Book of Ages (40 page)

Meanwhile, the memoir itself—the manuscript and as many as four copies—had begun to travel. In November 1789, Franklin, knowing that he was dying, had sent one copy to
Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, soon thereafter the mayor of Passy, requesting that it be read by him and by the French politician
Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld.
⁴
He wanted to know, from these men, what to do with what he had written.

“I am not without my Doubts concerning the Memoirs, whether it would be proper to publish them, or not, at least during my Lifetime,” he wrote La Rochefoucauld. “I am persuaded there are many Things that would, in Case of Publication, be best omitted. I therefore request it most earnestly of you, my dear Friend, that you would examine them carefully and critically, with Mr. Le Veillard, and give me your candid and friendly Advice.”
⁵

Two days after writing to La Rochefoucauld, Franklin sent a copy of the manuscript to
Benjamin Vaughan in London, requesting that he arrange for Richard Price to read it.
⁶
He knew Vaughan wanted him to publish it; he wanted to hear Price’s views. Price, unaware that Franklin was already dead, replied in May 1790, sending his letter by way of Jonathan Williams Jr.

“Your life has been so distinguished that your account of it must, if made public, excite much curiosity and be read with
eagerness,
” Price wrote Franklin. Then he equivocated: “I cannot however help wishing that the qualities and talents which produced this eminence had been aided by a faith in Christianity and the animating hopes of a resurrection to an endless life.”
⁷

The story of Franklin’s life contains within it a story about skepticism. Price found that dangerous. Franklin’s readers in France didn’t share that
fear. In 1791, a French translation of Franklin’s memoirs was published in
Paris as
Mémoires de la Vie Privée de Benjamin Franklin, Écrits par Lui-même, et Adressés a Son Fils
.
⁸
Within months of the Paris publication of
La Vie Privée de Benjamin Franklin,
retranslations back into English began appearing
in London, often with the title
The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin…, Written by Himself
.

In 1793, there appeared in London a two-volume anthology titled
Works of the late Doctor Benjamin Franklin: Consisting of His Life, Written By Himself, Together with Essays Humorous, Moral, and Literary
. These editions, poor translations of a poor translation, did preserve Franklin’s first person, if not his prose. But their publication alarmed Temple Franklin, Franklin’s literary executor, who, in a letter sent to London
newspapers, condemned the
Works
as spurious and unauthorized.

“I am arranging and methodizing the original manuscripts for the press,” he promised, “and before the conclusion of this year, I propose publishing the genuine Life of Dr. FRANKLIN as really written by himself.”

This he did not do. Temple Franklin, raised in
England and having spent much of his life with his grandfather in Paris, was never happy in America. In 1792, he sailed from Philadelphia to London, where he was reunited with his father, who had married his landlady, an Irish widow named Mary D’Evelyn; they lived with Mary’s sister-in-law, with whom Temple soon began an affair. Temple Franklin was something of a scoundrel. And, as for preparing his grandfather’s Life for publication, he procrastinated.
⁹
Meanwhile, American publishers began proposing an American edition of the 1793 London version of the
Works.
In September 1793, Benjamin Franklin Bache printed his cousin’s caution against unauthorized editions in his newspaper, the
Philadelphia
General Advertiser
.
¹⁰
None of this halted the unauthorized publication of Franklin’s memoirs, either in England or in America. Editions cribbed from the French publication continued to make their way into print.
¹¹

Did Jane read her brother’s memoirs? She must have known about them. She could have learned about them in the
General Advertiser,
which she read whenever she could.
¹²
Or she might have heard about them from Jonathan Williams Sr. His wife, Grace, had died two weeks before Franklin did. (“Aunt Mecom is poorely a good deal overCome by the Loss of her Niece,” Jonathan Williams Sr. had written to Franklin then, “for She was her bosom friend She Could unbosom to her more freely then to anyone
except yourSelf.”)
¹³
After Grace’s death, Jane remained close to the rest of the Williamses. In 1789, the older Williams had assured the dying Franklin that he would never fail Jane: “She is Intitled to every ade and Assistence in Our power and shall Niver want it.”
¹⁴
The next year, Williams left
Boston for Philadelphia. “Considering His Age & circumstances I think it unlikely I Shuld Ever see him more,” Jane wrote Sally. “It is Like cutting off Another Limb.” She missed him. “I feal the Diminution of my few friends very Sensibly tho I am grown almost Stupid to Every other Sensation, Except the Joy I recive on Seeing the Just Encomiums continually Expressed & Repeated of the Vertues & Honours Due to my Venerable Brother.” News of him she followed above all else.
¹⁵
She was lonely. She found joy in reading about her brother in the
newspaper. She could scarcely have failed to learn about the publication of his memoirs.

One other person from whom Jane might have heard about Franklin’s memoirs was Jonathan Williams Jr. Jane had taught him how to make soap. She adored him. (She took pleasure, she once wrote Franklin, in “the sight of Him whom I Love like a child.”)
¹⁶
The last letter written in Jane’s hand, dated August 11, 1792, is addressed to him. “Be Assured there is Love at the Heart & a wish to be Affectionatly Reme’d,” she closed.
¹⁷
These are the last words of hers to survive.

As old and frail and far away as she was, Jane had remained close to each of her nephews. Temple Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and Jonathan Williams Jr. all played a role in the story of Benjamin Franklin’s memoirs. Temple owned the rights, Bache had tried to help protect those rights, and Williams had carried Price’s letter to Franklin. They also seem to have conspired to keep from her a secret. In 1793 an advertisement appeared in Bache’s newspaper for crown soap, to be sold by Benjamin Mecom, in Burlington, New Jersey. Apparently, Benny Mecom hadn’t died during the Battle of Trenton after all.
¹⁸

In March 1793, Jane turned eighty-one. She was housebound. She had few visitors; she didn’t much like visitors. What she did or did not read that year is impossible to know. Did she read
Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
excerpted in the
Massachusetts Magazine
?
¹⁹
The tragedy of
women’s ignorance, Wollstonecraft argued, is that women could think about nothing but private life; they could not comprehend public affairs or understand politics; they could not possibly have any interest in the past.
²⁰
Abigail Adams read
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
leading her husband to accuse her of being a “Disciple of Wolstoncraft.”
²¹
Whether Jane read it is harder to say. It’s not clear whether, that year, she could any longer read at all, even with her spectacles.

Nor is it possible to know whether she read her brother’s memoirs. But she had tried for decades to read everything her brother ever wrote. If it was within her power, she would have tried very hard to get her hands on the story of his life.

Supposing she did. Supposing she was able to get a copy. And supposing she was still able to read, squinting and rubbing her eyes. What then?

She would have opened the first volume to find a preface, which included an excerpt from a letter written by Richard Price, in which he observed that the story of Franklin’s life, written by himself, showed, plainly, strikingly, “how a man, by talents, industry, and integrity, may rise from obscurity to the first eminence and consequence in the world.”
²²
Finishing the preface, she would have turned the page to read a story about a rise from rags to riches.
It wil teache you to live, and learne you to die
. It wasn’t a Bible or a psalter or an almanac or a conduct manual or a constitution. It was something new.

If she did read the story of her brother’s life, written by himself, she would have pored over every letter, every word. And she would have discovered: he never mentioned her.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

I
n the autumn of 1791, in an English town not more than ninety miles south of Ecton, a fifteen-year-old girl named Jane picked up her pen. On the first page of a tiny notebook made of stitched vellum, she wrote a title: “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced, & Ignorant Historian.” And then she added, at the bottom of the page, “N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.”

Jane
Austen was clever and she was sharp and she was wry. She was the littlest of the eight Austen children. She was, it was said, “very like her brother Henry.”
¹
Her father was a rector and a schoolmaster. He sent her to a dame school and then, when she was ten, to a boarding school, in
Reading. There was a lending library in Reading, and Jane read everything she could get her hands on—
Addison, Fielding, Richardson, and the
Lady’s Magazine
. In 1787, when she was twelve, she started writing stories. She thought it would be very funny to write a fake history.

Jane Austen’s “History of England” is a parody of
Oliver Goldsmith’s march-of-the-monarchs four-volume chronicle of kings:
The History of England, from The Earliest Times to the Death of George II
. Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized, “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”
²