Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Read Free Book Online

again,” he had her declare. “I am courteous and affable, good humored (unless I am first provoked) and handsome, and sometimes witty.” The flick of the word “sometimes” is particularly deft. In describing her beliefs and biases, Franklin had Mrs. Dogood assert an attitude that would, with his encouragement, become part of the emerging American character: “I am…a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly. I have likewise a natural inclination to observe and reprove the faults of others, at which I have an excellent faculty.” It was as good a description of the real Benjamin Franklin—and, indeed, of a typical American—as is likely to be found anywhere. 37
    Of the fourteen Dogood essays that Franklin wrote between April and October 1722, the one that stands out both as journalism and self-revelation is his attack on the college he never got to attend. Most of the classmates he had bested at Boston Latin had just entered Harvard, and Franklin could not refrain from lampooning them and their institution. The form he used was an allegorical narrative cast as a dream. In doing so, he drew on, and perhaps was mildly parodying, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, also an allegorical journey set as a dream. Addison had used the form somewhat clumsily in an issue of The Spectator that Franklin read, which recounted the dream of a banker about an allegorical virgin named Public Credit. 38
    In the essay, Mrs. Dogood recounts falling asleep under an apple tree while she mulls over whether to send her son to Harvard. As she journeys in her dream toward this temple of learning, she makes a discovery about those who send sons there: “Most of them consulted their own purses instead of their children’s capacities: so that I observed a great many, yea, the most part of those who were traveling thither were little better than Dunces and Blockheads.” The gate of the temple, she finds, is guarded by “two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty,” and only those who meet the approval of the former could get in. Most of the students are content to dally with the figures called Idleness and Ignorance. “They learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a room genteelly (which might as well be acquired at a dancing school), and from thence they return, after abundance of trouble and charge, as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.”
    Picking up on the proposals of Mather and Defoe for voluntary civic associations, Franklin devoted two of his Silence Dogood essays to the topic of relief for single women. For widows like herself, Mrs. Dogood proposes an insurance scheme funded by subscriptions from married couples. The next essay extended the idea to spinsters. A “friendly society” would be formed that would guarantee £500 “in ready cash” to any member who reaches age 30 and is still not married. The money, Mrs. Dogood notes, would come with a condition: “No woman, who after claiming and receiving, has had the good fortune to marry, shall entertain any company [by praising] her husband above the space of one hour at a time upon pain of returning one half the money into the office for the first offense, and upon the second offense to return the remainder.” In these essays, Franklin was being gently satirical rather than fully serious. But his interest in civic associations would later find more earnest expression, as we shall see, when he became established as a young tradesman in Philadelphia.
    Franklin’s vanity was further fed during that summer of 1722, when his brother was jailed for three weeks—without trial—by Massachusetts authorities for the “high affront” of questioning their competence in pursuing pirates. For three issues, Benjamin got to put out