Book of Ages (45 page)

Sparks retired from Harvard in 1853. He spent the rest of his life attempting to write a history of the American Revolution. He never finished it.
⁶⁴
He died in 1866. No scholar was more important to American history,
Robert Winthrop said at a memorial service at the
Massachusetts Historical Society, “nor can any one write that history, now or hereafter, without acknowledging a deep indebtedness, at every step, to his unwearied researches.”
⁶⁵

In December 1860, the month
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” appeared on newsstands in Boston, making Revere a legend, Jenny Mecom Kinsman died in Philadelphia.
⁶⁶
She was ninety-five. She was clever and witty and had never been wealthy and she liked to keep her secrets. She was the last of the Jane Mecoms. She was the last of the Franklin Janes.

CHAPTER XLII

I
n 1928, fifty-nine letters written by Franklin to Jane, the property of one Robert Harcourt, Esq., were auctioned by
Sotheby’s of London.
¹
Robert Vernon Harcourt, born in 1878, was the son of Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, a liberal member of Parliament, and an American woman, Elizabeth Cabot Motley. Elizabeth Cabot Motley was
John Lathrop’s granddaughter; her mother was
Ann Lathrop Motley.
Jane Lathrop Loring was her aunt. The papers Jane had left to Jenny Mecom Kinsman, and that Kinsman had given to John Lathrop, had stayed in family hands since Jane’s death in 1794.
²

The year Franklin’s letters to Jane were auctioned in London,
Virginia Woolf turned her attention to the question of
women’s writing. She had just finished writing
Orlando,
a parody of
biography that took up themes Woolf had long wrestled with, especially in “The Lives of the Obscure,” a meditation on books shelved in a “faded, out-of-date, obsolete library”: biographies of nobodies.
³
(Woolf’s father was a founding editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography,
a dictionary of somebodies.) “The obscure sleep on the walls, slouching against each other as if they were too drowsy to stand upright,” Woolf wrote. “Why disturb their sleep?”
⁴

In October 1928, Woolf delivered a series of lectures to women undergraduates at
Cambridge University, soon after published as
A Room of One’s Own
. It was Woolf’s odd work to turn Thomas Gray’s elegy to the short and simple annals of the poor into rage about the unwritten literary work of women.
⁵
What, she wanted to know, “would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith”?

Maybe that fall, Virginia Woolf, casting about for ideas for a lecture
series, rummaging about in a bookstore, came across a catalog from
Sotheby’s of London, slumbering upon a shelf, and, inside, an entry that read:

A M
OST
R
EMARKABLE AND
E
XTENSIVE
S
ERIES OF
L
ETTERS
WRITTEN BY
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
TO HIS SISTER
J
ANE
M
ECOM

Someone who did learn about those letters was
Carl Van Doren. Born in Illinois in 1885, Van Doren had earned a PhD from Columbia in 1911. His greatest passion was biography. He was a signal contributor to the
Dictionary of American Biography.
Van Doren was just embarking on a biography of
Benjamin Franklin. He wanted to rescue Franklin from the likes of Jared Sparks. To Van Doren, Franklin was a cosmopolitan, a revolutionary, and a wit. “The dry, prim people seem to regard him as a treasure shut up in a savings bank, to which they have the lawful key,” Van Doren fumed. “I herewith give him back, in grand dimensions, to his nation and the world.”
⁶

In 1939, Van Doren’s
Benjamin Franklin
won a Pulitzer Prize. That same year, Virginia Woolf published an essay called “
The Art of Biography”:

Also in 1939: Jane’s house was demolished. In 1856, the 150th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth, the house had even been decorated for the celebration. But so little was known about Jane that the claim that Franklin’s sister had ever lived there was eventually deemed dubious.
⁸
In 1939, Jane’s brick house was torn down to make room for a memorial to
Paul Revere. The house wasn’t in the way of the Revere memorial; it simply blocked a line of sight.
⁹
Jane’s house, that is, was demolished to improve the public view of a statue to Paul Revere, inspired by a poem written by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jared Sparks’s roommate.
¹⁰

Van Doren found this crushing. While writing about Franklin, he had
become fascinated by Jane. His affection for her grew into something of an obsession.
¹¹

He determined to collect her papers and write her biography.
¹²
Some of her letters were, at the time, in the possession of
Franklin Bache. In 1936, Bache’s descendants had given his eleven hundred Franklin papers—including thirty-seven letters written by Jane—to the
American Philosophical Society.
¹³
Van Doren also knew that the cache of letters auctioned in
London in 1928 had been purchased by the
Rosenbach Company, based in Philadelphia. In 1943, Rosenbach listed the letters in an auction catalog, touting the collection as “The Longest Franklin Correspondence in Existence,” “an Account of His Life from About 1729 until the Year Prior to His Death, in a Series of Letters to His Favorite Sister,” amounting to “Franklin’s Unofficial Autobiography.”
¹⁴

In July 1950, Van Doren had a heart attack while digging up a root in his yard. His
Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom
appeared after his death. He wrote, in the book’s preface, “Jane Mecom at last takes her true place in history.”
¹⁵
His biography
Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin: Her Life Here First Fully Narrated from Their Entire Surviving Correspondence
was published that October.
¹⁶
“A belated act of justice,” he called it.
¹⁷
Not many people read it. But he had made his point. A reviewer remarked, “Mr. Van Doren was too civilized a man to be interested only in the great.”
¹⁸

CHAPTER XLIII

I
grew up in a house a dozen miles from the library where Jane’s books ended up, on a street that got its name in 1906, on the two hundredth anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth. I grew up on Franklin Street.

A winter not long past, I headed out that way to visit the
Lancaster library. I walked down the stairs to the basement and knocked on the door of a locked room I’d never been in before. I’d spent years hunting for everything Jane had left behind. I’d found letters and books and recipes. I’d held them and read them.
¹
I’d found the ring she’d left, in her will, to her great-granddaughter Sally Greene. Curators at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had taken a box out of storage and handed it to me. I’d reached in and picked up a gold ring. I’d slipped it on. It barely fit on my pinkie. She must have been so small.

I’d gone to the library following the trail of another one of Jane’s great-granddaughters, Sally Flagg. She’d died unmarried on July 24, 1881, at the age of eighty-nine. The “many letters written by Dr. Franklin to his sister” that she had had in her house in 1858 had disappeared. But she had left the bulk of her estate, including the
Flagg family Bible, to the Lancaster library.
²

Inside that underground room, I found that Bible. Then I saw, hanging on a wall, something unexpected: a pair of three-quarter-length portraits, a boy and a girl, very young and very alike. I stared at their faces. They looked, uncannily, exactly how I had always pictured Franklin and Jane. I pulled the paintings down from the wall and read the tag on the back: “A gift of Sally Flagg, 1881.”

These were the portraits of Josiah Flagg and Jane Flagg, painted in 1765
by
Joseph Badger, when Josiah was four and Jenny was eight.
³
Sally Flagg had saved, for posterity, the only likenesses of Jane’s little rogues.

And then I found, on another wall of that room, something else Sally Flagg had left to the library: a needlepoint sampler she had embroidered and signed in 1802, when she was ten years old.
⁴

On linen, with silk, she had stitched these words:

And that’s when I knew I had come to the last page of my own book of ages.

Sorrows rolled upon Jane Franklin like waves of the sea. She left in their wake these gifts, her remains: needles and pens, letters and books, politics and opinions, this history, this archive, a quiet story of a quiet life of quiet sorrow and quieter beauty.