7. Next Stage: England
It was Christmas Eve, 1724, when Ben Franklin stepped off the boat in England, just shy of his nineteenth birthday. About 120 miles to the west, George Whitefield had just turned ten. It was probably not the Best Christmas Ever for either of them.
After eight years of widowhood, George’s mother had just remarried. George’s new stepdad was Capel Longden, a hardware dealer. (The term at the time was ironmonger: he sold iron objects.) Life in the new family would turn sour very soon.
As we might expect, George had difficulty with this remarriage. He was the baby of the bunch, pampered through his whole life, and groomed for greatness. His older siblings helped out at the family inn, but Elizabeth Whitefield wouldn’t let George get involved in the business. He was destined for greater things—college, perhaps the ministry. Several of their ancestors had been respected clergymen. Now it was up to George to lead this family back to its former greatness. In his memoirs, George compares himself at one point with the Old Testament Joseph, and it’s an apt analogy.1 Jacob’s favorite son ultimately delivered his family from a famine. Would George restore the Whitefields’ social status?
But now there was a different savior in the house. George suddenly had to share his mother’s attention with a new, strange man. That would have been difficult even if Capel Longden turned out to be a good guy.
He didn’t.
“Longden appears to have been an unpleasant personality,” wrote one historian.2 In his memoirs, Whitefield crisply commented that the marriage proved to be “what the world would call an unhappy match.”3 It seems that Longden tried to take over the operation of the Bell Inn, and he hurt the business considerably. George’s older siblings opposed their new stepfather, and Longden left after a few years.
George’s description of his own childhood shows an odd combination of mischief and piety, as if he was trying equally hard to pursue his holy calling and sabotage it. Even when we assume that his memoirs probably overstate the extent of his childhood depravity, we still find a curious juxtaposition of good and bad. He said he stole money from his mother and gave some of it to the poor.4 Some of the books he pilfered were devotional writings.
He wrote: “I remember, when some persons (as they frequently did) made it their business to tease me, I immediately retired to my room, and kneeling down, with many tears, prayed over that Psalm wherein David so often repeats these words—‘But in the Name of the Lord will I destroy them.’ ”5
The passage is Psalm 118:10–12, which indeed repeats that phrase, and it’s an apt reference. “They compassed me about like bees,” the Psalmist complains (v. 12 KJV), and we can imagine a schoolboy being surrounded by taunting classmates. Maybe they were teasing him about his squinty eye, the legacy of a bad bout with measles when he was four. As an adult, he was sometimes mocked as “Dr. Squintum.” Younger mockers might use even more hurtful terms.
We can certainly understand the anger stirred by such bullying, but it’s interesting that this future evangelist uses the Bible as his defense. Brandishing the Psalter as a weapon, summoning divine destruction upon his foes, he was like James and John, those “Sons of Thunder,” who wanted to call fire from heaven to punish a village for bad hospitality (Luke 9:54).
Whitefield told another story about a dissenting minister in Gloucester by the name of Cole, whom he and his friends loved to ridicule. As a prank, George would run into this man’s church, shouting, “Old Cole! Old Cole! Old Cole!” Someone in that congregation asked George what business he was planning to go into when he grew up. Perhaps this was a friend of his family, someone who already knew the answer and wanted to get George to think twice about his irreverent behavior. George replied that he wanted to be “a minister, but I would take care never to tell stories in the pulpit, like the old Cole.”6
This smart aleck felt no dissonance here. He wasn’t rejecting his faith with his bad behavior; he was practicing it. Old Cole had the audacity to tell stories from the pulpit rather than stick to the Scriptures. Young Whitefield felt this was wrong, and in the simplistic judgment of a ten-year-old, he could justify his own disruption of Cole’s service. Some years later, Cole happened to hear the adult Whitefield preach—and what did he hear? Stories. George had become a master of the anecdote, the parable, and the hypothetical case. The veteran preacher laughed, “I find that young Whitefield can now tell stories, as well as old Cole.”7
Sometimes kids pretend to be good in order to satisfy their religious parents, and they become holy terrors when they’re out of sight. But George’s family was not especially religious. Yes, he bore the messianic expectations of his mother, but these appear to be more social than spiritual. He was being shoved toward the Anglican ministry, but it was up to him to find his own faith.
George might have been exploring more than rebelling. “I was always fond of being a clergyman,” he noted in his memoirs, adding that he would “frequently . . . imitate the ministers reading prayers, etc.”8 So maybe he was pushing the borders of what religious devotion meant. Could he be a Robin Hood, taking the money his mother earned at the inn from adulterers and drunkards and redistributing it to the poor? Could he use the psalmist’s own words to invoke God’s wrath on his tormentors? Could he interrupt a Dissenter church service because they were worshiping the wrong way?
The fluctuating nature of his youthful behavior suggests that George was struggling through a significant period of identity formation. It’s not unusual for children to work through identity issues from ages ten to thirteen, but the combination of high expectations and lack of guidance from his mother made it more of a struggle. What kind of person was he going to be? Could he find a character that worked for him? We see a glimmer of the kind of identity games Ben Franklin was playing as a writer. Could he get ahead in the world by pretending to be someone else? Yet George’s identity crisis was deeper, more personal. He wasn’t just finding a character to play in public. He was finding a character he could be.
London Bridges Falling Down
In London, Ben Franklin, just turned nineteen, faced an identity crisis of his own.
Aboard the ship, he and his companion, James Ralph, were first treated as “ordinary persons,” and sent to the steerage section. But just before departure, a friend of Governor Keith came on board and showed Ben some respect. This raised his status, and when there was extra room in the Great Cabin, Franklin and Ralph were invited to stay there with the more esteemed folks. This certainly made for a more pleasant voyage, and it must have given Ben a taste of the good life. At that point he expected to do his business in London, buy the equipment he needed, maybe splurge a little on the governor’s line of credit, and head home to start a great new life as a businessman. This trip was a bridge to his own celestial city.
The shock of the governor’s betrayal wasn’t just a disappointment; it forced a reimagining of all Ben’s hopes and dreams. Would he ever be able to travel in the Great Cabins of life again, or would he always be consigned to steerage? Would he ever be his own boss, or would he always be someone else’s errand boy? Would he even be able to survive in this strange city?
As with his entry into Philadelphia, it was a Quaker who helped him find his way: the merchant Thomas Denham, who explained that Governor Keith was notoriously untrustworthy and laughed at the notion that Keith’s credit would be worth anything. He suggested that Ben seek work with a printer in London, which Ben did. A year and a half later, Denham would hire Ben as his own assistant and bring him back to Philadelphia at his own expense.
In the meantime, Ben lived and worked in London, getting to know himself better. You might call this his college experience, though he never enrolled in any institution of higher learning. Still, he was always learning. He had a roommate who liked to party, and Ben went along with that for a while before buckling down and hitting the books.
James Ralph was a wastrel. Full of creative ideas, he chased after them with abandon, leaving any sense of responsibility behind. A merchant’s clerk in Philadelphia, Ralph had told Ben he was coming to London to set up relationships for his own future mercantile business. Once they got there, Ralph confessed he was really just escaping from his wife and child. He had brought no money along, so they lived off Ben’s meager savings, renting a cheap apartment in Little Britain.
Ralph promised to pay Ben back once he found the right job, but that proved difficult. At first, Ralph thought he might become an actor, and he auditioned at a nearby playhouse for Robert Wilks, one of the giants of the London stage at that time. Wilks, who was famous for being gruff and temperamental, “advised him candidly not to think of that employment, as it was impossible he should succeed in it.”9 Then Ralph decided to be a writer, proposing to a publisher that he could churn out a weekly newspaper, but was rejected again. He couldn’t even get a job as a hack writer of legal documents.
Meanwhile, Ben was working away at Palmer’s print shop and supporting both of them. “I was pretty diligent,” Ben wrote later, “but spent with Ralph a good deal of my earnings on going to plays and other places of amusement.”10
Ben’s autobiography doesn’t tell us what plays and amusements Franklin and Ralph attended, but the history of entertainment in London is well documented. There were four main theaters in town at the time. The King’s Theatre specialized in opera, usually Italian opera, for which there was a big craze in London in that era (one that George F. Handel helped to satisfy). Little Haymarket Theatre was offering a series of French plays. Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane Theatre had a good competition going, fighting for market share with new English plays and pantomimes in the Commedia style.
Maybe Ben Franklin and James Ralph caught a performance of Caesar in Egypt at Drury Lane. They would have seen London’s premier actor, Colley Cibber, in a play about a tyrant extending his power to a land across the sea.
In January 1725, perhaps Ben saw Harlequin Sorcerer at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a pantomime featuring dance and music, with noted impresario John Rich in the lead. “Let the thunder crack and roll . . .” sings the character known as Air. “Nature shall yield to your great skill:/Your art, with ease, shall, when you please,/Transform all things to what you will.”11 Young Ben may have gained some inspiration here for his later scientific attempts to “transform” nature to the service of humanity—even developing the lightning rod, so that we needn’t worry when the thunder cracks and rolls.
Besides these plays, pantos, and operas, there were other “places of amusement” available to these two young men. Just four years later, a writer commented caustically on the various entertainment options in London, lampooning not only the plays, operas, and pantomimes, but also prize fighting, Italian strollers (minstrels), mountebank stages (magic shows), cockpits, puppet shows, fairs, and public auctions—not to mention the bear gardens. Yes, there were arenas set up for fights between bears and other animals, and crowds showed up to watch. In full satire, the writer said, “Who can view dogs tearing bulls, bulls goring dogs, or mastiffs throtthng bears, without being animated by their daring spirits! And what is brutal fierceness in them, may produce true human courage in us!”12
The satirical writer was none other than James Ralph, who stayed in England after Ben left and apparently attended many more amusements. With his biting critique of London’s entertainment scene, published in 1728, he finally made a name for himself. He became a friend of the writer Henry Fielding (author of Tom Jones), and had the dubious honor of being mentioned in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, a poetic blast at the entire arts community of London. Pope likened Ralph to a wolf howhng at the moon. The wastrel eventually found his niche: howhng at other works of art.
But in that watershed year of 1725, living hand to mouth, holed up in a cheap apartment with a buddy whose debt kept rising, spending all his pay on fairs and bears, Ben had a decision to make. Who was he going to be? James Ralph or James Franklin? Would he use his quick wit and creative mind to chase impossible dreams, to tear down everything around him, and to use people for his own benefit? Or would he work night and day, refusing fun, to build his career and to contribute something to society? Or was there some option in between?
One of the first things Ben did in this self-identification process was to decide what he thought about God.
Very early in his employment at Palmer’s print shop, he was asked to typeset a philosophical work by William Wollaston. This clergyman-scholar had embraced the emerging Enlightenment and produced some very modern-minded books. Could God be known through nature, he wondered, without the special revelation of the Bible? Could we find religion, morality, and even faith just by observing the created order? Even today, scholars disagree on whether Wollaston was pushing a variation of Deism or just exploring the biblical notions of, say, Romans 1:18–20. Maybe Wollaston wasn’t sure about that himself—sometimes he had second thoughts about his writing and destroyed it. In 1722, he had written his masterwork, The Religion of Nature Delineated, but he kept it to only a small print run and private distribution. When Wollaston died in late 1724, many printers rushed to republish the book—including Ben’s employer, Samuel Palmer.
Page by page, line by line, young Ben pored over Wollaston’s naturalistic philosophy, and he formulated his own thoughts in response to it. The result was Ben Franklin’s first book—more of a pamphlet, really—A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. In it, he deconstructed the Puritan faith of his youth, taking it to its logical extreme, or so he thought.
If God is infinitely wise, good, and powerful, Ben determined, then everything that happens is God’s will. As he put it, “Nothing can exist or be done in the Universe which is not agreeable to His Will, and therefore good.” Elsewhere he noted, “Evil doth not exist.” Since we cannot thwart the divine will, he said, our behavior is always good; there is no distinction between vice and virtue. He acknowledged that people might not like these ideas, but “Truth will be Truth though it sometimes prove mortifying and distasteful.”13
If this time in London was Ben’s “college experience,” then this was his sophomore project. Though there were glimmers of brilliance and immense bravado, it was ultimately pretty foolish. He later regretted printing it, though he repackaged some of the ideas in more mature writings to come.
Ben dedicated the work “to J. R.”—James Ralph. As it turned out, he might have regretted that too. They had a falling out over a woman whom James Ralph had loved and left. Ben made a pass at her, which she rebuffed and reported to Ralph, who was very upset (or claimed to be) and decided that now he would never repay Ben the money he had borrowed.
The story becomes more interesting in light of Ben’s “dissertation.” If there’s no such thing as evil, then why shouldn’t a young man try to bed a woman he fancies—even if it might hurt his best friend? If there’s no distinction between vice and virtue, then how can you expect anyone to pay back a loan? Once you’ve stripped the universe of morality, then all that’s left is cause and effect, action and reaction. Ben flirts, James reneges, and a friendship is scuttled.
As the smoke cleared, Ben realized that this breach actually set him free, and he began to think about saving money for a trip home. To that end, he found a new job at a larger print shop.
Fortuitously, one of his sophomoric pamphlets got into the hands of another author in town, who befriended Ben and introduced him to other authors and thinkers. Soon the young printer was hobnobbing with the literati in clubs and coffee houses—when he wasn’t working to earn money. One of these new friends hinted that he might introduce Ben to Sir Isaac Newton, but it never happened.
The dissertation was not Ben’s first or last attempt to create a religion of his own. With the soul of an inventor, he kept tweaking the status quo, looking for a better way. Seeing the shortcomings in the philosophies of others, he kept trying to fashion his own set of values—beginning on the voyage back to Philadelphia as he crafted his “Plan . . . for regulating my future conduct in life.”14
The James Ralph experience had taught him a great lesson, and he would build on it for decades to come. The two roommates shared many qualities—quick minds, keen insight, biting wit—but Ralph lacked responsibility, and Franklin decided he couldn’t live without it.
As Ben was boarding the boat for America, George was not too far away, nearly twelve years old, preparing to go to the school that would prepare him for college and a life in the clergy. This was his destiny, and he knew it. But something deep inside him wanted to invent his own way.