I am standing in a three-hundred-year-old London townhouse, alone, eyes closed, trying to picture Benjamin Franklin naked. Not naked anywhere but naked here, in his old first-floor study with its bare wooden floors, mint green walls, and sash windows facing Craven Street, a small lane nestled between Charing Cross and the Thames.
If there’s any place where I have a chance of communing with Ben, it is in this Georgian row house, the only one of Franklin’s many homes still standing. That it still stands is a miracle, one abetted by fortuitous twists and turns—distrust not providence—as well as a hearty band of Franklinistas who rescued it from likely extinction.
I am not thinking about any of that now, though. I am picturing, trying to picture, Benjamin Franklin, scientist and statesman, inventor and founder, nude as a newborn. I have my reasons. Nudity played an important supporting role in this act of Ben’s life.
The image of Ben in the buff does not come easily, but I persist and, sure enough, it materializes, like the old photographs I used to develop in my home darkroom. Yes, there he is, Naked Ben, fleshly and fluid. Dr. Fatsides in all his corpulent glory.
Naked Ben was in London on a mission that was supposed to last six months. He ended up staying more than fifteen years, a sizable chunk of his long and useful life. (Between 1757 and 1785, he lived only three years on American soil.) Three decades had passed since he was last here. London was a different city, and Franklin, now fifty-one years old, a different man. Both had matured and gained new prominence. Both were more self-assured and less indulgent. Ben tempered his drinking. London authorities cracked down on the cheap gin joints that had proliferated. Ben’s waistline had expanded, and so had London’s population, ballooning to 750,000 thanks, in part, to an influx of immigrants from places like Ireland. Londoners had grown more clothes conscious. Hoop petticoats as wide as five feet were all the rage, though of no interest to Naked Ben. New roads were built and bridges erected. The city had a new museum too, the British Museum, an institution built on Hans Sloane’s vast collection of curios, including the asbestos purse Franklin had sold him more than thirty years earlier.
Franklin’s London chapter, part two, was a love story in reverse, a slow-motion divorce. As with all divorces, the final break was not inevitable—until it was. When he sailed from Philadelphia in 1757, he told friends he was “going home to England.” Franklin, like many Americans of the time, was a proud and loyal British subject. He even considered staying and becoming “a Londoner for the rest of my days.” It was the superior city in the superior nation, he said. Every English neighborhood is home to “more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests.” The prospect of the colonies uniting and rising up against their motherland “is not merely improbable,” he said, “it is impossible.”
Seventeen years later, Franklin left—fled, really—disenchanted, humiliated, and a wanted man. The divorce was finalized and implausibly, incredibly, a rebel was born at age sixty-nine.
It was a home birth. Number Seven Craven Street, to be precise. When Franklin first saw the house one July day in 1757, he knew he had found his London home. It was perfect: large yet cozy, quiet yet centrally located, in the shadow of Charing Cross where, as Samuel Johnson said, you could witness “the full tide of human existence.” It was a short walk from Whitehall, the center of British government, as well as the Houses of Parliament. A few yards uphill was the Strand, the popular shopping street anchored by Hungerford Market, with its array of fresh produce and meats. In the opposite direction was the Thames, and the promise of swimming. There were plenty of pubs and clubs nearby, as well as the Drury Lane Theatre, where Ben could catch a performance by David Garrick, the renowned actor.
Franklin soon moved into Number Seven Craven Street. His wife, Deborah, had stayed in Philadelphia, where she managed the family store and other business interests. She was afraid to travel by sea, a not unreasonable fear at the time; she wouldn’t even cross the Delaware, let alone the Atlantic. That is the official story, at least. I can’t help but wonder if the long-distance arrangement suited Ben. He was forever promising Deborah he would return home soon, but “soon” grew later and later. Eventually he stopped promising.
Ben’s twenty-seven-year-old son William accompanied him, as did two enslaved persons, Peter and King. Ben hardly mentions the two men, except in passing. “Peter behaves very well to me in general,” he relays to Deborah in 1758. “My shirts are always well air’d as you directed.”
Franklin wrote to Deborah often, at least in the early years. One of his first dispatches describes his new lodging: four furnished rooms on the first floor of the Craven Street house, and “every thing about us pretty genteel.” Ben needed all the gentility he could get. His mission to London was not only difficult but, in hindsight, impossible.
His remit was to win over the haughty heirs of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn. The two brothers, Richard and Thomas Penn, lived in a palatial home in London’s Spring Garden neighborhood while collecting tax-free revenue from their vast holdings in Pennsylvania. They were absentee landlords, with the ethical standards that implies. Pennsylvania was their private piggy bank. They insisted their huge tracts of land and the revenue they produced were exempt from taxes. The Pennsylvania Assembly disagreed and dispatched Franklin, the most famous American, to London to change the Penns’ minds.
If this sounds like a minor, intramural dispute, that’s because it was. But tax disputes are never just about taxes, and this one was no exception. Scratch beneath the antiquated tax codes and legalese and you find the dry kindling that would ignite a revolution. Listen to the words the Pennsylvania Assembly used in describing the Penns’ recalcitrance and you hear whispers of rebellion. The Penns’ behavior was “injurious to the interests of the Crown, and tyrannical with regard to the people.” The T word had been uttered.
Ben was slow to embrace it. During his many years in London, he worked to prevent a break between Britain and its American colonies in hopes of preserving that “fine and noble china vase,” the British Empire. He knew that “once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole.” Thus, the second aim of Franklin’s London mission was wresting control of Pennsylvania from the odious Penn brothers and waltzing into the supposedly friendlier embrace of George III. Franklin was aiming not for American independence but the opposite: a closer relationship to the British sovereign.
This is not what I learned in high school. My history teacher portrayed the founding fathers as single-minded men on a singular mission and traced a straight line from subjugation to freedom. As Franklin’s experience shows, the reality was much messier. The road to independence was long and winding, replete with switchbacks, detours, and even U-turns.
Such roads are not easily traversed. They demand skill, patience, and, perhaps most of all, a reliable and reassuring routine. Ben had his. He’d wake early and peel off his sleepwear: calico bedgown and footed flannel trousers. Then he’d open a few more windows (he slept with at least one open) and spend the next hour or so reading and writing and letting it all hang out. “Air baths,” he called them. After an hour or so of air bathing, he’d get dressed and begin his day. Sometimes, though, he’d return to bed and experience “one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.”
Ben Franklin was comfortable in his own naked skin. He was born naked but, unlike the rest of us, remained naked his entire life—sometimes metaphorically, often literally. He had no interest in haute couture. Clothing binds and constricts, and in direct proportion to cost. The fancier the attire, the greater the amount of toxic envy it arouses. “The eyes of other people are the eyes that ruin us,” he said. If everyone but him were blind, he’d have no need for fine clothing, or any clothes at all.
Was Ben a nudist? In a sense, yes. To be naked is to be open to experience, and Franklin remained wide open even as he aged, especially as he aged. As the years ticked by, he continued to change his mind about vital issues, democracy and slavery to name just two, yet another trait that set him apart. Most of us become less, not more, open to experience as we age.
To be naked is also to be vulnerable. At first blush, this doesn’t seem to fit Franklin. He was cautious (“the most cautious man I have ever seen,” said one Pennsylvanian visiting London). In large gatherings or among strangers he could be “cold and reserved,” acknowledged his friend Joseph Priestley, “but where he was intimate, no man indulged more to pleasantry and good-humour.” Franklin did get naked, just not with anyone.
Writing to a physician friend, possibly in the nude, he gushed about the joys of air bathing. “This practice is not in the least painful, but on the contrary, agreeable.” I suspect Ben’s neighbors found the practice a bit less agreeable. Air baths soon became a habit that he stuck with for the rest of his years. Even as he grew older, his skin flabby and wrinkled and flaked with a disease he called the “scurf” (psoriasis, most likely), he continued to air-bathe unabashedly. In France, well into his seventies, he swam in the Seine, naked.
Franklin, a son of Puritan Boston, seemed immune to even a twinge of shame about his naked, imperfect body. I, a son of Jewish Baltimore, do feel such shame, and more than a twinge. When it comes to nudity, I’m with M*A*S*H’s Radar O’Reilly. “Nudidity [sic] makes me breathe funny.”
I never sleep naked. I’ve never been to a nude beach. I do shower naked, but quickly, as if I’m being timed, then dress immediately afterward. I dread doctor visits, unless it’s a waist-up doctor. Those are okay. Ophthalmologists are my favorite.
What about emotional nakedness? On one level, I am, like Ben, open to experience. I’ve traveled the world, eaten rotten shark in Iceland and fried insects in Thailand. Those who meet me find me outgoing and gregarious. They mistake me for an extrovert. Sure, I can imitate one for a while, but it is an act, one I find thoroughly exhausting.
Emotionally, I am the opposite of naked. I am swaddled in layers of protective outerwear that come in various sizes and styles. Humor is one of my favorites. So tight fitting is that garment that only the most attentive souls, like my teenage daughter, see through it and call me out. All this clothing constricts, limiting my range of motion. Beneath all those layers, people can barely see me, let alone touch me.
Maybe this is why I travel. On the road, alone among strangers, it’s easy to disrobe. Foreigners are less likely to judge my Ben-sized belly or surgical scars or my many other somatic imperfections. Ditto my emotional ones. And should they do so, who cares? I’m just passing through.
Franklin didn’t always endorse the therapeutic benefits of fresh air. Like many people at the time, he suffered from “aerophobia,” as he called it, diligently closing every crevice in every room. As usual, direct experience changed his mind. He noticed he was healthier when exposed to regular doses of fresh air. “I now look upon fresh air as my friend,” he said. He embraced his new friend with open, naked arms. He began sleeping with windows open; no outside air—not even London’s smokiest—could possibly be as unhealthy as the fetid atmosphere found inside a closed room.
Franklin’s theory about the benefits of fresh air, if not air baths, caught on. During the Revolutionary War, many physicians ensured that their patients had access to fresh air. Ebenezer Beardsley noticed that troops quartered in “putrid atmospheres” were much more likely to contract dysentery than those housed in airier venues. Franklin’s friend, the physician Benjamin Rush, suggested treating patients in rural areas rather than overcrowded urban hospitals.
One person who did not accept Franklin’s advice was the mulish John Adams. In one of the more amusing episodes of American colonial history, Adams and Franklin had to share a room at an overbooked inn in Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776. The windows were open. Adams, an aerophobe, jumped up and shut them.
“Oh,” said Franklin, “don’t shut the window, we shall be suffocated.”
No, we won’t, replied Adams, explaining his concerns about the cold outside air.
Wrong, retorted Franklin. “The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors. Come! Open the windows and come to bed.”
Franklin sprang to his feet, opened the windows, and delivered a long lecture about his theory of head colds and the benefits of fresh air. Adams, exhausted and scientifically outgunned, absorbed little but, he recalled, “I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.”
I love this story. Here are two giants of the American Revolution, the most fatherly of the founders, bickering like two siblings forced to share a room. Open the window! No, close it. Adams doesn’t say whether Franklin tried to convert him into an air bather, but I suspect Ben didn’t bother. Some mountains are too daunting to summit, even for a possibilian.
Ben’s London house wasn’t easy to find. After crossing the Thames on foot, I circled Charing Cross in search of Craven Street. It’s more lane than street, only a block long, but it packs in more history than many US cities. Not only did Franklin live here, but so did Aaron Burr and, later, Herman Melville and the German poet Heinrich Heine. John Quincy Adams had an office on Craven Street.
Ben would still recognize the Georgian architecture, red-bricked and sturdy, and his trusty Thames, narrower and more polluted than in his day but otherwise unchanged. The sushi takeaway joints and CCTV cameras would befuddle him, but he’d smile at the sight of a Tesla Model S parked near his house, the chassis concealing its 7,000 batteries. His terms, his science, at their most useful. He’d surely approve of the neatly arranged phalanx of Boris Bikes. The bike rental scheme, launched by Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, is a combination of the civic-mindedness and entrepreneurial spirit Franklin appreciated. He’d also appreciate the College of Optometrists, adjacent to his old house and with a mockup of the bifocals he invented displayed in the window.
I like old Number Seven (since renumbered thirty-six) Craven Street. I like the simple, quotidian feel, so less intimidating than Monticello or Mount Vernon. I like how the hallways are lit by candles, just as they were in Ben’s day. I like how the floors list in random directions and creak when you walk on them. I like how, despite these peculiarities, the Franklin house “shows no signs of being haunted,” according to operations manager Michael Hall. (He can’t say the same about other historic houses he’s managed.) I like how the staff don’t take Ben any more seriously than he took himself. During Christmas season, they place a red Santa hat on a marble bust of Ben. It fits.
Ben’s house is now a small museum. The Franklinistas who run it let me come and go as I please. One afternoon, after the tourists have left, I am alone. Just me and Ben. I climb the stairs—the very stairs he climbed, sometimes just for exercise. I step into his old study. This is the room where Ben spent most of his time. It is an ordinary room, not too large or small or special in any way, yet it is its ordinariness that makes it so extraordinary—just like the man who lived here.
The walls are painted the same pale shade of green as in Ben’s day. The curators couldn’t find any contemporary drawings of the interior so rather than guess how it was furnished, they left the rooms bare. Naked. I respect that decision. It means I can fill in Ben’s study with my imagination. I imagine him here, sitting at his desk, quill in hand, firing off a letter to his friend Peter Collinson or maybe to Deborah in Philadelphia, telling her about his latest shopping expedition, rushing to finish his missive before the packet ship departed. I can picture him playing the glass armonica, the musical instrument he invented here. I can picture him pacing the room, worried about the political storm clouds gathering outside, a tempest so explosive even his mighty Franklin Rod couldn’t defuse it.
Given its age, the Craven Street house feels surprisingly robust. Yes, it’s had some work done, but you would too if you were nearly three hundred years old and endured flooding, fire, and a World War II bombing. The house has good bones. Several are on display here: femurs and tibias and clavicles, all arranged in a glass display case. Another Franklin surprise.
When workers were excavating the house in 1998, converting it into a museum, they found a human thigh bone. Then another bone, and another. Eventually they discovered 1,200 bones, the remains of more than fifteen bodies. Some of the bones bore saw marks while others were cut clean through. The skulls had been trepanned. People began to wonder: Was Ben Franklin a mass murderer?
He was not. It turns out a physician named William Hewson also lived at Number Seven Craven Street at the same time as Franklin. Hewson ran an anatomy school from the house. He needed cadavers, but they were hard to come by, given the moral prohibition against dissections at the time. So Hewson hired “resurrection men” skilled at digging up bodies in the middle of the night. After the dissections, Hewson disposed of the cadavers in the garden at the rear of the house. Franklin was probably aware of the dissections and may have participated in a few.
It’s a good story, but I can’t help but wonder if the same rumors would have surfaced had workers found bones at Monticello or Mount Vernon. I don’t think so. There is something about sly Ben that says, I could be a genius. Or I could be a mass murderer. You decide. Wink, wink.
Bones and all, this house was more than a place to hang his bifocals. It was home. He may or may not have been sexually promiscuous, but there’s no doubt he was emotionally promiscuous. He was forever inventing new homes with new families. So it was at the house on Craven Street. The landlady, Margaret Stevenson, and her teenage daughter, Mary (or Polly, as everyone called her), soon became Franklin’s second family. Polly adored Franklin, and Franklin adored her. My “dear good girl,” he called her, or “my dear philosopher.” Ben had his share of stormy relationships, but with Polly, he said, it was “all clear sunshine.”
He made himself at home, converting one room into an improvised laboratory and buying his own coach so he could make a good impression on those he visited. Franklin knew appearances mattered. He made new friends, generous ones with large country estates at Ben’s disposal. He was so much in demand that “I seldom dine at home in winter, and could spend the whole summer in the country-houses of inviting friends, if I chose it.” He and William attended the coronation of George III (“the best King any nation was ever blessed with”) and dined with another monarch, the king of Denmark. Franklin even sketched the seating arrangement and sent it to his sister Jane in Boston.
Franklin, a social creature, was in his element. In the daytime, he frequented coffeehouses like Waghorn’s or the Jamaican or the Pennsylvania Coffeehouse on Birchin Lane, where he could catch up on the news from home. In the evenings, it was taverns and club meetings. Mondays he dined at the George and Vulture with a group of fellow scientists and explorers, sometimes including Captain James Cook. Thursdays it was the Club of Honest Whigs, where he dined on Welsh rarebit and apple puffs with a group of physicians, dissenting clergy, and other freethinkers. He’d visit friends’ homes and play cribbage and chess. Each summer, he traveled—to Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and, his favorite destination, Scotland, where he experienced the “densest happiness” of his life.
Life was good. Yet in his letters to Deborah, he claimed it was duty to country, or colony, that kept him in London. Did Deborah believe that? Did Ben? Perhaps. The rational mind, as he observed, is gullible. We can convince ourselves of anything.
Life was good but not perfect. (It never is.) As an American, even a highly respected American, Ben was still an outsider, and one with no proper pedigree or education. He had his nose pressed against the posh windows of London, but he wasn’t allowed inside. He was almost a member of the club, but not quite. No wonder he gravitated toward fellow interlopers: Scots like the printer William Strahan (“Straney,” Franklin called him) and Quakers like the botanist and electrical whisperer Peter Collinson. Several of his friends were physicians, real doctors, including the royal physician, John Pringle.
London was vibrant and intellectually stimulating, but it wasn’t home. It wasn’t his soulplace. Ben suffered from bouts of homesickness, assuaged by the growing American presence in London—artists like Benjamin West, fellow colonial agents, and others. Then there was the encroaching American vegetation. Ben would have recognized the sugar maples and hemlock spruces and other native American plants that had sprouted across London, thanks to the work of curious and industrious botanists like Peter Collinson. Ben might have seen American animals—rattlesnakes and crocodiles—stuffed and on display at London’s coffeehouses.
If that wasn’t enough, Deborah regularly sent packages crammed with his favorite American goodies: cranberries, buckwheat cakes, buckskins, apples (Newton Pippins were his favorite), dried venison, and bacon. Ben sent his wife gifts in exchange: The Book of Common Prayer in large type, to spare her eyes; reading glasses set in silver and tortoise shell; shoes; pins; needles; Persian textiles; damask tablecloths; silk blankets; glassware and silverware; a device for coring apples; saucepans from Sheffield. Ben spent freely on himself too, acquiring fine china, leather breeches, a new pair of eyeglasses, Madeira wine, and, of course, books. These spending sprees erupted just as the author of The Way to Wealth was gaining a worldwide reputation as the ultimate penny-pincher. Poor Richard’s puppeteer may have remained industrious, but he was no longer frugal.
Back home in suburban Washington, DC, I am surprised how much I miss my time at Craven Street. The old house, like the Old Conjurer himself, had wormed its way into my heart. The photos I took remind me of my time there, but there is one image that requires no snapshot for it is engraved in my mind: Naked Ben. I smile whenever I think of him taking his air baths, propriety and neighbors be damned.
Then it dawns on me. It’s all well and good to imagine Franklin’s air baths, to read about them, but this is mere secondhand knowledge, inferior to direct experience. What if I air-bathed? Why not? I, too, live on a small lane, though the nearest river is not the Thames but a muddy estuary called Sligo Creek. My neighbors are not Aaron Burr or John Quincy Adams but Amy and Barbara.
I wake early one morning, and strip. I step into my home office and open a window. I check my schedule. No Zoom calls. Good. I have company: my dog Parker, who is way ahead of me in the air-bath department and thus unfazed by my little experiment. It’s about time, I imagine he’s thinking.
At first, I feel self-conscious, hyperaware of my nakedness. I begin to breathe funny. I lock my office door even though no one else is home. “Come on,” I tell myself. “This can’t be so difficult.” What could be more natural than a grown man sitting at his desk naked as the day he was born? I take a few deep breaths, elongating the exhalation, as a meditation teacher once advised. Sure enough, the tension in my naked shoulders subsides, and my naked belly expands and contracts more freely. I click on a streaming service and play traditional Scottish folk music, Ben’s favorite, fully submerging myself in the air bath.
I fire up my laptop and write. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the keyboard feels springier, the blank screen less daunting. The words come more easily. In fact, the ones you are reading right now were written in the nude. Can you tell?
Franklin recognized the power of names. Had he told people he liked to hang around the house completely naked each morning, he would have attracted disapproving looks. The thought of a naked late-middle-aged man is not exactly appealing. But a late-middle-aged man taking an air bath? Okay, it’s still unappealing, but less so. An air bath sounds therapeutic, cleansing.
I spend the next hour writing and reading, just like Ben, feeling the cool spring air caressing my… arms. Then I return to bed, like Ben, and while I don’t experience that sweet sleep he described, I do sink into the mattress with greater ease than usual. My heart rate slows, my breathing deepens. The tasks that lie ahead evaporate like smoke escaping from a Franklin Stove. I believe there is a word for this state I’m experiencing. I believe that word is “relaxation.”
Yes, I could get used to this air bathing, I think, closing my eyes. I just might make a habit of it. Better alert the neighbors.