Book of Ages (39 page)

Franklin had begun, in 1771, by addressing the story of his life to his son. That no longer made sense. Vaughan urged him to write what would be read, instead, by
every
son. Franklin explained to Vaughan how he understood his task. He made no pretense of telling the whole of his story: “To shorten the work, as well as for other reasons, I omit all facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young reader, by showing him from my example, and my success in emerging from poverty, and acquiring some degree of wealth, power, and reputation, the advantages of certain modes of conduct which I observed, and of avoiding the errors which were prejudicial to me. If a writer can judge properly of his own work, I fancy on reading over what is already done, that the book may be found entertaining, interesting, and useful, more so than I expected when I began it.”
⁸

In the spring of 1788, Franklin fell down the stone steps to his house—the same steps Jane had fallen down—and hurt his arm, his writing arm. At the time, in addition to working on
Part III of his autobiography, he was
drafting a new will, in which he left his sister the house in which she lived, as well as £50 a year for the rest of her life.
⁹

“Death, however is sure to come to us all, and mine cannot now be far off,” he wrote her, “but that may be to me no misfortune, and I shall take care to make it as small a one to you, as possible.”
¹⁰

This she heard as a rebuke. “I see you are Angry with me and I cannot bare my Brothers Displeasure,” she returned. “I am Anxous for your Life it is true, but also for your Sufferings hear as I had Reason from my own Expearance of a fall from the Same Place, the Efects of which I felt for some years, but is it posable my Dear Brother can think my concern for Him is mearly for my own Soport.” After she wrote that, though, Reverend Lathrop stopped by and showed her the letter he had received from Franklin, asking him to be sure to let him know if Jane needed anything. This led her to reread Franklin’s letter: “On Reading it several times since I bigin to Doubt whither you were Angry or no, if you were not Pray dont let this make you so, but Impute all to a weakness of mind depraved by
my
Old Age which was never very strong.”
¹¹

“There are in life real evils enough,” he returned calmly, “and it is a folly to afflict ourselves with imaginary ones.”
¹²

She had real worries, too. In the summer of 1788, Jenny Mecom, Jane’s “Constant Atendant and comfort,” now twenty-three years old, nearly died. “For Eight & forty hours we dispared of her Life,” Jane wrote her brother. “Her Phisicion said Afterwards tho he had long Practice he had never a Patient with all the Simptomes of Death on them as she had that Recovered, but thank God she is again about House & we have hopes of a Perfect Recovery.”
¹³

More often, her family was a comfort, especially when her great-grandchildren visited. Jenny Flagg Greene’s daughter Sally Greene came in the spring of 1789.
¹⁴
Jane missed having young children around. “I long to have Every won to Kiss & Play with,” she wrote.
¹⁵
She found, in visits, relief from the aches of old age. “I have Even in my self in times Past Lost the snse of Paine for some time by the Injoyment of good Company.” She was happy that her brother had the pleasure of his own mind, writing to him that she was glad his “Intellets … thank God Apear as sound as Ever,
which must suply you with a Source of Entertainment beyond what comon mortals can Expearance.”
¹⁶
But she took pleasure, too, in her own intellect: in the company of her own mind.

Franklin wrote to her about his favorite grandson,
Benjamin Franklin Bache, who had begun work as a printer
in Philadelphia. Franklin sent Jane a box of
books Bache had printed:
Lessons for Children,
by
Anna Letitia Barbauld.
¹⁷
(Barbauld was one of eighteenth-century England’s most celebrated and accomplished poets and critics. She was also an astute political commentator.) “They are really valuable for the purpose of teaching Children to read,” Franklin told his sister. “The largeness and plainness of the Character, and the little Sentences of common occurrence which they can understand when they read, makes them delight in reading them, so as to forward their Progress exceedingly.” But booksellers in Boston were either unable or unwilling to sell them. Jane reported to her brother, “They are Jealous of a young Printer who so far surpases them in the Art & accuracy of his Profeshion & are not willing to Incuridge him by Disposeing of his work.”
¹⁸

Franklin told his sister that
Sally Franklin Bache had given birth again, to her eighth child.

“Mrs. Bache may make up my Number Twelve,” Jane admitted, even “tho she did not begin so young.”
¹⁹

Franklin inquired after the Folgers: “By the way, is our Relationship in
Nantucket quite worn out?”
²⁰

“I beleve there are a few of our Nantucket Relations who have still an Affection for us,” Jane answered. “But the war time which made such Havock every where Devided & scatered them about.” She got gabby:

It was just as well for Jane that she had turned down Coffin’s invitation to come spend the war on Nantucket. “A Wise & Good Provedence
ordered it otherways,” Jane wrote. As to Coffin: “She Took to the wrong side & Exerted Her Self by Every method she could devise Right or rong to Accomplish her Designs, & Favour the Britons, went in to Large Traid with them, & for them, & by mis-management & not suckceding in her Indevours has sunk Every Farthing they were Ever Posesed of & have been in Jail both Her Husband at nantuket & her self at
Halifax.”
²¹
During the war, Coffin, a
loyalist, turned smuggler. In 1779, she was accused of
treason; in 1780, she was tried and acquitted in Watertown.
²²
In 1782 she was again arrested, charged with attempting to steal a vessel owned by the
Continental Army; by the end of the war, she was ruined. She fled to Halifax, where by 1787 she was in debtors’ prison.
²³
By then, Jane and Keziah had stopped writing to each other.
²⁴

“She was allway thought to be an Artfull Wooman, but there are such Extraordinary stories tould of her as is hard to be leved,” Jane wrote Franklin. (Keziah Folger Coffin died in 1798, after falling down a flight of stairs. The stories that were told about her were so hard to believe that, in the early nineteenth century, she became the subject of a swashbuckling novel which, in turn, inspired
Herman Melville to write
Moby-Dick.
)
²⁵
The war had divided the Franklins from the Folgers, and Jane was a Franklin. As for the rest of the Folgers, Jane wrote her brother, “I dont know if they come to Boston if they do they do not know where to find me.”
²⁶
She didn’t mind. She had no wish to be found.

In December 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote to his sister with a request: “As I imagine it might be some Pleasure to you, if you knew of anything agreable to me, that you could send me, I now acquaint you, that I have lately wished to regale on
Cod’s Tongues and Sounds”—that is, a New England delicacy, cods’ tongues and bladders—“and if you could now and then send me a small Keg of them, containing about two Quarts, they would be very acceptable and pleasing to your affectionate Brother.”
²⁷

Franklin had been, all his life, a “great Lover of Fish,” especially cod.
²⁸

She sent him “a Keg of souns & Toungs.”

“I have Tasted them and think them very Good,” she wrote to him on his eighty-fourth birthday. “I hope now you have been able to Regale on them more than wonce as I beleve they are so throwly Preserved they will
Reman sweet all the cool wether.” It was cold enough in Boston that winter that she was shut in: “I do not Atempt to go abroad my Breath but Just Serves me to go about the House.”
²⁹

Shut in her house, and mostly confined, as her brother was, to bed, Jane read. In March and April 1790, the
Massachusetts Magazine
published a two-part essay called “On the
Equality of the Sexes.” Its author was a writer from Gloucester named
Judith Sargent Murray. Murray inquired, as
Mary Astell had a century earlier, about the cause of men’s intellectual superiority, asking, “May we not trace its source in the difference of
education, and continued advantages?” To make this case, Murray asked her reader to imagine the lives of a brother and sister, born very much alike:

The sister has the misfortune, in watching her brother’s education, to see the lack of her own. “She feels the want of a cultivated mind.” Her misery is profound, her solitude inevitable. If she marries a man of discernment, she is pained by her inferiority. “Doth the person to whom her adverse fate hath consigned her, possess a mind incapable of improvement, she is equally wretched, in being so closely connected with an individual whom she cannot but despise.” Either way, she is alone.
³⁰

On March 24, 1790, Benjamin Franklin wrote the last letter he would ever write to his sister. His hand was poor, weak and quavering. The fish,
he told her, “give me pleasure.” He had been thinking about their childhood and about what had become of everyone. Their sister Lydia Franklin, born in 1708, had married a ship’s captain named
Robert Scott, borne a daughter, and died in 1758.

“Do you know anything of our sister Scott’s daughter,” Franklin asked Jane, and “whether she is still living, and where?”

He was sure Jane would be able to find out.
³¹
But he was tired. He added a postscript:

“P.S. It is early in the morning, and I write in bed. The awkward position has occasioned the crooked lines.”
³²

He wrote only two more letters.
³³
He died on April 17.

Richard Bache sent Jane the news: “My duty calls upon me to make you acquainted with an event which I know will be a sore affliction to your affectionate Breast.”
³⁴

Her brother had been the fellow of her mind’s eye. “To make society agreeable there must be a similarity of circumstances and sentiments, as well as age,” she wrote, when she learned of his death. “I have no such near me.” She had felt such want. “My dear brother supplied all. Every line from him was a pleasure.” No one else came as close. “He while living was to me every enjoyment.”
³⁵

CHAPTER XXXVII

I
n May 1790, a month after Benjamin Franklin died, the
“History of the Life and Character of Benjamin Franklin” began appearing in Philadelphia in the
Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine
.
¹
Starting in July, much the same account ran in another Philadelphia magazine, the
American Museum, or Universal Magazine
. Both consisted of extracts taken from Franklin’s account of his own life. The editors didn’t call what they were printing an “
autobiography”; that word wasn’t coined until 1797.
²
Nor did they print what Franklin had written. Instead, they read what Franklin wrote, summarized the facts, modernized the style, and changed the first person to the third. “At Ten Years old, I was taken home to assist my Father in his Business, which was that of a Tallow
Chandler and Sope-Boiler,” Franklin had written. “I dislik’d the Trade.” This became: “Benjamin had a most decided aversion to the business of soap-boiling.”
³
Franklin’s editors replaced a memoir with a history.