4. Casting Characters
The working day is done, but the teenage boy sets himself to a new task. Disguising his handwriting, he pens a letter, introducing himself as a writer in the area and beginning to tell his life story. Except it’s not his own story. He’s making up a new character. He employs his own ample wit within the letter, but he disguises this as well, trying to write in the manner of a middle-aged woman. He signs the letter “Silence Dogood” and slips it under the door of the print shop where he works.
Benjamin Franklin is at it again, but there’s a purpose to this prank. He’s beginning to realize that he’s a gifted writer, at least as intelligent as most of those who contribute to the newspaper his brother publishes. But his brother, who is also his boss, won’t give him a chance. James Franklin sees Ben as his errand boy, an indentured servant, not a colleague. So Ben has to disguise his voice to let it be heard.
James finds the letter from Mrs. Dogood, and he loves it. He talks with his friends about it, those other writers who come by the shop with their news items and editorials. Ben overhears them voicing their approval, and he’s bursting with pride. The first letter has promised updates every two weeks, and the letters come through on schedule, under the door of the print shop. The writers who gather there make guesses about the true identity of the author. The suspects they mention are among the smartest folks in town.
Can you imagine the smirk that Ben tries to hide as he sweeps up around this conversation? Yet he keeps his silence, through a third Dogood letter, and a fifth. Over the next six months, fourteen such letters are surreptitiously submitted.
At first it’s just a very entertaining autobiography, rolled out bit by bit. “Silence” says she was born on a ship crossing to America, but the moment her father learned of her birth, a wave swept him overboard. “Thus was my disconsolate mother at once made both a parent and a widow.”1 After her mother died, she went to work as a housekeeper for a bachelor minister and eventually married him. So goes the comic melodrama that Ben invents for his unlikely alter ego. But then the letters branch out to social issues, tackling education, government, religion, and even the status of women.
In Letter 4 she relates a lengthy dream about a “Temple of Learning,” filled with symbolic characters like something out of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Her minister-husband quickly interprets it as a fair depiction of Harvard.2
By Letter 9 she’s talking about religion, wondering whether society “suffers more by hypocritical pretenders to religion, or by the openly profane?” She thinks that “the hypocrite is the most dangerous person of the two, especially if he sustains a post in the government.”3
There is great fun in the writing, a constant winking at the reader. The language is a bit flowery, but it remains clear. Ben’s cleverness is apparent in multiple ways. He has created an effective character here, and he has mastered her language. It’s a great way to prove himself as a writer and social commentator. But, further, he has discovered a rather safe way to deal with controversy: put your critical thoughts in the mouth of a lovable character.
Finally the game is up. Ben admits to the ruse, gaining the instant respect of his brother’s friends but causing irritation to his brother.
Decades later, Ben told the story in his autobiography. “I kept my secret till my small fund of sense for such performances was pretty well exhausted.”4 He was still smirking about it. But this was far more than a childish prank. Young Ben Franklin learned several things through the Silence Dogood charade. First, he was a good writer. Moving well beyond doggerel about Blackbeard, his prose was good enough for the newspaper. Second, he learned that life is often a performance, and sometimes you can choose the part you play.
Later he would use pseudonyms to great effect in his own Philadelphia newspaper. When he wanted to stir controversy, or to express opinions that might get him in trouble, he could invent a character to say what needed to be said. No one would have to know that the byline on the page was just a figment of the publisher’s imagination. And of course Franklin made the most of his most popular pen name, Poor Richard, whose series of almanacs turned out to be best sellers.
Escape
Ben was just sixteen when the Dogood letters were printed, not yet halfway through his appointed apprenticeship. Though he loved the world of words—many nights he borrowed books from the shop and returned them the next morning—he found James a difficult master. When the Dogood hoax was revealed, James worried that Ben might grow vain. And the fact was he didn’t need another writer; he needed someone to deliver papers. Ben seemed to be outgrowing his position, and there were still five years to go.
At that time, an apprentice was essentially an indentured servant. The contract that committed a worker to a certain number of years of service was legally binding. The boss had great power over the apprentice, even to the point of corporal punishment. (“My brother was passionate and had often beaten me,” Ben wrote later.5) The Franklin situation involved family, so Ben could rely on his father for some mediation, and he did, but he still longed to be free from his brother.
James was just nine years older than Ben—an adult, yes, but still making his own way. He had bought his printing press in London when he was just twenty-one, and two years later he started his paper, the New-England Courant, only the fourth regular newspaper ever established in the colonies. In many respects, James was a slightly older and less brilliant version of Ben. He was beginning to make a name for himself in Boston. People in high places were taking notice of his little publication. He didn’t need a little brother tagging along.
Until he did.
In 1722, James ran a piece in the Courant criticizing government authorities for colluding with pirates in raids near Boston Harbor. Some assemblymen took offense and had James jailed for nearly a month. (America was still six decades away from freedom of the press.) Ben took over the operation of the newspaper in that time. The court released James on the condition that he no longer publish the Courant.
What to do? Friends suggested a name change for the paper, but the Courant was gaining a reputation in town and James didn’t want to lose it. Could he just list Benjamin Franklin as the publisher and continue running it himself? Well, the authorities would see right through that sham. They would assume the apprentice was under the control of his master. But what if Ben were officially released from his commitment as an apprentice? He would then be a free agent in publishing the Courant, at least as the public saw it. This was the solution James chose. The official apprenticeship contract was dissolved and replaced with a secret agreement that had the same terms. James resumed calling the shots with Ben as his apprentice, but as far as anyone else knew, the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin was the sole publisher of the New-England Courant.
So once again we find Ben Franklin advancing his career through fiction. He faithfully played the role of publisher for several months, with James actually in charge, until the brothers had a major disagreement. At that point Ben realized he had blackmail power. James could never go public with their new, secret apprenticeship contract, because he might be thrown back into jail for publishing the paper again. The fiction had become the reality. With this leverage, Ben was in effect a free agent. He began applying for posts with other printers in town, but no one wanted to offend the older brother by hiring the younger.
It became clear that Ben needed to skip town, so he sold a few books to pay for passage and slipped away quietly on a sloop to New York. He was just seventeen.
Ben’s Great Adventure
At the time, New York was the third largest city in the colonies, behind Boston and Philadelphia. The only printer in town, Bradford, already had all the help he needed. But Bradford’s son, a printer in Philadelphia, happened to have a vacancy on his staff, and so Ben set his sights about another hundred miles southwest. He caught a boat across the channel, walked across New Jersey, and hopped a rowboat down the Delaware River.
It was his Robinson Crusoe adventure. Out of New England for the first time in his life, with barely enough money in his pockets but brimming with confidence, the young man made his way through colonial America, wondering what the future would hold.
Franklin’s autobiography holds a fascinating anecdote from this leg of his journey. His boat had some difficulty crossing from New York to Perth Amboy, New Jersey. A sudden squall caused some turbulence, and a drunken passenger fell overboard. Ben managed to pull him up. As this passenger, a Dutchman, sat recovering in the boat, he emptied his pockets and handed Ben a beautiful little book, asking him to dry it as best he could.
It was a Dutch translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, “finely printed on good paper with copper cuts [copperplate engravings], a dress better than I had ever seen it wear in its own language [English].”6 It’s no surprise that the young printer-in-training would remember the details of this finely produced book. In his autobiography, the elderly Franklin took the opportunity to comment on the immense popularity of The Pilgrim’s Progress, how it had been “translated into most of the languages of Europe,” and on its unique writing style, mixing narration and dialogue.7
Scholars sometimes question how accurate Ben Franklin was trying to be in his autobiography. We can forgive occasional slips on the historical details from a sixty-five-year-old man recollecting his youth, but was he carefully crafting this account, intentionally tweaking and positioning the stories to leave the reader with a certain impression? The stormy waters, the rescue, the beautiful book restored from its “baptism”—it all reads more like fiction than history. Some critics think Franklin was intentionally creating the character of Young Ben as he related the tale of his own pilgrimage, in the same way that author John Bunyan created the character of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress.8
Crafting a Life
In a chapter entitled “The Arts of Seeming Truthful: Autobiography,” historian Daniel Boorstin suggested that, along with his other inventions, Franklin invented a new literary form in this book: the success saga.9 Many other writers would follow in this train, but Franklin was the engineer. This doesn’t necessarily mean Ben was making up these events, just that he was consciously packaging them in a success-focused narrative.
There had been a few other autobiographies published before Franklin’s, but not many. The first great one was The Confessions of St. Augustine, in which the bishop traced his spiritual journey, recounting events from his childhood, youth, and young adulthood that led up to his conversion. There was a clear through line as Augustine recognized God’s hand shaping his life. Franklin had a through line, too, but no particular spiritual agenda. The eighteenth-century autobiography that most closely followed Augustine’s was not Franklin’s, but George Whitefield’s, published in 1738 (and later republished by Benjamin Franklin). In its opening pages, Whitefield noted that many biographies had “partial” authors. “They have given us the bright, but not the dark side of their character.” He promised to be impartial, as biblical accounts were about their subjects. “I have simply told what I was by nature, as well as what I am by grace.”10 Augustine would have been pleased.
But Franklin had a different kind of journey, a rags-to-riches story that celebrated the rags as well as the riches. There was no particular conversion he led up to, just a series of lessons learned, changes made, and feats accomplished. He rejected the sense of total depravity that we’d find in Augustine, Whitefield, or the Puritan teaching he grew up with. While he did refer to a few regrets along the way (always a printer, he called them “errata,” like a newspaper’s typographical errors), he focused on how basic human virtues lead to success.
And he wrote with a disarming charm. As soon as the reader is tempted to think the story’s too good to be true, Franklin displays some seemingly authentic humility. “By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be grown old. I used to write more methodically.”11 This appears early in his autobiography, when he first stopped to reread his early, breathless pages. That sort of apology recurs throughout the text—somewhat reminiscent of the delightful self-deprecation we first found in the Silence Dogood letters. If he was intentionally inventing a fictional image of himself, he was doing a brilliant job of making it seem unintentional.
Maybe he wasn’t crafting his literary character any more than he crafted his personal character. Ben Franklin was extremely conscious of the person he was and the person he wanted to be. He understood the importance of image in business, in statecraft, and in relationship. This awareness helped him broadcast his dangerous ideas to all of Boston in the guise of letters from the devout Dogood. He knew that the image of “Benjamin Franklin” as publisher of the Courant would set him free from his apprenticeship, no matter what the secret reality was. As Boorstin noted, “In his inward battle between Appearance and Reality, Appearance always wins.”12 Throughout his life, he played roles that brought him success—from the hardworking young printer ostentatiously carting paper down Market Street to the coonskin-capped American diplomat wowing the French aristocrats. And so, whatever image creation Franklin did in his autobiography might just be an extension of the images he was creating in life.
He wasn’t writing fiction. He was living it.
The Pilgrimage
Returning to the beautiful edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress pulled out of the water, one might wonder whether Ben was playing novelist there, dropping in a meaningful symbol at a key moment, or whether God was the true trickster, offering the young pilgrim a tangible (and beautifully printed) reminder of divine providence.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, was one of the first books Ben ever read. It’s an allegory of a character, Christian, who journeys from his home in the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Various characters—including Pliable, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Civility, and Good Will—help him, hurt him, pull him backward, or get in his way. He passes through the Slough of Despond and the Village of Morality and cowers before Mount Sinai before (with the help of Evangelist) he gets on the King’s Highway.
In the fourteenth century, the medieval play Everyman had presented a similar allegory, but with a very Catholic vision. The Pilgrim’s Progress teemed with evangelical theology, and it struck a chord in a post-Reformation world. It wasn’t only a best seller—it was the best seller. As Franklin’s autobiography notes, “It has been more generally read than any other book except perhaps the Bible.”13
As a boy, Ben was so taken with this book that he bought a collection of John Bunyan’s works. These were readily and cheaply available throughout the English-speaking world. While this collection probably had other allegorical works, such as The Holy War and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, it would have also included Bunyan’s autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. This latter work, published in 1666, long before The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), also told of a spiritual journey, a step-by-step movement toward God, toward forgiveness, and toward ministry. (Its deep introspection bears similarity to that of Augustine’s Confessions and Whitefield’s autobiography.)
John Bunyan was a commoner with limited schooling, though he clearly learned to write well. As a youth he enjoyed sports and dancing, he says, but also cursing and other wild behavior. “I was the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company, in all manner of vice and ungodliness.”14 The only dowry his wife brought into the marriage consisted of two religious books, but John found these quite transformative. Trying to get rid of his bad habits, he started going to church. Bunyan worked as a tinker, mending pots and pans, and then began preaching in an Independent church in Bedford, drawing crowds. This was during the Restoration period, with Charles II on the throne and a strongly Anglican Parliament. Non-Anglican church meetings were illegal, and their leaders were often jailed—as was John Bunyan. But in prison he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, which rapidly became a hit.
Along with nearly every other literate person in the English-speaking world of that time, George Whitefield also read The Pilgrim’s Progress. He revered John Bunyan, preached once in Bunyan’s old church, and even wrote a preface to a 1767 edition of Bunyan’s works. The different ways George and Ben viewed this book and its author are instructive.
Like Bunyan, Whitefield mourned the sins of his youth. In both Bunyan’s allegory and life story, Whitefield saw a process of spiritual discovery—first a commitment to righteous living, then a despair over his own inability to live that way, and then the acceptance of Christ. In that 1767 preface, Whitefield wrote that Bunyan “was of the meanest occupation, and a notorious sabbath-breaker, drunkard, swearer, blasphemer, etc. by habitual practice: And yet, through rich, free, sovereign, distinguishing grace, he was chosen, called, and afterwards formed, by the all-powerful operations of the Holy Ghost, to be a scribe ready instructed to the kingdom of God.”15 Whitefield found here a model for his own ministry. Though George was ordained an Anglican, the evangelical gospel he preached was very similar to that of John Bunyan, the Dissenter.
Ben’s approach to Bunyan was quite different. Like Bunyan, Franklin was a commoner with little formal education but a keen mind and a knack for writing. Books would transform Ben’s life, as they had for Bunyan. A tradesman like Ben, Bunyan turned tragedy to triumph. In prison, under the same persecution that Ben’s father had fled, Bunyan found phenomenal success by writing for the common people. His simple but deeply meaningful allegory engaged the masses in the same way that Franklin would later with his own best seller, the simple but wise Poor Richard’s Almanac.
As Whitefield’s preface noted, “Pilgrim’s Progress . . . is read with the greatest pleasure, not only by the truly serious, of divers religious persuasions, but likewise by those, to whom pleasure is the end of reading.”16 That might be a nod in Franklin’s direction. Yet Ben might have found inspiration not only in Bunyan’s pleasurable prose, but also in his ability to parlay common origins and the misfortunes of life into stunning success.
In Grace Abounding, Bunyan recalled some close calls of his youth: “Once I fell into a creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning. Another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford River, but, mercy yet preserved me alive.”17 In a fascinating poetic connection—either by Franklin’s design, pure coincidence, or the Creator’s wry providence—Ben remembers a key moment of his own life when he pulled a drunkard out of a river and “preserved” Bunyan’s book from “drowning.”
Ben Franklin was on a pilgrimage. He wasn’t sure where he was ultimately headed, or what his “Celestial City” would look like, but he was definitely on the move.