The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (13 page)

Of the four, James Ralph had the highest ambitions for a career in writing—poetry, to be specific. Charles Osborne likewise had poetic pretensions, but he also possessed the askant eye of the critic—especially toward Ralph’s poetry and hopes of making a living by it. Franklin, recalling his own humbling efforts at versifying, shared Osborne’s opinion that a career in poetry was a fool’s quest, although he allowed that if Ralph wanted to write poetry merely to please himself, that was his affair. Franklin added the opinion he had formed some years earlier that even poetry that did not rise to art could serve as a tool for the improvement of one’s prose. The others concurred in this sensible opinion, and an assignment—setting the Eighteenth Psalm to verse—was agreed upon.

Just before the next meeting, Ralph approached Franklin, his updating of David in hand. Franklin read the piece and registered approval. Ralph thereupon asked him to take part in a deception. Osborne, Ralph complained, would never say anything positive about his—Ralph’s—poetry; he could not stand that someone—specifically Ralph—might write more gracefully than he. Would Franklin be willing to present Ralph’s piece as his own? Only by such a subterfuge could Ralph get an objective opinion.

Franklin’s schedule at Keimer’s that week had prevented his writing a poem himself, and he consented. He cribbed Ralph’s work into his own hand and read it to the group. Osborne praised it extravagantly. Ralph suggested a few revisions; Osborne told him he was as dull a critic as a poet and did not know what he was talking about. After the meeting, while Osborne and Ralph were walking home together, the former continued to effuse over the purported Franklin poem. Such imagery! Such power! He confided to Ralph that he had not earlier praised the piece as fully as he might have; he did not want to seem a flatterer. He wondered aloud how a person who spoke so indifferently could write with such passion and fire.

The confusion provoked laughter, at Osborne’s expense, when the ruse was revealed at the next meeting. The episode did not estrange Osborne from Franklin; the two remained friendly enough to pledge a pact that whichever of them predeceased the other should, after having surveyed the ground on that farther shore, return and apprise the living one of the landscape there. The obligation fell to Osborne, who died relatively young. “He never fulfilled his promise,” Franklin noted at sixty-five.

Debating
with his friends and dreaming of his future success filled most of Franklin’s leisure time during that summer of his nineteenth year; but not all. Love occupied him as well.

The object of his affections was Deborah Read, with whom he had grown increasingly familiar since that inauspicious morning of his arrival the previous autumn. She had watched his career prospects improve with Keimer; partly in consequence he saw his romantic prospects improve with her. Ten months earlier, unknown and unemployed, he was the sort no father would have let near his daughter. Now, well placed in his craft, surrounded by friends hardworking and respectable, and waited upon by Governor Keith, he was one of the more eligible young men in town.

Precisely what Franklin saw in Deborah Read is more difficult to discern. No one painted her portrait during that period, and the only surviving one from later years shows a woman with a not unpleasant but neither notably appealing face. She was two years younger than he, which especially in that age meant that she might physically have been hardly more than a girl. Yet he seems to have been quite attracted to her, for they spoke of marriage. Her father and mother did not dismiss the idea. They had been searching for a good match, not least because John Read had lately run into financial difficulties. The search grew more pressing that September, when Read suddenly died, leaving his debts and his daughter—among other children—to his wife. At this point Sarah Read must have listened carefully as Ben Franklin made his suit.

Yet careful she was, and reflecting on Ben’s youth, she told them to wait until his return from England. Perhaps she wished to gauge the seriousness of his intentions. Perhaps she wished to see whether the print shop he spoke of with such enthusiasm—to Debbie and her, yet still to almost no one else—actually materialized. Her husband’s money troubles had resulted from his lending credence, and cash, to glib retailers of fraudulent promises. A modest skepticism would become his widow and safeguard his daughter.

Franklin could not gainsay this prudence in a mother-in-law. Nor was there much he could do about it if he had, for Sarah Read was not the sort to be trifled with. Love would have to wait the six months or so the crossing to England and the return would require. Then he would be older, and, with printing equipment in hand, his success would be assured. At that point Sarah Read could not deny him, and Debbie would not.

3
London Once
1724–26

It is a truism that one travels to learn about home, but Franklin was young, and consequently it came as a surprise that the most important lesson he learned in going to London was what sort of person William Keith was. The lesson commenced before his ship cleared the Delaware River. Right down to the dock the governor continued to pledge full support for Franklin’s printing project; he would provide not merely the letter of credit for the £100 Franklin’s inventory required but reference letters to friends well placed to see the project profitably started. Repeatedly Franklin called at the governor’s house to receive the letters; repeatedly he was told that the demands of duty had prevented the governor from drafting them. Come again next week and they would definitely be ready.

He did; they were not. He did again; they were not. Understandably, he began to worry. As luck would have it, the departure of the annual ship was several times postponed. Though this afforded more time for the governor to fulfill his pledge, it threw a cloud of additional uncertainty over the entire venture.

Finally on November 5, 1724, the
London Hope
cast off and drifted down the Delaware. The governor’s promised letters still had not appeared. Franklin boarded at the last moment only on the express assurance of the governor’s personal secretary that the letters would be supplied at New Castle, a downstream destination for which the governor himself was about to depart and which he would reach before the ship did. Even as the ship was tying up at New Castle, Franklin leaped ashore in search of the governor. Once more the governor’s secretary intercepted him, saying again the governor was extremely busy. But he would include the letters with the rest of the official correspondence, to be loaded at the last moment.

This seemed a plausible, if not persuasive, explanation, and was made the more so when Colonel French, the governor’s Delaware friend, personally carried the official packet aboard. He greeted Franklin warmly; this had the double effect of reassuring Franklin about Keith’s bona fides and elevating the young man in the opinion of the other passengers, who heretofore had deemed him unworthy of notice. He would have been even more reassured had he been allowed to
see
the letters, but the captain, concerned that their numerous delays would place them in mid-Atlantic when the gales of winter began to blow, refused to risk any further delay. Franklin could not go through the packet now. But if he would be patient, he would have any letters meant for his hand long before they landed at London. “I was satisfied for the present,” Franklin recalled, “and we proceeded on our voyage.”

Franklin’s first ocean crossing was a tempestuous one. The winter weather did indeed catch them out; wind, rain, sleet, and snow battered the vessel and kept the passengers below decks most of the way. To his satisfaction—and, as it turned out, his lifelong convenience—Franklin discovered that stormy seas had little effect on his stomach or head. He employed the time and the close quarters to improve his acquaintance with certain individuals who had taken notice of him when Colonel French did. Indeed, these men called him out of steerage to berth with them in the cabin; they shared their victuals and all made merry together. “We had a sociable company …” Franklin said, “and lived uncommonly well.”

As the craft entered the English Channel the captain kept his promise and allowed Franklin to sort through the Pennsylvania pouch. To his surprise he found no letters bearing his name. Thinking this an oversight, he selected several addressed to individuals evidently connected to the governor’s pledge and to the errand that had brought him hither. One such letter was to the king’s printer, another to a London stationer. Franklin could not well open the letters and discover for certain, but he assumed that the governor therein explained this fine young man’s mission and pledged political and financial support.

Upon landing at London on Christmas Eve of 1724, Franklin looked up the addressees. The first he chanced upon was the stationer, to whom he delivered the missive as from Governor Keith. The stationer looked puzzled. I don’t know the man, he said—thereby puzzling Franklin. Opening the letter, the stationer exclaimed, “Oh, this is from Riddlesden.”

William Riddlesden, as Franklin probably did not know, was a convicted felon who had been transported to Maryland in lieu of prison; as Franklin knew full well, Riddlesden had continued in his conniving ways in America, sucking John Read into one of his confidence schemes, to the persisting detriment of Sarah and their children. The Maryland assembly had conferred upon him the distinction of being officially proclaimed “a person of a matchless character in infamy.”

This opinion was shared by the stationer who now read the letter Franklin delivered. “I have lately found him to be a complete rascal,” he said (in Franklin’s reconstruction of the conversation), “and I will have nothing to do with him, nor receive any letters from him.” With this he thrust the letter back into Franklin’s hand and turned to greet a customer.

As he left the stationer’s shop, Franklin looked closely at the other letters. He realized that these were not from the governor either. For the first time he began seriously to doubt whether the mailbag contained any letters from Keith on his behalf, or even whether Keith had ever intended to write any such letters. Consulting Thomas Denham, one of his cabinmates and a prosperous Pennsylvania merchant who had known Keith for some time, Franklin learned that the governor had a habit of promising much and delivering little. Denham laughed aloud when Franklin mentioned the letter of credit Keith was to have sent. Sir William, Denham said, had no credit to give.

This lesson in human nature came as a shock. When he had awakened that morning, Franklin fancied himself an independent artisan about to embark on a brilliant career. Now he was simply an out-of-work
journeyman a very long way from home, with no place to stay and no friends within three thousand miles.

Actually
, he did have one friend, although this friend soon proved more trouble than any enemy. James Ralph had accompanied Franklin to London, determined, after his success in the small charade he and Franklin had committed against Charles Osborne, to seek artistic fame in the capital of English letters. He did not confide his plans to his wife, who remained in Philadelphia with their small child; instead he told her he was going to London to establish commercial connections that would allow him to set up a merchandising business upon his return. She and her relatives doubtless deemed this an improvement over idle versifying and bade him bon voyage. But no sooner had the
London Hope
arrived at the city of its name than Ralph informed Franklin he was not going back. He could not abide his in-laws, he said. His future lay in England.