I cross the Thames by foot, marveling at the endless construction sprouting from either side of the river like runaway shrubbery. London has always been a city in a hurry. As I navigate the currents of pedestrians, I try to imagine young Ben here, in the “great and monstrous thing” that was, and still is, London.
I hop on the Tube, a mode of transport Franklin would surely like, offering, as it does, the twin appeals of both speed and equality. Anyone can ride the Tube. I arrive at my destination where I navigate a long pedestrian tunnel. I pass a busker playing the violin. He’s not bad, I think, but where is his hat or violin case? How does he make money? Then I spot it: a card reader. The tunnel musician takes credit cards, and Apple Pay too. I can see Franklin smiling at this incongruity. He was always dreaming up new forms of currency. In Pennsylvania, he promoted the use of paper money, a novel concept at the time, and invented ways to print bills designed to thwart counterfeiters.
I exit the station and slalom through a gaggle of schoolkids, led by a mother duck of a teacher. As I approach London’s Natural History Museum, I see a sign that reads, “Our Broken Planet. How We Got Here and How to Fix It.” Good topics. Franklin would be more concerned with the latter one. He was less interested in the causes of problems than in finding novel solutions. I am the opposite. I’d rather chew on a problem than cough up a solution. This approach has its advantages; by not finding solutions to problems, I needn’t worry about my solutions flopping. There are downsides too. Squabbles with my wife, for instance. Whenever I present her with a problem I’m facing, she has the audacity—the gall!—to offer a solution. Sometimes, and this is the truly warped part, she suggests multiple solutions. What she fails to realize is that I’m not looking for solutions to my problem. I’m looking for someone to mull it over with, a chewing partner.
I step into the vast Victorian-era building that is London’s Natural History Museum. A giant blue whale named Hope hangs from the ceiling. I smile and wonder if giant dangling whales are a requirement for all natural history museums. I head for the minerals exhibit, a cavernous hall. It takes me a while, but I find it, encased behind an antiquated wooden display cabinet that looks like something Charles Darwin owned. The label reads: “Sloane Artifacts.”
Hans Sloane was a wealthy physician and collector of curiosities. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, he traveled the world searching for them. Nothing was too obscure or bizarre for Sloane. His collection, the Guardian newspaper recounts, included “gnats’ blood, Inuit sun visors, a stick to put down your throat to make yourself sick, a cyclops pig, a silver penis protector and a bit of coral that looked just like someone’s hand.” By the time he died in 1753, Sloane had amassed some 71,000 objects, which the government acquired and used to found the British Museum and its offshoots, like the one I’m in now.
Sloane’s curios displayed here include an amber brush holder from China and an amethyst snuff box from Germany, but my eyes are drawn elsewhere—to a tangle of spindly white strands that look like a hairy squid. “Asbestos Purse,” the label informs me. It is no longer recognizable as a purse, but that doesn’t matter. It once belonged to Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin knew enough to bring the purse with him from Philadelphia and that a man like Hans Sloane would be interested in acquiring it. So he wrote to him. First, he played up the exotic nature of the purse. “Having lately been in the northern parts of America, I have brought from thence a purse made of the stone asbestos… call’d by the inhabitants, Salamander Cotton.” Then Franklin pivoted to flattery—“As you are noted to be a lover of curiosities…”—before deploying the soft sell: “If you have any inclination to purchase them, or see ’em, let me know your pleasure.” He ended his letter with a postscript: “I expect to be out of town in 2 or 3 days, and therefore beg an immediate answer.”
This was a lie. Franklin wasn’t going anywhere. It was the classic hurry, limited time offer! ploy used by salespeople everywhere. It worked. Hans Sloane invited Franklin to his elegant home in Bloomsbury Square, where he purchased the purse for a handsome sum. Franklin doesn’t mention what he did with this money. Did he use it to buy books, or did he indulge in the “amusements” London offered? A little of both, I suspect.
I spot a sign for the “Contemplation Room” and am intrigued. I could use some contemplation. I enter a sparsely decorated room that is part yoga studio, part mosque. On the floor are a beanbag chair and half a dozen Muslim prayer rugs. A sign on the wall informs me of the rules. No eating or drinking or using mobile phones—all sound prohibitions—but also a warning to “refrain from using scented products.” That strikes me as going a bit too far. Who doesn’t like a good scented product?
The room is blissfully quiet. I collapse onto the beanbag chair and contemplate. Questions abound. What was this young Ben Franklin like? And where did he get the moxie to meet bigwigs like Hans Sloane and Bernard Mandeville? Was it merely the heedless confidence of the young, or was Franklin already exuding greatness? Was he, I wonder, displaying nascent signs of the extreme usefulness that would define his life? There were indications. In London, he taught one friend how to swim and lent another money. It was not the methodical benevolence that would characterize his later projects, but it was a start.
It must have been a heady—and terrifying—experience for Franklin to visit London for the first time. London was unlike any city he’d ever seen, with a population fifty times larger than Boston’s or Philadelphia’s. It was also a giant mess, still recovering from the Great Fire of 1666 and the Great Storm of 1703, not to mention an economic downturn.
The buildings were in various states of disrepair, looking “like skeletons of buildings, like what in truth they were, heaps of ruins,” writes Jerry White in his encyclopedic history of eighteenth-century London. The streets were treacherous, pitted with troughs that could crack an axle or a bone. The street names told you everything you needed to know about them. There were Foul Lane and Dirty Lane and Rotten Row and, my favorite, Pissing Alley (“a very proper name for it,” one contemporary observed). The air was so foul that in the summer, the royal family decamped from St. James’s Palace to Hampton Court Palace. Others were not so fortunate.
London was dirty and dangerous, but also enticing. The smell of progress was in the air, as pungent and irresistible as the smoke and dust. The Enlightenment was in full swing; sparks were flying everywhere. The Royal Society, home to Isaac Newton and other natural philosophers, as scientists were known at the time, was blossoming. Writers like Jonathan Swift and Addison Steele were breaking new ground. And with the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1709, the modern English novel was born.
Many of these new and exciting ideas were birthed not in the lecture halls or laboratories but in coffeehouses. They were the petri dishes of intellectual fermentation, places where ideas flowed as freely as “the bitter black drink called coffee.” You could read the latest newspapers splayed across tables or pick up the freshest gossip. You could educate yourself by listening to lectures on philosophy or the arts or sciences at these “penny universities,” as coffeehouses were known.
Each had a different specialty. Some were all business, places where merchants and bankers would meet over coffee and strike deals. Lloyd’s and Christie’s and Sotheby’s all got their start in coffeehouses. One, Don Saltero’s, housed a vast collection of curiosities from around the world, a museum that served coffee. Another required all customers to converse only in Latin. (It was short-lived.)
I can see why Franklin loved London’s coffeehouses. They were cheap, one of the few places he could afford to visit. They were highly social, and Franklin was a social animal. They were useful and egalitarian, or as egalitarian as eighteenth-century England permitted, where men (and, with few exceptions, only men) of different social strata could mingle over a penny cup of coffee and see what new ideas emerged.
Franklin had his favorites. He frequented the Pennsylvania Coffee House, of course, where he read the latest news from Philadelphia. Then there was the New England Coffee House and his go-to, the Golden Fan, conveniently located near the cheap room he rented in a neighborhood called Little Britain.
Today, Little Britain is dotted with shiny new condominiums, gleaming office towers, and pubs with names like The Lamb and Trotter and The Hand and Shear. Turn a corner, and you come upon Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s a view young Ben Franklin would have seen often. The cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. It took decades to rebuild and wasn’t completed until 1711, only thirteen years before Franklin arrived.
In Franklin’s time, traffic in Little Britain consisted of hackney carriages, oxcarts, and nervous pedestrians. Today traffic consists of Range Rovers, Teslas, and nervous pedestrians. I pass a hospital, shiny and new on one side, old and yellowing on the other, effortlessly straddling the centuries in a way American buildings do not. For us, something is either new or it is old. Rarely is it both.
I close my eyes and picture eighteen-year-old Ben walking these streets. He was young and ambitious—a bit cocky, no doubt, but with enough self-awareness to know he didn’t know what he didn’t know. He frequented a secondhand bookshop called the Green Dragon, owned by a kind man, John Wilcox. Franklin couldn’t afford to buy books, so Wilcox allowed the young printer to borrow a few titles overnight “on certain reasonable terms.”
Not everyone was so welcoming. Franklin was an American, and thus a country bumpkin by default. For the ordinary Briton, America was like a dentist’s office: a somewhat mysterious, possibly painful place you might visit if you were desperate enough but not otherwise. America was an untamed land filled with wild beasts and primitive “savages.” Many Britons believed Americans could not speak English, which strikes me as odd considering so many of them came from… England. Said the contemporary writer Samuel Johnson: “[Americans] are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow short of hanging.” Those are fighting words, but belligerence was many decades away. Benjamin Franklin, like nearly all Americans of the time, saw himself as a proud and loyal British subject.
He was not a happy one, though. He knew he needed to change course; no, he needed to set a course. Until now he was like one of those hot-air balloons he would later witness soaring over Paris, drifting here and there, whichever way the wind took it.
I walk a bit farther and spot a bistro with a sign that reads: “Today’s Inspirational Quote: Don’t be an arsehole.” Solid advice. Benjamin Franklin followed it. Mostly. When his friend James Ralph was out of town, Franklin visited his girlfriend and “attempted familiarities.” Later in life, he was largely an absentee husband and father. So, yes, Franklin could be an arsehole. He was no saint.
The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, or Great St. Bart’s for short, is the oldest surviving church in London. It is also where Ben Franklin, not exactly a regular churchgoer, found work.
I traverse a small courtyard, populated by workers on smoke breaks, then walk through a narrow passageway and into the main sanctuary, where I spot a young, plump priest.
“I’m looking for Marcus,” I say to the priest.
“I am Marcus,” the priest says.
Marcus is garrulous and proud of the church’s Franklin connection. Founded as a monastery in 1123, the church is old “even by English standards,” says Marcus, subtly boasting the way the English do, suggesting, in a covertly condescending way, that their country is really really old and, by extension, America is but an infant.
Great St. Bart’s, like nearly all medieval churches, had a smaller separate chapel devoted to the Virgin Mary and known as the Lady Chapel. During the Reformation, “the Virgin Mary fell off a cliff,” explains Marcus, and for the rest of our conversation I can’t dislodge the image of a free-falling mother of Christ from my mind.
Saddled with extra floor space, the custodians of Great St. Bart’s did what any landlord would do: find a new tenant. In this case, it was a printer named Samuel Palmer. It must have been quite the scene, parishioners worshipping in the church while, a few yards away, Palmer and his printing presses made an unholy racket. When I ask Marcus about this incongruity, he replies philosophically.
“Such were the times.”
Franklin found work at Palmer’s as a compositor. He was “pretty diligent” on the job, he recalled, but spent much of his earnings hanging out with his friend James Ralph, a flighty poet from New Jersey, “going to plays and other places of amusement.” Franklin doesn’t say what sort of places of amusement he means, but they were probably located across the Thames in Southwark, London’s seedy alter ego, where circuses and bear baiting were common, not to mention numerous opportunities to engage in “intrigues with low women.”
Today, Palmer’s Printing House, long gone, is commemorated with a plaque. “The Lady Chapel: Where Benjamin Franklin Learned His Trade.” The plaque notes this is where Franklin wrote his first and only work of moral philosophy: A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.
It is a strange and disturbing little piece. In it, Franklin argues that, in so many words, nothing matters. Virtue and vice? No difference. Pleasure and pain? Same. Ditto good and evil. There is more to it than that, but not much more. Flirting with atheism, the paper made the case for deism, the belief that while there is a supreme being that created the universe, such a being does not control events or interact with humans in any way. Deism, also called Natural Religion, was popular in some circles at the time, but it remained a heretical idea.
Franklin’s paper was scandalous and would have landed him in trouble with the authorities had anyone read it. Fortunately, hardly anyone did. He immediately regretted writing his “London pamphlet” and scrambled to retrieve and burn the one hundred copies he had printed.
The paper marked the beginning and end of Franklin’s career as a metaphysician; such speculation now “disgusted” him, he said. Searching for absolute truth is pointless, a distraction. People can’t agree on the visible world. How do you expect them to agree on the invisible one? He would continue to philosophize but by other means. His life became his message. His was a philosophy based on deeds, not words. A philosophy of the useful.
Franklin, the young man in a hurry, soon grew restless at Palmer’s and moved to a larger, more prestigious printing house, owned by one John Watts. This time Franklin worked the presses, a much more physically demanding job but one he craved, for he “felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been us’d to in America.”
Whenever I pictured Benjamin Franklin, the same image came to mind: a squat, rotund man whose idea of exercise was lifting pints of beer to his mouth. Not true, at least in Franklin’s youth. At five foot ten, he was tall for the time. He was toned and muscular, with brown eyes and thick brown hair. Benjamin Franklin, the founding grandfather, was ripped. Throughout his life, he regularly walked, rowed, swam, and lifted weights at a time when few others did. As a boy, he was a skilled boxer who could deck an opponent with a mean uppercut to the jaw. Sadly, we have no portraits of this buff Franklin. He wasn’t famous yet.
As for beer, Franklin drank it only occasionally (he preferred Madeira) and, unlike his colleagues at Watts Printing House, abstained in the morning. He drank water instead, earning him the nickname “The Water American.”
The moniker was apt, and in more ways than his beer-guzzling coworkers knew. His aquatic skills had crossed the Atlantic with him and distinguished him in London. Few people at the time knew how to swim. Even bathing was frowned on. Immersing yourself in water was considered uncouth and medically unsound. Body odors were thought to form a protective cocoon and act as a sexual stimulant. I’d feel right at home in the eighteenth century—not because of the body odor but my aversion to swimming.
One day, at the urging of friends, Franklin stripped and dove into the Thames, easily traversing the river from Chelsea to Blackfriars, “performing on the way many feats of activity both upon and under water.” Everyone was impressed. A wealthy nobleman learned of Franklin’s prowess and offered to pay him to teach his children to swim. Franklin was tempted but turned down the offer. It was a different proposition that won him over: a Quaker merchant named Thomas Denham proposed paying Franklin’s fare to Philadelphia if he would work for him as a clerk, with the prospect of becoming a partner. Franklin, ready to go home, accepted. He spent his final days in London the way I spend my days before every trip, no matter how short: packing, repacking, running errands, and purchasing supplies, needed or not.
Before boarding the ship, Franklin reflected on his time in London. He had gained valuable printing experience, read voraciously, and “pick’d up some very ingenious acquaintance[s].” He developed healthy habits, drinking water in the morning instead of beer, swimming regularly, and going for long walks. Overall, though, he was disappointed. He was leaving the way he arrived: broke. (His friend James Ralph owed him twenty-seven pounds, a considerable sum, but was unlikely to repay it given Franklin’s attempted seduction of his girlfriend.) He had written a misguided and potentially dangerous dissertation. He had borne the brunt of rabid anti-Americanism. He had not made his mark. He had not been useful. How could he be when he was such an impoverished, directionless mess of a man?
It was time to go home, and so on July 21, 1726, Franklin boarded the Berkshire, bound for Philadelphia. It was a journey that should have taken five or six weeks. It took nearly thirteen. Yet it was aboard this ship, floundering in a windless Atlantic, that Franklin became Franklin.