Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

First published: 1791, as Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin (English translation, 1860)

Type of work: Autobiography

The Work

The first part of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (also known as the Autobiography) was begun in 1771. In the work, Benjamin Franklin first addresses his adult son, William. After a few pages about his ancestry and his own birth in Boston as the fourteenth of his father’s seventeen children (and the seventh by his second wife), Franklin tells of being taken from grammar school at the age of ten and put to work for his father, a maker of candles and soap. The young Franklin did not enjoy this work but found consolation in being a leader among the boys in his neighborhood and in being an omnivorous reader.

At the age of twelve, Franklin was apprenticed to his printer brother, James. When the latter started his own newspaper, The New England Courant, Franklin not only worked at printing and delivering the newspaper but also made anonymous contributions, usually of a satirical nature, to the publication.

Franklin had been physically abused by his older brother, who had benefited from Franklin more than he realized. In 1723, Benjamin decided, without consulting his family, to leave home and live on his own. He traveled to New York but found no jobs for a printer. He continued to Philadelphia, where he found work with a printer named Keimer. He lived with the Read family and soon fell in love with young Deborah Read. He also made the acquaintance of Governor William Keith, who suggested that he travel to London for printing supplies. While Franklin was away, Deborah had married another man who, within a few months of their marriage, deserted her.

Franklin returned from London as a clerk for a merchant named Thomas Denham but later worked again for Keimer, from whom he bought a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin also adopted the philosophy of Deism, and undertook one of the first of his cultural enterprises: He started the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first circulating library in America. In 1730, he married Deborah, whose marital status was unclear at this time. They had two daughters together and raised Franklin’s son, William.

After a break of seventeen years, Franklin wrote the second part of his Autobiography, turning to an examination of his religious and moral life. Raised as a Presbyterian, he came to believe some of its doctrines “unintelligible, others doubtful” and found greater satisfaction with the principles of Deism. These principles did not, however, provide him with a key to good conduct.

In an attempt to reach “moral perfection,” Franklin consulted his wide range of readings and employed his own judgment to establish a list of thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, charity, and humility. He made charts for each virtue and recorded his daily progress in his pursuit of them. He found the third virtue, order, difficult to obtain but also felt that his efforts made him a better person. The last of his virtues, humility, he added after a Quaker friend told him that he was generally considered proud. Humility, too, proved a difficult virtue, for even if he obtained it, he observed that he would “probably be proud of my humility.”

In the third part of his work, Franklin recounts many of the achievements of his middle years. He learned French, Italian, and Spanish. He filled a number of posts in Pennsylvania’s general assembly. He established a philosophical society and an academy. He became the postmaster of the American colonies. He devised the Franklin stove and conducted many “electrical experiments,” although he does not provide any details about his famous lightning-rod experiments. He studied the causes of fires and established a company to battle them. He devoted considerable time to military preparedness and offered a plan to unify the defenses of the colonies. Despite his dislike of organized religion, he admired the most famous traveling evangelist of his time, George Whitefield, and formed a “civil friendship” with him. He also was able to cooperate with Quakers in forwarding his defense measures.

In the fourth part, which he wrote in the last year of his life, Franklin tells of being sent by the Pennsylvania assembly as an agent to England, where he learned how Americans differed from the English in assessing their relationships, particularly those involving taxes. The scope of the Autobiography stops short of Franklin’s part in the controversy over the Stamp Tax. The work thus contains nothing about his crowning work as a diplomat abroad or his contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Although written in the last twenty years of a long life, Franklin’s Autobiography covers only a little more than Franklin’s first forty-plus years and omits much of importance in that period. Also, the integration of the work is hampered because the manuscript had been written at four different times, sometimes without other parts of the work at hand. The work’s unity is hampered as well: The first part had been written for his son, the second part in response to a request by a friend for an account of Franklin’s moral philosophy, and the last parts in response to requests for a memoir that he was, by this time, too old and too ill to complete.

Despite these intervals and shifts in motivation, the Autobiography reflects the consistency of Franklin himself. He was a native New Englander, and this work reflects a Puritan sense of duty and the influence of a tradition of personal narratives, such as those by Jonathan Edwards and John Woolman, which trace their respective struggles for moral progress. The Puritans had interpreted such progress as evidence that they might be spared God’s wrath. At the end of every year, Puritans reckoned their economic success, mainly as evidence of divine favor; Franklin favored frugality because it would lead to wealth and freedom from social fears that arise from want. His economic influence is much more profound. Social philosopher Max Weber, in his book Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1930), argues that Franklin’s assertions about time, credit, and investment display the essential spirit of capitalism.

Franklin had left New England because of his dislike for authority. Also, he began to doubt some of the doctrines of congregational Presbyterianism. Offenses against the Puritan moral code were considered sins; Franklin spoke of errata, or mistakes, instead. To this day, Americans are more likely to follow Franklin in labeling their moral deviations “errors” or “mistakes” rather than sins. Franklin sought to arrange his moral life not by reference to doctrine but by his own reflections on the best advice he could find in his readings. One of the works most valued in colonial New England was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684). Franklin characteristically sold his copy to purchase historical works that would broaden his knowledge. His reading included periodical literature, and he admired Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator, whose title reflects an interest in the goings-on of any given moment—what was to be seen—rather than in the abstract spiritual realm that preoccupied preachers and theologians. His affinity with periodical literature helped him develop the plain, unadorned style that made the Autobiography understandable and stimulating to the reader of his day.

The first building that Franklin visited in Philadelphia was a Quaker meeting house. The meeting he first attended there was a typically quiet one—it even put him to sleep. It is significant that he had no interest in Quaker worship, but it is even more significant that the Quaker meetings reflected the religious toleration that he respected. As his stay in his new town continued, he perceived more of its advantages. Philadelphia, more so than Boston, was cosmopolitan, worldly, and involved with such topics as government, finance, and social welfare. He settled in Philadelphia.

Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues, which would have puzzled a more typical New Englander, proved to be compatible with his new surroundings. Many of them—silence, order, and resolution, for instance—are not theological but philosophical. For Franklin, doing good was not an act of worship but a way of serving the community; the Autobiography describes many of his countless activities toward that end. He gave his new home a library and several educational institutions to educate his fellow citizens. He founded newspapers and published almanacs to keep citizens informed. He built a militia to keep them safe, a hospital to heal their wounds, a stove to warm them, a fire department to protect their lives and homes, pavements for their roads, and an improved postal service. His academy became the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these local improvements reached beyond Philadelphia; for example, his organization for philosophy became the American Philosophical Society. People found his inventions and creations empowering, and adopted them gratefully.

Some of his achievements led to advances he could never have predicted. Could he have imagined an institution like the present University of Pennsylvania, or the proliferation of great institutions of higher learning across the United States? His work in electricity contributed to an almost unimaginable and yet unceasing flow of improvements in everyday life. Some critics—novelist D. H. Lawrence in particular—found Franklin deficient in spirituality and even responsible for a deplorable spiritual decline in American life, but few people have complained about his contributions to social welfare.

It has often been said that Franklin’s life mirrors American life, especially its concern for civic and social improvement. Indeed, his writing and the nature of his achievements exemplify a powerful sense of duty to form a prosperous and enjoyable society. J. A. Leo Lemay, an important editor and critic of Franklin’s work, has argued that it was Franklin who formulated the idea of the American Dream. Franklin’s conceptions of frugality and industry—the fifth and sixth of the virtues listed in the second part of the Autobiography—laid the path by which the common man (Franklin has little to say about women) could prosper in life. Lemay also points out that Franklin valued as more important not the attainment of wealth but the rise from helplessness to power. Another aspect of the American Dream is the philosophy of individualism, which allows for any person to succeed in life, if that person believes in the “possibility of accomplishment.” Finally, “the fictive world of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Lemay argues, “portrays the first completely modern world that I know in Western literature: nonfeudal, nonaristocratic, and nonreligious.”

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