin wrote. “If he will be industrious and frugal, ’tis ten to one but he gets rich, for he seems to have spirit and activity.”
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Peter, eighteen, had apprenticed with Jane and Benjamin’s brother John, a soap boiler. “I
am glad that Peter is acquainted with the crown soap business,” Franklin wrote, although he would not take Jane’s side in a dispute over whether Peter or John’s widow,
Elizabeth Hubbart Franklin, had more right to sell the family soap.
⁴²
After John Franklin’s death in January 1756, Peter Mecom had begun selling crown soap, until Elizabeth Hubbart Franklin took out an ad in the
Boston News-Letter
in October, informing the public, “That there are sundry Persons endeavouring to impose on People a Sort of Soap which
they call
Crown Soap, which a little resembles it in Appearance, but is vastly unlike it in Quality.” She warned, “There never was in
New-England
any Person but the late Mr.
John Franklin,
that made the true Sort of CROWN-SOAP: It is now carried on by Mrs. Elizabeth Franklin.”
⁴³
It galled Jane, who thought that if anything was her rightful inheritance, and rightly belonged to her sons, it was the family
recipe for soap.

Franklin wanted no part of this. He chided Jane, too, for having asked whether he might remove their brother’s stepson, Tuthill Hubbart (a child of Elizabeth Hubbart Franklin’s from her first marriage), from the position of
postmaster to Boston and appoint Benny in his stead: “I have not shown any backwardness to assist Benny, where it could be done without injurying another. But if my friends require of me to gratify not only their inclinations, but their resentments, they expect too much of me.”
⁴⁴
He offered, instead, more advice: “I am glad to hear that Peter is at a place where he has full employ. A trade is a valuable thing; but, unless a habit of
industry be acquired with it, it turns out of little use.”
⁴⁵
Johnny, sixteen, was apprenticed to Jane’s nephew William Homes.
⁴⁶
“I am glad to hear Johnny is so good and diligent a workman,” Franklin wrote. “If he ever sets up at the
goldsmith’s business, he must remember, that there is one accomplishment without which he cannot possibly thrive in that trade, (i.e.,
to be perfectly honest
.)”
⁴⁷

On the eve of sailing to England, Franklin filled his letters to his sister with advice for young tradesmen. One last thing Franklin did while waiting to leave for England, about which Jane never knew: he wrote a new will, forgiving Benny Mecom a debt of £50 and bequeathing to Jane the mortgage he held on Elizabeth Franklin Douse’s house.
⁴⁸

And then, in his cabin, maybe even before the ship finally sailed, on June 20, he wrote the preface for that year’s
Poor Richard’s Almanack
. Instead of coming up with something new, he strung together ninety-odd
proverbs from twenty-five years of
Poor Dicks
. They read like this:

Thinking about his sister’s all but fatherless sons, Franklin collected all the advice to young tradesmen he had ever given: an argument against the kind of indolence that seemed to have plagued Edward Mecom and that had reduced his family to a state of misery and wretchedness.

He finished writing at sea, on July 7. Upon reaching England, he sent his essay back on the first westbound vessel. It was published as the preface to
Poor Richard Improved … 1758
, though it was reprinted—soon, often, and far and wide. It appeared in at least 145 editions and six languages even before the eighteenth century was over, usually with the title
The Way to Wealth
. He sent it to Benjamin Mecom. The very first time it was printed as a pamphlet, it contained this imprimatur:

The Way to Wealth
has been read as an American creed: industry begets riches. Few pieces of writing have been more poorly understood.
⁵¹
“I often Recolect the Advice you wonce Gave won of my Sons,” Jane wrote her
brother: “do the right thing with Spirit.”
⁵²
This she never forgot.
Do the right thing with Spirit. The Way to Wealth
was an act of charity: a gift to Jane’s son.