Chapter Eight
Troubled Waters
London, 1757–1762
Mrs. Stevenson’s Lodger
As he crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1757, Franklin noticed something about the other ships in the convoy. Most roiled the water with large wakes. One day, however, the ocean behind two of them was oddly tranquil. Ever inquisitive, he asked about the phenomenon. “The cooks,” he was told, “have been emptying their greasy water through the scuppers, which has greased the sides of those ships.”
The explanation did not satisfy Franklin. Instead, he recalled reading about how Pliny the Elder, the first-century Roman senator and scientist, had calmed agitated water by pouring oil on it. In the ensuing years, Franklin would engage in a variety of oil-and-water experiments, and he even devised a parlor trick where he stilled waves by touching them with a cane that contained a hidden cruet of oil. The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.1
Also during the crossing, his ship narrowly avoided being wrecked on the Scilly Isles when it sought to evade French privateers in the fog. Franklin described his grateful reaction in a letter home to his wife. “Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint,” he wrote. “But as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.” Franklin always took pride in his instinct for practical solutions, but that too would fail him in England.2
Franklin’s return to London at age 51 came almost thirty-three years after his first visit there as a teenage printer. His mission as Pennsylvania’s agent was to mix lobbying with deft diplomacy. Unfortunately, his usual observational skills, his sense of practicality and prudence, and his soothing temperament and cool head would be overwhelmed by frustration and then bitterness. Yet, even as his diplomatic mission foundered, there would be aspects of his life in London—the company of cosmopolitan intellectuals who doted on him, the creation of a contented home life similar to his in Philadelphia—that would make it hard for him to tear himself away. He initially thought his work would be done in five months, but he ended up staying more than five years, and then, after a brief interlude back home, another ten.
Franklin arrived in London in July accompanied by his son, William, then about 26, and two slaves who had been their household servants. They were met by his longtime pen pal Peter Collinson, the London Quaker merchant and botanist, who had helped procure books for the Junto’s first library and later published Franklin’s letters on electricity. Collinson put Franklin up at his stately home just north of London and immediately invited over others, such as the printer William Strahan, who were likewise delighted finally to meet in person the now-legendary man they had known only through years of correspondence.3
After a few days, Franklin found lodgings (including a room for his electricity experiments) in a cozy but convenient four-story row house on Craven Street, nestled between the Strand and the Thames River just off what is now Trafalgar Square, a short walk from the ministries of Whitehall. His landlady was a sensible and unpretentious middle-aged widow named Margaret Stevenson. With her he would form a familial relationship, at once both curious and mundane, that replicated the marriage of comforting convenience that he enjoyed with Deborah in Philadelphia. His London friends often treated Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson as a couple, inviting them together to dinners and inquiring after them both in letters. Though it is possible that their relationship had some sexual aspect, there was no particular passion, and it provoked very little gossip or scandal in London.4
More complex was his relation with her daughter Mary, known as Polly. She was a lively and endearing 18-year-old with the sort of inquisitive intellect that Franklin loved in women. In some respects, Polly served as the London counterpart to his daughter, Sally. He treated her in an avuncular, and sometimes even paternal, manner, instructing her on life and morals as well as science and education. But she was also an English version of Caty Ray, a pretty young woman of playful demeanor and lively mind. His letters to her were flirtatious at times, and he flattered her with the focused attention that he lavished on women he liked.
Franklin spent hours talking to Polly, whose eager curiosity enchanted him, and then, when she went to live with an aunt in the country, carried on an astonishing correspondence. During his years in London, he wrote to her far more often than he wrote to his family. Some of the letters were flirtatious. “Not a day passes in which I do not think of you,” he wrote less than a year after their first meeting. She sent him little gifts. “I have received the garters you have so kindly knit for me,” he said in one letter. “They are of the only sort that I can wear, having worn none of any kind for 20 years, until you began to supply me…Be assured that I shall think as often of you in the wearing as you did of me in the making.”
As with Caty Ray, his relationship with Polly was an engagement of the mind as much as the heart. He wrote to her at great length and in sophisticated detail about how barometers work, colors absorb heat, electricity is conducted, waterspouts are formed, and the moon affects tidal flows. Eight of these letters were later included in a revised edition of his electricity papers.
He also worked with Polly to come up with what was essentially a correspondence course to teach her a variety of subjects. “Our easiest method of proceeding, I think, will be for you to read some books I may recommend to you,” he suggested. “Those will furnish matter for your letters to me and, in consequence, of mine also to you.” Such intellectual tutoring was, for him, the ultimate way to flatter a young woman. As he ended one letter to her, “After writing six folio pages of philosophy to a young girl, is it necessary to finish such a letter with a compliment? Is not such a letter of itself a compliment? Does it not say, She has a mind thirsty after knowledge and capable of receiving it?”5
His one concern was that Polly would take her studies too seriously. Even though he appreciated her mind, Franklin flinched when she hinted at her desire to devote herself to learning at the expense of getting married and raising a family. So he provided her with some paternal prodding. In response to her suggestion that she might “live single” the rest of her life, he lectured her about the “duty” of a woman to raise a family:
There is, however, a prudent moderation to be used in studies of this kind. The knowledge of nature may be ornamental, and it may be useful, but if to attain an eminence in that we neglect the knowledge and practice of essential duties, we deserve reprehension. For there is no rank in natural knowledge of equal dignity and importance with that of being a good parent, a good child, a good husband, or wife.
Polly took the injunction to heart. “Thank you my dear preceptor for your indulgence in satisfying my curiosity,” she replied. “As my greatest ambition is to render myself amiable in your eyes, I will be careful never to transgress the bounds of moderation you prescribe.” And then, over the next few weeks, they proceeded to engage in an extensive colloquy, filled with both factual research and various theories, of how the tides affect the flow of water at the mouth of a river.6
Polly would eventually marry, have three children, and then become widowed, but through it all she remained extraordinarily close to Franklin. As he would write to her in 1783, near the end of his life, “Our friendship has been all clear sunshine, without the least cloud in its hemisphere.” And she would be at his bedside when he died, thirty-three years after their first meeting.7
Margaret and Polly Stevenson provided a replica of the family he left in Philadelphia, just as comfortable and more intellectually stimulating. So what did this mean for his real family? Franklin’s English friend William Strahan expressed concern. He wrote Deborah to try to persuade her to join her husband in London. The opposite of the peripatetic Franklin, she had no desire to travel and was deeply afraid of the sea. Strahan assured her that no one had ever been killed crossing from
Philadelphia to London, not mentioning that this statistic ignored that many had been killed on similar routes. The trip would also be a great experience for Sally, Strahan went on to urge.
That was the sweet part of the letter, the carrots designed to entice. But it was followed, almost rudely, by some jarringly presumptuous advice, which was courteously cloaked but contained barely concealed warnings that reflected Strahan’s knowledge of Franklin’s nature: “Now madam, as I know the ladies here consider him in exactly the same light I do, upon my word I think that you should come over with all convenient speed to look after your interest; not but that I think him as faithful to his Joan [Franklin’s poetic nickname for Deborah] as any man breathing, but who knows what repeated and strong temptation may in time, and while he at so great a distance from you, accomplish.” In case Deborah missed the point, Strahan dropped a poison-tinged reassurance at the very end of his letter: “I cannot take my leave of you without informing you that Mr. F. has the good fortune to lodge with a very discreet gentlewoman who is particularly careful of him, who attended him during a very severe cold with an assiduity, concern and tenderness which, perhaps, only yourself could equal; so that I don’t think you could have a better substitute until you come over to take him under your own protection.”8
Franklin was fond of Deborah, relied on her, and respected her solid and simple manner, but he knew that she would be out of place in this more sophisticated London world. So he seemed somewhat ambivalent about the prospect of enticing her to England—and typically realistic about the likelihood. “[Strahan] has offered to lay me a considerable wager that a letter he wrote to you will bring you immediately over here,” he wrote. “I tell him I will not pick his pocket, for I am sure there is no inducement strong enough to prevail with you to cross the seas.” When she replied that she would indeed be staying in Philadelphia, Franklin showed little grief. “Your answer to Mr. Strahan was just what it should be; I was very much pleased with it. He fancied his rhetoric and art would certainly bring you over.”
In his letters home, Franklin walked a fine line of assuring Deborah that he was well looked after, but also reassuring her that he missed her love. After falling ill a few months after his arrival, he wrote, “I have made your compliments to Mrs. Stevenson. She is indeed very obliging, takes great care of my health, and is very diligent when I am in any way indisposed; but yet I have a thousand times wished you with me, and my little Sally…There is a great difference in sickness between being nursed with that tender attention which proceeds from sincere love.”
Accompanying the letter was an assortment of gifts, some of which, he told her, were chosen by Mrs. Stevenson. The shipment included china, four of London’s “newest but ugliest” silver salt ladles, “a little instrument to core apples, another to make little turnips out of great ones,” a basket for Sally from Mrs. Stevenson, garters for Deborah that had been knit by Polly (“who favored me with a pair of the same kind”), carpets, blankets, tablecloths, gown fabric chosen for Deborah by Mrs. Stevenson, candle snuffers, and enough other items to assuage any guilt.9
Deborah was generally sanguine about the women in Franklin’s life. She supplied him with all the news and gossip from home, including the latest she had heard from Caty Ray asking for advice about (of all things) her love life. “I am glad to hear that Miss Ray is well, and that you correspond,” Franklin replied, though he urged her not to “be forward in giving advice in such cases.”
Their correspondence, for the most part, contained little of the emotional or intellectual content to be found in the letters Franklin exchanged with Polly or Caty Ray or later with his female friends in Paris. Nor did he discourse much with her on political matters, the way he did with his sister Jane Mecom. Although his letters conveyed what seems to be a sincere fondness for Deborah and for the practical nature of their partnership, there were no signs of the more profound partnership that is so evident, for example, in John Adams’s correspondence with his wife, Abigail.
Eventually, as Franklin’s mission stretched on, Deborah’s letters to him would become more bereft and self-pitying, especially after her mother died in a horrible kitchen fire in 1760. Shortly after, she wrote in her awkward way about her loneliness and her worries about rumors she had heard about him and other women. Franklin’s reply, though reassuring, was phrased in a coolly abstract manner. “I am concerned that so much trouble should be given you by idle reports,” he wrote. “Be satisfied, my dear, that while I have my senses, and God vouchsafes me his protection, I shall do nothing unworthy the character of an honest man, and one that loves his family.”10
Franklin’s London World
With 750,000 inhabitants and growing rapidly, London in the 1750s was the largest city in Europe and second only to Beijing (pop: 900,000) in the world. It was cramped and dirty, filled with disease and prostitutes and crime, and had long been stratified into an upper class of titled aristocrats and a lower class of impoverished workers who struggled with starvation. Yet it was also vibrant and cosmopolitan, and by the 1750s it had an emerging middle class of merchants and industrialists as well as a growing coffeehouse society of intellectuals, writers, scientists, and artists. Although Philadelphia was the largest city in America, it was a tiny village by comparison, with only 23,000 inhabitants (about the size of Franklin, Wisconsin, or Franklin, Massachusetts, today).
In the cosmopolitan mix of old and new classes that made up London, Franklin quickly found favor among the intellectual and literary set. But despite his reputation for social climbing, he showed little inclination to court the members of the Tory aristocracy, and the feeling was mutual. He liked to be among people with lively minds and simple virtues, and he had an inbred aversion to powerful establishments and idle elites. One of his first visits was to the press where he had once worked. There he bought buckets of beer and drank toasts to the “success of printing.”
Strahan and Collinson formed the nucleus of a new set of friends that replicated for Franklin his old Junto but with more sophistication and distinction. He had been corresponding with Strahan, a printer and part-owner of the London Chronicle, since 1743, when Strahan provided a letter of recommendation for his apprentice, David Hall, whom Franklin hired and later made his partner. They had exchanged more than sixty letters before they even met, and when they finally did, Strahan was smitten by the larger-than-life Franklin. “I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to me,” he wrote Deborah Franklin. “Some are amiable in one view, some in another, he in all.”
Collinson, the merchant with whom he had corresponded about electricity, introduced Franklin to the Royal Society, which had already elected him its first American member a year before he arrived. Through Collinson he met Dr. John Fothergill, one of London’s foremost physicians, who became his doctor and helped advise him on dealing with the Penns, and also Sir John Pringle, a crusty Scottish professor of moral philosophy and later royal physician, who became his traveling companion. Collinson also brought him into the Honest Whigs, a discussion club of pro-American liberal intellectuals. Among its members, Franklin befriended Joseph Priestley, who wrote the history of electricity that secured Franklin’s reputation and went on to isolate oxygen, and Jonathan Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, at whose home Franklin would write much of his autobiography.11
Franklin also got in touch with the wayward friend of his youth, James Ralph, who had been his companion on his earlier trip to London, during which they had a falling-out over money and a woman. Ralph’s character hadn’t changed much. Franklin carried from Philadelphia a letter to Ralph written by the daughter he had abandoned, who was now the mother of ten children. But Ralph didn’t want his own English wife and daughter to learn of his connections to America, so he refused to write back. He merely told Franklin to pass along his “great affection.” Franklin had little to do with Ralph after that.12
For the fashionable gentlemen of the aristocracy, elegant eating and gambling clubs, such as Whi
te’s and later Brookes’s and Boodle’s, were starting to spring up in St. James’s. For the burgeoning new class of writers, journalists, professionals, and intellectuals whose company Franklin preferred, there were the coffeehouses. London had more than five hundred at the time. They contained newspapers and periodicals for the patrons to read and tables around which discussion clubs could be formed. Fellows of the Royal Society tended to meet at the Grecian coffeehouse in the Strand, just a short walk from Craven Street. The Club of Honest Whigs met on alternate Thursdays at St. Paul’s coffeehouse. Others, such as the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania coffeehouses, provided an American connection. Franklin, always fond of clubs and the occasional glass of Madeira, frequented these and others.13
And thus he created an embracing new set of friends and hangouts that replicated the joys of the Junto and provided him with a modest power base among the city’s intellectuals. But it was, as Thomas Penn had predicted, a somewhat limited power base. The Proprietor had reassured his own allies, after Franklin’s appointment, that he might find favor among those who cared about his scientific experiments, but these middle-class Whiggish intellectuals were not the ones who would decide Pennsylvania’s fate. “There are very few of any consequence that have heard of his electrical experiments, those matters being attended to by a particular set of people,” Penn wrote. “But it is quite another sort of people who are to determine the dispute between us.” Indeed it was.14
Battling the Penns
Franklin came to London not only as a loyalist to the Crown but as an enthusiast for the empire, of which he felt that America was an integral part. But he soon found out that he labored under a misconception. He believed that His Majesty’s subjects who happened to live in the colonies were not second-class citizens. Instead, he felt they should have all the rights of any British subject, including that of electing assemblies with legislative and tax-writing powers similar to those of Parliament. The Penns might not see it that way, but certainly the enlightened British ministers would, he believed, help him pressure the Penns to revise their autocratic ways.