When the Printer Met the Virtuoso

In June 1725, on tour in Enlightenment London, Benjamin Franklin found his way to the Bloomsbury mansion of Sir Hans Sloane. In some ways, the meeting was anti-climactic. Ravenously curious about the workings of nature (and society), the nineteen-year-old Franklin had hoped, but failed, to meet the aged Isaac Newton, although he probably met associates of the great natural philosopher such as John Theophilus Desaguliers and Isaac Greenwood. Sloane, however, was himself one of the most eminent figures in British scientific and medical society: then sixty-five, he was President of the Royal College of Physicians and shortly to succeed Newton as Royal Society President in 1727 (he had long since served as the society's secretary starting in the 1690s). He was also the most important patron of scientific activity around Britain's commercial empire, the hub of a network of traveler-collectors that included traders, planters, and naturalists from the Asian subcontinent and China to West Africa and the Americas. Sloane was the man at the center. Leo Lemay, in his Life of Benjamin Franklin, makes little of the meeting between Sloane and Franklin, but it was nevertheless a remarkable moment when the periphery met the center. Here is how Franklin later recalled it: "I had brought over a few Curiosities among which the principal was a purse made of the Asbestos, which purifies by fire. Sir Hans Sloane heard of it, came to see me, and invited me to his House in Bloomsbury Square; where he show'd me all his Curiosities, and persuaded me to let him add that to the Number, for which he paid me handsomely" (I, p. 294). The meeting generated the first enduring material traces of Franklin's life: his first extant letter is his note of introduction to Sloane, and the asbestos purse still survives in the collections of London's Natural History Museum.¹

What's extraordinary in Franklin's account is the way he places himself in the position of power: it is Sloane who hears of Franklin, visits him, and strives to persuade the traveler to part with his intriguing curiosity. Franklin, however, appears to have distorted what happened; or maybe the years, and his own rise to prominence, made him seem increasingly the center of every story he retold. His original letter to Sloane of June 2, 1725 suggests a rather different interaction. "'As you are noted to be a lover of curiosities,' he wrote, 'I have inform'd you of these [the purse, etc.]; and if you have any inclination to purchase them, or see 'em, let me know your pleasure by a line directed for me at the Golden Fan in Little Britain, and I will wait upon you with them'" (I, frontispiece). It was Franklin who had heard of Sloane, not vice versa; Franklin solicited Sloane's interest and immediately offered his curiosities for sale (perhaps, over-eagerly, mentioning purchasing, then seeing them in that order), assuring Sloane of his pleasure to wait on him. Franklin's rewriting of this exchange clearly signaled a desire to reverse the dynamics between collector and supplier. But in reality, Sloane would never have gone to see Franklin; those who aspired to contribute to his storied collection—ultimately the founding collection of the British Museum—had to go to Sloane.

The meeting between Sloane and Franklin might appear to exemplify the political dynamics of knowledge-making in the Atlantic world, about which much has recently been written.² Numerous early modern commentators worked hard to naturalize imperial politics by casting western Europe as the center of human ingenuity and defining as peripheral those places where climate and culture degraded bodily capacity and intellectual ability, including settler-colonies inhabited by expanding subject populations. On this view, Franklin was the Creole...