The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Preface
This book proposes to illuminate the legacy of Benjamin Franklin by substituting his memoir for his life. The reverse is the customary scholarly practice: to sift the memoir for incidents and evidence that can illuminate our current understanding of the Atlantic world in Franklin’s lifetime. No face in American history is more famous than his. Perhaps only Washington and Lincoln are equally recognizable, and equally mythic, figures. Since the bicentennial of the ...
Introduction: Accident and Design
The following pages are about a book, not a man. Its author never gave his work a title, and though he wrote in English, part of his manuscript was first published in French translation in 1791, a year after his death. This initial appearance was quickly followed by German, Swedish, and English translations of the French fragment, one of which was serialized in eight installments of...
CHAPTER 1 Great Works and Little Anecdotes
Benjamin Franklin’s memoir begins, inauspiciously, as the recollections of an amateur genealogist, tracing his origins in the English Midlands, sharing the experience with his son, and adding his own contributions to the family lore. The initial result, he suggests in retrospect, is a compilation of “little family Anecdotes of no Importance to others,” a note of false modesty on the part ...
CHAPTER 2 Imposing Forms
Franklin’s memoir dramatizes a remarkable range of experiments in association, large and small, nearly all of which incorporate the shifting proportions of stability and instability reflected in the epitaph that he wrote for his parents. Social compacts of all sizes are repeatedly established, broken, modified, and remade in his pages, often for reasons that have little to do with...
CHAPTER 3 The Scramble of Life
Osborne, Watson, and Ralph compose Franklin’s second experiment in the formation of a mutual improvement society. The first, his friendship with Collins, had begun in much the same way as the bond among the four “Lovers of Reading” who debated the usefulness of poetry during their Sunday walks. But Collins had disappeared in the West Indies where Osborne’s promising legal career would come to a premature end; Watson died young; and James Ralph...
CHAPTER 4 Litera Scripta Manet
In the fall of 1773, Franklin contributed to the Public Advertiser the last of his efforts to influence English colonial policy through the London press, including two of his most celebrated satires: “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One” and “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” After the news arrived in January 1774 of the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, followed by Franklin’s excruciating experience before the Privy Council the same...
CHAPTER 5 Some Uses of Cunning
From the moment that Franklin begins writing his memoir, he conceives of it as a record of excuses. The book as a whole, he insists, is an indulgence of an old man’s natural inclination to reminisce about his past. Franklin apologizes for doing so, in the memoir’s opening sentences, but vanity entices him to continue, consoled by the thought that readers (unlike listeners) need not pretend to be a polite audience. This convenient by-product of writing is also...
CONCLUSION: Segmented Serpent
The pace of Franklin’s narrative slows dramatically as he pieces together his account of the busy years between 1751, when he and Thomas Bond collaborate on building a hospital, and 1757, when he sails to England as the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent in its case at court against Thomas Penn. The bulk of the 1788 fragment of the memoir focuses on events that fall between the Carlisle treaty meeting in the autumn of 1753 and the immediate aftermath of the Braddock ...
E-ISBN-13: 9781421406138
E-ISBN-10: 1421406136
Print-ISBN-13: 9781421405230
Print-ISBN-10: 1421405237
Page Count: 224
Illustrations: 8 b&w illus.
Publication Year: 2012
OCLC Number: 809317399
MUSE Marc Record: Download for The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin
