Benjamin Franklin's Humor

1. Silence Dogood 1722–1723

11 Silence Dogood 1 SILENCE DOGOOD 1722–1723 At thirteen, Franklin plunged into print with a timely ballad about lighthouse keeper George Worthylake drowning with two daughters in the heavy November surf of Boston Harbor. A few months later, he followed with another timely ballad on the capture of the notorious pirate Blackbeard off the Carolina coast. Emboldened, he adopted higher models. Having learned to write by imitating Addison and Steele’s popular Spectator essays, Franklin aspired to their role as censor of morals and manners. He would correct deviations from community standards by exposing them to ridicule. At sixteen, he transplanted their style to Boston in James Franklin’s New-England Courant. He left no doubt about his model in his first sketch, using many of the Spectator’s words. No attribution was necessary, because readers would have known Addision and Steele’s style anywhere. Such copying, common in Franklin’s time, would be considered legitimate imitation.1 Franklin, fearing that James never would have published work by a mere boy otherwise, slipped the first “Silence Dogood” essay through the door under cover of darkness and the pseudonym Silence Dogood, a feisty Boston widow lady. The Courant ran fourteen of her essays fortnightly from 2 April through 8 October 1722. Mrs. Dogood’s timely remarks on society and fashion sometimes resonate with Benjamin Franklin’s incipient BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S HUMOR 12 talents. But the polished writing suggests help from the coterie of writers, the Couranteers, who lounged around brother James’s shop to read London literary periodicals and imitate them in articles for the Courant under names like Timothy Turnstone and Zechariah Hearwell.2 The coterie spent the winter of 1721–1722 mocking Rev. Cotton Mather, who branded them “The Hell-Fire Club” for abusing Boston’s clergy. Not surprisingly, then, young Franklin crafted the sprightly widow’s name from two of Mather’s recent tracts, Silentarius and Essays to Do Good. Why a widow? One-fourth of Boston’s adults were widows.3 Even more subtle for modern readers (though not for Franklin’s contemporaries) is the allusion to Mather’s overwrought scene in the third book of his Magnalia Christi Americana (pt. 2, chap. 2, p. 77). Sailing from Newbury to Marblehead with his family, preacher John Avery “was by a Wave sweeping him off, immediately wafted away to Heaven,” says Mather. Mrs. Dogood indicts a comparably culpable wave for the death of her father. As he, poor Man, stood upon the Deck rejoycing at my Birth, a merciless Wave entred the Ship, and in one Moment carry’d him beyond Reprieve. This was the first Day which I saw, the last that was seen by my Father; and thus was my disconsolate Mother at once made both a Parent and a Widow. [No. 1]4 Mrs. Dogood’s balance of contrasting terms (first Day and last, Parent and Widow) will become a hallmark of Franklin’s epigrammatic style, as in, “It is not [General Howe] who had taken Philadelphia, but Philadelphia who had taken him.”5 After telling how she owed her writing skill to a country parson who encouraged her love of books, Mrs. Dogood concludes the first chapter with the same sort of front-loaded shot. I liv’d a chearful Country Life, spending my leisure Time either in some innocent Diversion with the neighbouring females, or in some shady Retirement, with the best of Company, Books. 13 Silence Dogood Thus I past away the Time with a Mixture of Profit and Pleasure, having no Affliction but what was imaginary, and created in my own Fancy; as nothing is more common with us Women, than to be grieving for nothing, when we have nothing else to grieve for. [No. 1] Aside from Addison and Steele’s carefully crafted style, Mrs. Dogood sounds like Daniel Defoe’s spunky, smart, and independent heroines, particularly Moll Flanders, whose popular memoirs appeared in January 1722. In a passage for tonal comparison, Mrs. Flanders offers a capsule account of her first marriage: “Modesty forbids me to reveal the Secrets of the Marriage Bed. . . . My Husband was so Fuddled when he came to Bed, that he could not remember in the Morning, whether he had any Conversation [sex] with me or no. . . . It concerns the Story in hand very little, to enter into the farther particulars . . . [of] the five Years that I liv’d with this Husband; only...