Benjamin Franklin in London by George Goodwin
Weidenfeld, £25
American national legend has it that, such was Benjamin Franklin’s sense of irreverence and penchant for satire, he was not chosen to write the Declaration of Independence because it was feared that he would include an off-colour joke in the text which would go unnoticed until it was too late. Generations of schoolchildren have speculated as to what such a joke would have looked like, and how rude it might have been. This sense of an only guessed at irreverence and humanity is frustratingly preserved by George Goodwin’s biography, which focuses on Franklin’s 18 years spent in London.
In his introduction to Franklin’s early life, Goodwin gives us a straight-faced account of the 16-year-old apprentice printer pseudonymously submitting a series of letters to his brother’s newspaper in the guise of a po-faced widow named Silence Dogood. Unfortunately, he does not offer us any examples of the “tremendous mixture of spoof and mockery” which made them a sensation. Similarly, we are told that the Poor Richard’s Almanack series, which made Franklin famous across the colonies as a writer, started with a blistering send-up of his nearest competitor, but we are left to fill in for ourselves what the incendiary mockery must have sounded like.
Throughout the book, Goodwin keeps us at arm’s length from his subject – happy to praise his legendary sense of humour, but never lowering the tone by giving examples. Similarly, the origins of Franklin’s illegitimate son remain not only obscure but almost defensively unguessed at. Goodwin concedes that, as a young self-made man, Franklin “sowed his wild oats” but frustratingly few, if any, details emerge about the leisure pursuits of a man who, according to Thomas Jefferson, in the company of women “loses all power over himself and becomes almost frenzied”.
Likewise, Franklin’s dizzyingly cozy domestic set-up, with a common-law wife in America and an unexplored emotional ménage with his landlady and her daughter in London, are presented as the epitome of propriety and practicality. Even Franklin’s friendship with Sir Francis Dashwood, of Hellfire Club fame, is, we are told, no reflection upon the character of the estimable Founding Father.
Throughout the book we are presented with Franklin as an Ordnance Survey map – the contours and features are all represented, but we are denied any living impression of the man.
Regarding Franklin’s two stays in London, Goodwin finds ample room to demonstrate the depth of his research. We are given an intriguing and colourful impression of London, newly recovered from the Great Fire, and the life of an average journeyman printer working there. Sadly, the life presented is that of “Poor Richard”, and not Franklin, a young man who forswears beer for water and is early to bed and early to rise. Franklin’s scientific exploits and renown are well recounted, and it is this reputation that allows him easy entrance to London society in middle age as the agent of his adopted home of Pennsylvania.
The furious politicking Franklin engages in, first against the proprietary Penn family, and later with the government, is treated with a mastery of detail. Indeed, the book’s strength is as a pocket study of the cabinet intrigues of 18th-century politics. Yet here it seems to fall between two stools: the average American reader will soon find himself lost among the intricate chain of correspondence between politicians, whose names frequently change as they are ennobled, and whose wider political concerns outside the colonies are taken as read. The British reader is left without a real context for the growing discontent in the colonies which lends urgency to Franklin’s mission.
Franklin’s place among the “natural philosophers” of his day is often reduced to that of a mere scientist. Goodwin fails to situate Franklin’s political battles within the period’s emerging war of ideas.
One of the great networks which Franklin deployed to his advantage, first as a thinker and later as a politician, was Freemasonry, of which he was an active member. Goodwin mentions this only a handful of times, each only in passing. While noticing that Franklin was politically on the side of the religious non-conformists and often confronting conservative forces of high churchmen in the colonial assembly, he never links the political and the philosophical in a way that his own presentation of events seems to demand.
As Franklin boards his ship for America in 1775, fleeing arrest, we are presented with a man, furious in his rejection, committing himself to revolution. While his enmity is well presented by Goodwin as personal as much as political, and while he nuances slightly his antipathy for the mother country, no account is taken of evidence which suggests Franklin continued to play both sides of the Atlantic in the future. While this book is a work of diligent research and context, in the end, Goodwin’s portrait of Franklin is an optical illusion whose hidden shape and depth never truly emerges into view.
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