Book of Ages

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Jill Lepore

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-95835-8

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-95834-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lepore, Jill, [date]

  Book of ages : the life and opinions of Jane Franklin / Jill Lepore.—First Edition.

  pages cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-307-95834-1

  1. Mecom, Jane, 1712–1794. 2. Franklin, Benjamin, 1706–1790. 3. Women—United States—Social conditions—18th century. 4. Boston (Mass.)—Biography. I. Title.

  E302.6.F8L427 2013

  973.3092—dc23

  [B] 2013001012

  Cover portrait of Jane Flagg Greene (Jane Franklin’s granddaughter) by Joseph Badger, oil on canvas, 1765, Thayer Memorial Library, Lancaster, Massachusetts

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  Appendix G, “A Map of Jane’s Boston,” adapted by Robert Bull, from Jane Mecom by Carl Van Doren (New York: Viking, 1950)

  v.3.1

  In memory

  of my father

  and of my mother

  their youngest daughter

  places this stone

  One Half of the World

  does not know

  how the other Half lives.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,

  Poor Richard’s Almanack

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  PART ONE Jane 1537–1727

  PART TWO Her Book 1727–1757

  PART THREE Letters 1758–1775

  PART FOUR History 1775–1793

  PART FIVE Remains 1794–

  Appendices

  A. Methods and Sources

  B. A Franklin Genealogy

  C. A Jane Genealogy

  D. A Calendar of the Letters

  E. The Editorial Hand of Jared Sparks

  F. Jane’s Library

  G. A Map of Jane’s Boston

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  A Calendar of Letters (Large Images)

  Preface

  Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane thought of her brother as her “Second Self.”1 He was the youngest of ten sons; she was the youngest of seven daughters. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little. No two people in their family were more alike.

  Their lives could hardly have been more different. He ran away from home when he was seventeen. She never left. He taught himself to write with wit and force and style; she never learned how to spell. The day he turned twenty-one, he wrote her a letter—she was fourteen—beginning a correspondence that would last until his death sixty-three years later. He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name. He loved no one longer. She loved no one better. He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone. All her life, she wrote back: letter after letter filled with news and recipes and gossip and, when she was truly, sorely vexed, and only then, with her blistering opinions about politics.

  He wrote the story of his life, a well-turned tale about a boy who runs away from poverty and obscurity in cramped, pious Boston and leaves all that behind—leaves home behind, leaves his sister behind, leaves the past behind—to become an enlightened, independent man of the world: a free man. It is one of the most important autobiographies ever written. It is also an allegory about America: the story of a man as the story of a nation.

  In that story, he left her out. Never once did he so much as mention her name. All the same, little of what Benjamin Franklin wrote—not the Silence Dogood essays, not Poor Richard’s Almanack, not The Way to Wealth, not the autobiography—can be understood without her. This book, a history of the life and opinions of Jane Franklin, contains with it a wholly new reading of the life and opinions of her brother. But more, it tells her story. Like his, her life is an allegory: it explains what it means to write history not from what survives but from what is lost. “One Half of the World does not know how the other Half lives,” Franklin once wrote. His sister is his other Half.

  She never wrote the story of her life. This would scarcely have occurred to her.2 But she did once write a book. She stitched four sheets of foolscap between two covers to make sixteen pages. On its first page, she wrote,

  She called it her Book of Ages.3 It is a record of the births and deaths of her children, a litany of grief.

  I once held it in my hands. It was so small, so fragile, so plain, her handwriting so tiny and cramped. Sixteen pages and, as I turned them, I discovered that she had left the last pages blank. Had she nothing more to say?

  Virginia Woolf once asked, “What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith”? Woolf gave herself permission to invent this Judith Shakespeare—“Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by”—and conjured a girl as brilliant and daring as her brother:

  She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.

  What, Woolf wondered, would have been Judith Shakespeare’s fate?

  Before she was out of her teens, she was to be betrothed to the son of a neighbouring wool-stapler. She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?

  Judith Shakespeare did break her father’s heart: she ran away. “The force of her own gift alone drove her to it,” Woolf wrote. “She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen.” In London, she was seduced by an actor, after which “she found herself with child by that gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night.”4

  Judith Shakespeare is a figment of Virginia Woolf’s imagination, a heroine trapped, skirts aflutter, in a modern, manly idea of the self, and of the author as solitary and unencumbered: a free man. No American writer did more to mold that idea of authorship than Benjamin Franklin. Judith Shakespeare could not reconcile a life of the mind with the life of a mother. Neither could Virginia Woolf.

  The facts of Jane Franklin’s life are hard to come by. Her obscurity is matched only by her brother’s fame. If he meant to be Everyman, she is everyone else. Most of what she wrote is lost—the first letter in her hand to survive is one she wrote when she was forty-five years old—and what scant record of her life is left has been saved only because she was
Benjamin Franklin’s sister.

  But Jane Franklin is not a figment of my imagination. She was flesh and blood and milk and tears. Her brother ran away and broke their father’s heart; she would not, could not. She never gave herself that much rope. She didn’t kill herself one winter’s night. She never gave herself that kind of rope, either. She had too many people to look after. She never left anyone behind. She hardly ever left the house. She didn’t have a room of her own until she was sixty-nine years old. “I write now in my own litle chamber…& nobod up in the house near me to Desturb me,” she wrote, delighted.5 She was very happy to have it, but not having that room sooner isn’t why she didn’t write more or better.

  Whether a poet’s heart beat inside her woman’s body I leave it to the reader to decide, but sitting in that archive, holding those sheets of foolscap stitched together with the coarsest of threads, I began to think that Benjamin Franklin’s sister had something to say after all, something true, something new. Very delicately, I once more turned the brittle pages of the Book of Ages, and in them I saw an unwritten story: a history of books and papers, a history of reading and writing, a history from reformation to revolution, a history of history. This, then, is Jane Franklin’s story: a book of ages about ages of books.

  TO THE READER:

  All original English spellings have been retained.

  Spelling is part of the story.

  CHAPTER I

  Lady Jane

  Lady Jane Grey, a red-haired, freckle-faced grandniece of Henry the Eighth, read, while still a girl, the Old Testament in Hebrew and Plato in Greek. She was remarkable; she was untoward. A royal tutor once found her shut in her room reading an account of Socrates’s execution for heresy, “with as moch delite, as som jentleman wold read a merie tale.” She was thirteen. The tutor confessed himself astonished. Why, he asked, did she closet herself in her chamber to study the philosophy of death when she might instead hunt in the park with the duke and duchess?

  She looked up from her book. “They never felt, what trewe pleasure ment,” she said.

  This scarcely slaked him.

  “And howe came you,” inquired he, “to this déepe knowledge of pleasure”?

  “I will tell you,” she obliged: when she was in the company of other than books, she said, “that I thinke my selfe in hell.”1

  Lady Jane was a cousin of the king’s son, Edward. From the age of twelve, he kept a journal, uncommonly canny, an account at once of himself and of the state; he called it his “Chronicle.” He began with his birth: “The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th’eight.”2

  The chronicle of a king is a history of the world. The royal weddings alone could have filled a folio. The Church of England had separated from the Church of Rome when Edward’s father divorced his wife to marry Anne Boleyn. He would have four wives more. Born, married, buried. Born, married, beheaded.

  Then there were the heretics, the readers of banned books. Born, married, burned. “The secrets mysteries of the faith ought not to be explained to all men in all places,” the church had decreed in 1215. “For such is the depth of divine Scripture that, not only the simple and illiterate but even the prudent and learned are not fully sufficient to try to understand it.”3 But in the 1450s, after a German blacksmith named Johannes Gutenberg cast letters of lead and antimony in his forge and, with a machine hewn of wood, pressed ink onto a page, the secret mysteries began to seep out. If a book could be made so well and copied so cheaply, might there not, one day, be mountains of books? And then, might not every man, and even every woman, down to the merest girl, read the word of God? William Tyndale, a scholar, began translating the Bible into English. “If God spare my life,” he warned a clergyman, “I wvyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou doest.”4

  Tyndale went to the gallows.5 The next year, Edward was born:

  The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th’eight.

  Thus begins the chronicle of a king.

  But what of the king’s humble subjects, the merchants and gentle ladies, the busy tradesmen and the surly apprentices, the frugal housewives and their virtuous daughters, the thieves and the rogues, the beggars and the whores? What of the plain?

  Thomas Cromwell, the king’s minister, ordered every parish to “kepe one boke or registre wherin ye shall write the day and yere of every weddyng christenyng and buryeng”: a record of births, marriages, and deaths—a chronicle of everyone. Each book was to be kept in a coffer, fastened with two locks. Not every vicar complied.6 Impertinent parsons kept no books at all. They could think of no purpose for which a king might make a count except to tax.

  In 1547, Henry died and Edward, nine, was crowned. The boy king, he was called. A council ruling in his name strove to have every last vestige of idolatry destroyed. Vestries were ransacked, stained glass shattered, statues smashed. In their stead, on altars and in pews, went print: psalters, catechisms, books of common prayer. To read was to be saved.

  Lady Jane kept reading. Her piety was daunting; her learning was said to be “almost past belief.”7 Edward fell ill; there were rumors that he had been poisoned. On his deathbed, he named as his successor Lady Jane.

  When Edward died, Jane became queen. She was sixteen. Then Edward’s half sister Mary, with an army behind her, seized the crown. Jane’s reign lasted only nine days. She was locked in the Tower of London, and sentenced to death. Before she was executed, she sent one of her sisters a Bible. “It wil teache you to live,” she told her, “and learne you to die.”8

  Far from the Tower of London, in the tiny village of Ecton, in Northampshire, in the very middle of England, there lived a blacksmith named Thomas Francklyne, a clever man, a tinkerer. When, during Mary’s reign, she restored the Church of Rome, Thomas Francklyne contrived an ingenious device: with cloth tape, he fastened a Bible to the underside of a stool with a hinged seat so that he could turn it up and read his book when he would, but when anyone came to the door, he could tuck it under.9 When Mary died in 1558, and her sister Elizabeth, a Protestant, succeeded her, Thomas Francklyne took his Bible out from under his stool and kept it out. It wil teache you to live, and learne you to die.

  Only then did the recalcitrant rector of the village of Ecton begin, at last, to keep a parish register.10 In it, in the year of the Lord fifteen hundred sixty-five, he recorded a baptism:

  Jane, the daughter of Thomas ffrancklyne.

  It sounds so plain. But, at the time, Jane wasn’t just any name.

  CHAPTER II

  The Franklin’s Tale

  In the spring of 1758, Benjamin Franklin made a pilgrimage to Ecton to uncover his ancestors. Thomas Francklyne, who hid his Bible under a stool, was Jane and Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-grandfather.

  In Ecton, Franklin walked through a maze of stone. He sought out the villagers, the crooked and the haggard, leaning upon their canes. He stopped at the rectory to inquire after the parish register. “By which I find,” he wrote, “that our poor honest Family were Inhabitants of that Village near 200 Years, as early as the Register begins.”1 Jane, the daughter of Thomas ffrancklyne.

  In the churchyard, he trudged along narrow, grassy paths, squinting at stones, looking for the family name. “The short and simple Annals of the Poor,” Thomas Gray had called gravestones, in “An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard,” in 1751, thinking about how “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.”2

  Jane Francklyne, born in 1565, had lived for less than a month. She left very little behind. She was buried in the Ecton churchyard, but her father would hardly have paid a carver to engrave so small a stone.3 If not for the parish register, there would be no record that this Jane Francklyne had ever lived at all. History is what is written and can be found; what isn’t saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

  Thomas Francklyne had four sons who lived longer than their unfortunate sister. The youngest, Henry, grew to be a pigheaded, contrary man. A
blacksmith like his father, he once spent a year and a day in prison, “on suspicion of his being the author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man.”4 Silence was not Henry Francklyne’s handmaiden. He named his youngest son Thomas. By now, the spelling of the family name had begun to change. Thomas Francklin minded the forge in Ecton. He forged pots and hinges and rasps and fetters, like the blacksmith in Isaiah 54:16: “Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coales in the fire, and that bringeth foorth an instrument for his worke.”5 He “had very little hair and used to wear a cap,” one of his sons remembered. Not only a blacksmith, “he alsoe practised for diversion the trade of a Turner, a Gun-Smith, a surgeion, a scrivener, and wrote as prety a hand as ever I saw. He was a historian.”6

  Behold the historian. His hand holds a pen. His eye lingers on the past.

  Thomas Francklin’s wife, Jane White, loved to sing and to recite to her children the last verses of the third chapter of Malachi: “they that feared the Lord, spake often to one another, and the Lord hearkened and heard it, & a booke of remembrance was written before him, for them that feared the Lord, & that thought upon his name.”7

  The word, the name, the book: reckoning and remembrance. A history.

  Thomas and Jane White Francklin didn’t fasten their Bible under a stool. They inked it on plaster. On the very walls of their house, they wrote their favorite verses: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotton Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his sonne into the world to condemne the world: but that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:16–17).8 This, their word of gods, father and son, snaked around the walls, a foot above the floor.

  Their youngest son, Josiah, was born in 1657. He became not a blacksmith but a dyer of silk and a maker of ink, and not in the sleepy village of Ecton but in the bustling town of Banbury, a Puritan town.9 He and brother Benjamin wrote down the family recipes. How to whiten linen: “Lay it two dayes in soure Milk, closs coverd.” How to dye leather blue: “Boyle in Water, Walwort berries, and Elderberries.” How to make black printer’s ink: “Burn Rozin in an Iron pan, hold a bag with ye Mouth downward to catch the smoak, When it is cold shake yor bag on a paper, Mix the soot Exceeding well with Linseed oyle, and then boyle it over a gentle fire, until you find it thick.”10