3. The Inn and the Candle Shop
They were born about nine years and one ocean apart. For children growing up in working-class homes in the early 1700s, England and America weren’t all that different. Both Ben and George were sent to school, but they also helped out in the family businesses. Ben cut wicks, poured wax, and ran errands for his father’s candle-making shop. George assisted at the inn his mother owned. Fortunately, both saw fit to write accounts of their lives, and so we can gather a number of details regarding their upbringing—at least as they remembered them.
Benjamin was born on the sixth day of 1706, or so he thought. There is some confusion about many dates in that era, because the British Empire switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in 1752, essentially erasing eleven days from the calendar. September 2 was followed by September 14 that year, to realign the year with the solar seasons. As a result, many important dates from the early 1700s have both “Old Style” and “New Style” numbers. Ben was born January 6, 1706 (OS), or January 17 (NS). George Whitefield was born December 16, 1714 (OS), or December 27 (NS).
The Franklins had a huge family. Ben’s father, Josiah, sired seven children with his first wife, Anne Child—three before moving to America and four afterward. After Anne died, he married Abiah Folger and fathered ten more. Benjamin was the third youngest child in the clan, with two kid sisters. Not all of the children survived to adulthood, but Ben remembered a moment, probably when he was nine, with thirteen Franklin progeny sitting around the dinner table.1 Imagine the challenges of growing up in that kind of crowd. How do you find your place in such a family? How do you get the attention you need?
Young Benjamin was smart, an avid reader, and precocious. “I was generally a leader among the boys,” he recalled, “and sometimes led them into scrapes.”2 On one occasion, at Ben’s instigation, the boys raided a construction site and carried off stones, which they used to build a wharf for their own fishing hole.
This is a remarkable story, which is why Ben included it in his autobiography half a century later, noting that “it shows an early projecting public spirit, tho’ not then justly conducted.”3 We see him gathering his playmates in a massive public works project, inspiring them to work hard to build something that would benefit them all. This is the sort of thing he did all his life. Library, fire company, hospital—he had a knack for building society, and apparently it started early. Of course, in his youth, he overlooked the fact that he was stealing the materials from someone else. The boys’ thievery was discovered, and their fathers “corrected” them. Ben “pleaded the usefulness of the work,” but his father convinced him that “nothing was useful which was not honest.”4
Because of Ben’s unique intelligence, Josiah Franklin had special plans for this, his tenth and youngest son, “intending to devote me as the tithe of his sons to the service of the Church.”5 As the ancient Israelites brought a tenth of their produce to the tabernacle—their tithe—so this tenth son would be dedicated to the church. That was the plan, anyway. Church ministry would require education, and so, while his older brothers were apprenticing with various tradesmen, Ben was sent to grammar school, where he excelled. He rose to the head of his class and jumped to the next grade, and he was about to jump to the next when his father realized there was no money for advanced education. He would never be able to send Ben to college, and so the dream of making his son a clergyman vanished. Ben was enrolled in a different school for more practical training in writing and arithmetic. (He did well in the writing—not so well with math.) But then, at the age of ten, he was finished with his schooling. Since college would never be an option, Ben would need to learn a trade. For the next few years, Ben stayed home to work in his father’s candle-making business—when he wasn’t getting into “scrapes” with his pals.
Ben hated candle making. He didn’t want to do this all his life. Because the sea had always fascinated Ben, Josiah feared that the boy might run off to be a sailor, so he became increasingly desperate about finding a trade his youngest son would like. “He therefore sometimes took me to walk with him, and see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc. at their work, that he might observe my inclination, and endeavour to fix it on some trade or other on land,” Ben wrote.6
This turned out to be a great education in how a society works. Benjamin Franklin never became a professional bricklayer or joiner (carpenter), but he saw how each of these craftsmen contributed to the civic enterprise. “It has ever since been a pleasure to me to see good workmen handle their tools,” he commented years later, adding that he himself had since used some of the skills he had observed in that walkabout.7 But there was a larger education going on here. Twelve-year-old Ben was watching democracy in action, long before it became a political reality. All his life, he would respect the work of the common laborer. Hobnobbing with “gentlemen” who looked down on those who got their hands dirty, Franklin would always keep quite a different opinion.
As it happened, Josiah had a nephew who was setting up shop as a cutler, and he made arrangements for Ben to apprentice with him. When they couldn’t agree on the financial arrangements (the family was expected to pay for the apprenticeship), this experience was cut short. Ben was back to square one. Would he have to make his living on the high seas?
One of Josiah’s older sons, James, had recently returned from London with a printing press and was setting up shop in Boston. Noting Benjamin’s love of books, Josiah sought to arrange an apprenticeship there. Though Ben resisted at first—the sea still beckoned—this was where he ended up. Papers were signed that committed Benjamin to work for his brother until he was twenty-one.
Room at the Inn
Across the pond, George Whitefield was still a toddler. He too was a youngest son, in fact the youngest of seven children born to Thomas and Elizabeth Whitefield, who ran an inn in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. It took his mother fourteen weeks to recover physically from this birth, and George notes that she “used to say, even when I was an infant, that she expected more comfort from me than any other of her children.”8 This sense of specialness, as the baby of the family, seeps through Whitefield’s journals and through his life. There was a sense that he was destined for great things.
The family was not especially religious, though they participated in the generic Anglican faith of that region. George’s great-grandfather had been an Oxford-educated Anglican rector, but the family’s status had dropped a few pegs in the succeeding generations. Elizabeth’s dreams for her youngest son may have been more social than spiritual, that he might attain a respectable church post and thus lift the whole family’s fortunes. The fact that he was born in an inn often prompted George to “make good my mother’s expectations, and so follow the example of my dear Saviour, who was born in a manger belonging to an inn.”9
Thomas Whitefield died suddenly at age thirty-five, when George was just two. The inn was left in Elizabeth’s care, with her children to help. Yet she wouldn’t let young George work there. His education came first.
As you might expect from a Calvinist, Whitefield described his childhood in terms that fit with the concept of total depravity. “I was so brutish as to hate instruction. . . . Lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting I was much addicted to, even when very young. Sometimes I used to curse, if not swear.” He stole money from his mother’s pocket, broke the Sabbath, and indulged in “common entertainments” like play going, card playing, and reading romances. “Often have I joined with others in playing roguish tricks, but was generally, if not always, happily detected.”10
Compare this with Franklin’s story of stealing stones. In both situations, “roguish tricks” were “detected” and lessons learned. But Ben reveled in his impish boyhood, not to mention the leadership ability shown in the wharf-building episode, while George berated himself for his innate wickedness. Ironically, it would seem that the Franklin home was religiously stricter than the Whitefield home, and yet each man looked back autobiographically and analyzed the sins of his youth in a way that matched his adult mind-set. Boys will be boys, and yet Ben looked back at a lesson learned in good citizenship while George saw his desperate need for a Savior.
After eight years of widowhood, George’s mother remarried—and it nearly destroyed her. Her new husband tried to take over the inn, failed, left her, stole as much as he could, and filed for divorce. At that point, the family’s fortunes plummeted. Though George had done well in school, especially in speech making and theater, it became clear that the family would not be able to send him to college. So, in a situation similar to Ben Franklin’s, George dropped out of school as a teenager and worked full-time at the inn for a year and a half—and for a time he even worked for an older brother who had taken over the inn.
Father Figures
Psychoanalyzing historical characters is always presumptuous, but it’s worth noting that Ben Franklin grew up with a strong father and George Whitefield did not.
It’s really quite touching to read Ben’s tribute to his father in the early pages of his autobiography, especially when we remember that this was written to his own son. “I think you may like to know something of his person and character,” the sixty-five-year-old Ben wrote to William, who was in his early forties. After describing Josiah’s appearance, singing voice, and mechanical genius, Ben added, “his great excellence lay in a sound understanding, and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and public affairs.” Though the man never had time for any governmental post, Ben remembered that he was “frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the Town or of the Church he belonged to and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice.”11
Ben went on to talk about the family dinners, where Josiah often invited friends to converse with (though surely the table was already crowded) and “always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our Attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life.” With such food for thought, no one talked about the quality of the meal.12
We’ve already seen the care Josiah took in finding the right direction for Ben, acquainting him with different trades and seeking to negotiate a suitable apprenticeship. He seemed to be a gentle giant in Ben’s life. Ever after, in all his relationships, this son prized the qualities he had seen in his father, and he sought to be that kind of father to his own son.
Whitefield, on the other hand, had a single mom who doted on him. Like Josiah Franklin, Elizabeth Whitefield had high hopes for her gifted youngest son, only to be limited by economic realities. As much as she tried to care for George, she herself needed the care of her family, in her own recuperation from George’s birth, her grieving over her first husband, the practical difficulties of running a respectable inn as a single woman, and dealing with the fallout of her catastrophic second marriage. We get the idea that for much of his youth, George was pretty much rearing himself.
Still, he wrote about her with great appreciation, and he maintained a relationship with her throughout his life. He made her very proud.
Yet we can’t help but wonder what effect his upbringing had on his adult relationships. With a father he hardly knew and a rogue for a stepfather, how did he learn about being a man? What sort of models did he have for marriage? In his youth, George had some trouble deciding what sort of person he would be. He would surely have benefited from more attentive parenting. And there are two details from his adult life that take on greater significance when we consider the fractured home he grew up in. First, the charitable cause to which he devoted his life was an orphanage. He did all he could to provide a stable home for children in need. And second, when he visited the renowned theologian Jonathan Edwards, he came away with a profound respect for his marriage. Perhaps he had never seen such a loving relationship up close, certainly not in his boyhood home.
Work and Words
As Ben grew up in Boston and George in Bristol, both quickly found their places in a world of work and words.
Both of them learned the value of hard work in the family business—and they acted on that knowledge the rest of their lives. Ben would write about it; George, with his remarkable preaching schedule, would practice it. Remember, too, that the wider culture didn’t always support this principle. The mark of a true gentleman was that he didn’t have to work. But the world was beginning to change its mind about this—especially in America—and both Ben and George would contribute to that change.
There was plenty of work to do in America. The growing society needed people who rolled up their sleeves and pitched in. The founders of the new colonies had been workers, not royals. The Puritans hallowed work as God’s calling. The Quakers celebrated the value of community by working together. This was a land of brawn and sweat, where people burned the candle at both ends. While making some of those candles, young Ben gained an appreciation for common laborers. Tending bar and making beds at his mother’s inn, young George began to see his own value in serving others.
In different ways, both men incorporated this work ethic into their religious views as they grew older. For Franklin, the measure of a man was his contribution to society. Vices impeded productivity. Even today, we quote his mantra—“Early to bed and early to rise/makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” This wasn’t just a catchy rhyme. It embodied an ethic that was very important to Franklin.
As a young man, Ben constructed for himself an elaborate plan of self-improvement, with thirteen virtues he would work at developing, one a week, four times a year. His autobiography explains it in words that seem almost Methodist: “I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time.” He’s looking back at his youthful ardor with a smile, adding, “I soon found that I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined.”13
So maybe his Thirteen Weeks to Self-Actualization was a bit too ambitious, but Franklin worked at improving himself in various ways all his life, and his wit and wisdom helped others do the same.
For Whitefield, on the other hand, the role of good works in a person’s life became a critical issue. Like his friends John and Charles Wesley, he threw himself into religious disciplines—including prayer, fasting, meditation, and Bible study. This was the “method” of attaining holiness that earned them the nickname “Methodists.” But, in separate events, all of them reached basically the same conclusion that Franklin did: the task of attaining moral perfection was more difficult than they imagined. The breakthrough for Whitefield and the Wesleys was the acceptance of God’s grace. They could never be righteous enough on their own; they needed the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. Whitefield had this conversion experience in 1735, after he had already been meeting with the Holy Club at Oxford for a couple of years.
Good works came afterward. God did his work of sanctification in the believer’s heart, and this resulted in works of righteousness, love, and service. Along with the other Methodists, Whitefield reclaimed a methodical approach to righteous living—not as a way of earning God’s favor, but as a way of letting God improve him. George worked tirelessly in God’s service because, frankly, he didn’t deserve a day off. He was a depraved sinner, saved by grace, and he owed God every moment.
A number of books provided guidance for young Whitefield in this spiritual journey—besides the Bible, of course. These included two instructive and devotional works by English scholar William Law: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) and A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (1726). Earlier he read works by Anglican bishop Thomas Ken and medieval devotionalist Thomas à Kempis. To get the books that fascinated him, George would beg, borrow, and steal. Literally. He saved up money to buy some books, and sometimes friends would lend him reading material. From Charles Wesley, he borrowed Nicodemus, or A Treatise Against the Fear of Man by German August Hermann Francke. In the mea culpa that begins his journal, he confessed that he even stole a few books as a child. They were devotional writings.
But Whitefield’s early reading was not confined to religious works. He loved to read plays until religious conviction compelled him to give up the theater. For a time he found his “heart’s delight” in “reading romances”14—not the sex-obsessed novels of today, but adventure stories featuring heroes of old. Clearly he understood the power of language from a young age. As an orator, actor, or preacher, he would find a way to make words work for him.
Ben Franklin wrote: “From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.” He loved John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, so he bought a collection of Bunyan’s works. Plutarch’s Lives was a classic set of biographies “in which I read abundantly,” and there were works by Daniel Defoe and Cotton Mather he found helpful.15
A friend introduced him to poetry, and as a young teen he began dabbling in verse. He wrote two ballads on recent events, one about a lighthouse keeper who drowned, and the other about the killing of Blackbeard the pirate. “They were wretched stuff,” Ben admitted.16
Over the next few years, Ben engaged in several writing exercises to develop his own ability, and he continued to read widely. As a printer’s apprentice, he was perfectly situated, with access to books and newspapers that gave him a window on the wider world. Like George Whitefield, he began to realize that he would impact that world with words.