Throughout his life, Ben Franklin resided in cities—Boston, Philadelphia, and now London, where he felt at home amid the frenzied shoppers of Charing Cross and the free-flowing ale and conversation at pubs like the George and Vulture.
But even the most committed urbanite needs to escape the din and noise every now and then. Ben had recurring pastoral fantasies. He extolled the beauty of the American countryside and the “continual miracle” that is farming. The truth is he couldn’t milk a cow or hoe a field any more than I can.
In summer 1771, the pull of the countryside was especially strong. The London air was smoky and foul, “every street a chimney… and you never get a sweet breath of what is pure, without riding some miles for it into the country,” he wrote to Deborah. It had been “a severe and tedious winter,” with spring arriving late and half-heartedly.
Ben’s mood mirrored the weather. It would be another three years before his ritual humiliation in the Cockpit, but life was already growing stressful. Britain seemed determined to milk its colonies dry. In 1765, it enacted the Stamp Act, which levied duties (requiring an official stamp) on just about any piece of paper, from legal documents to playing cards. The tax was about as popular with the colonists as the convicted criminals the British sent to America.
Ben, usually attuned to public sentiment, misread the mood on this one. The tax was inevitable, he sighed after it was rammed through Parliament. “We might as well have hinder’d the sun’s setting.” He even helped a friend, John Hughes, get the job as stamp distributor in Philadelphia, a move both men would regret. Rumors circulated that Franklin was behind the tax (he was not). One day in 1765, an angry mob massed outside his house in Philadelphia. Friends urged Deborah to flee. Instead, she armed herself and, with the help of relatives and a posse of leather-apron men, defended the family home.
Realizing his blunder, Franklin pivoted and argued against the tax. He met with any British official who would listen. He wrote articles and drew political cartoons. In February 1766, he testified at the House of Commons, fielding some two hundred questions. “Franklin of Philadelphia,” as he called himself, was brilliant. In firm but measured replies, he delivered a spirited rebuke of the unpopular tax. Shortly after, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Ben had salvaged his reputation among Americans.
British officials, though, continued to treat him with contempt. When Franklin presented his credentials to the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Hillsborough, he refused to accept them. Ben was furious (a controlled fury, of course) but, oddly, remained loyal to the British monarch. The problem, as he saw it, was Parliament, not King George. “Loyalty [to the king] is the most probable means of securing us from the arbitrary power of a corrupt Parliament, that does not like us, and conceives itself to have an interest in keeping us down and fleecing us,” he wrote.
By summer 1771, the centrifugal forces pushing and pulling Ben were beginning to take their toll. He displayed rare signs of melancholy, as his friend William Strahan relayed in a letter to Franklin’s son. “His temper is grown so very reserved, which adds greatly to his natural inactivity, that there is no getting him to take part in anything.”
This is a side of Ben I had not seen before. I recognize it in myself: the resignation and learned helplessness. When nothing seems to work and new traps await at every turn, the natural reaction is to freeze, to shut down. I have tools at my disposal that Ben did not: therapies and pharmaceuticals galore. I know I should take solace in this, but I do not. The ineffectiveness of these supposed remedies only underscores my powerlessness over the disease.
One remedy that does help: motion. A brisk walk around the block, a slow run—or hopping on a 600 mph Boeing. Change your location, and you can change yourself. Not easily, not permanently, but I’ll take what I can get. So did Ben. Not only was London smoky and contentious, but he had a new writing project to begin—not a pseudonymous article or scientific treatise, though; this piece of writing was personal. When his friend Jonathan Shipley invited him to visit Twyford House, his expansive country home near Southampton, Ben didn’t hesitate to accept.
Shipley had been appointed Bishop of St. Asaph. Ben may have despised the clergy in general, but he liked individual men of the cloth. Consider his unlikely relationship with George Whitefield, the evangelical preacher who spearheaded the religious revival known as the Great Awakening. He was an entertaining and inspiring speaker who drew large and enthusiastic crowds. “Hearing him preach gave me a heart wound,” said Nathan Cole, a Connecticut farmer who traveled miles to hear Whitefield speak.
Whitefield rivaled Franklin in his ability to relieve people of their money for a good cause. After one sermon, Whitefield appealed for donations. Franklin, who was in the audience, hesitated, but the preacher was persuasive and soon, “I began to soften… and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.” Franklin, so expert at nudging people into being more generous versions of themselves, had been out-Franklined.
It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Franklin earned money printing Whitefield’s sermons, and Whitefield benefited from the publicity Franklin drummed up in his newspaper. But their relationship was more than mercenary. There was genuine affection between them. When Whitefield was recovering from an illness, Franklin, writing to a relative, said simply, “He is a good man and I love him.”
He loved Jonathan Shipley too and counted him among his closest friends. The bishop, his wife, Anna, and their five daughters, ranging in age from eleven to twenty-three, were like family. He was looking forward, he said, to a good chunk of “uninterrupted leisure.”
I wanted to see Twyford House myself. Unlike Ben’s former London residence, it is not a museum open to the public. It is somebody’s home. The house, I discover, is owned by a British family, the Leylands. Were they Franklinistas? I hoped so.
I contact Anna Leyland, explaining my Ben fixation. I am careful to sound sane, eliding such details as my air bath fantasies and fascination with Ben’s theory of flatulence. It is a long shot. She and her family have lives to live and probably had no time for a neurotic American writer obsessed with long-dead Ben Franklin. I brace myself for a polite English rejection.
Hi Eric,
We would be very happy to invite you to come to see Twyford House. Could you let me know what days and times might work for you?
Many thanks, Anna.
Once again, I remind myself not to assume the worst of humanity. Ben didn’t, and he witnessed far more evil than I have. Anna gives me detailed directions for getting to Twyford House. She asks if I want to take the fast route or the scenic one. A tough choice. I consult Ben. On the one hand, he makes the case for the fast route: “Lost time is never found again; and what we call time-enough, always proves little enough.” Then again, Ben also believed travel lengthens life, so logically the scenic route is the way to go. Yes, that is what I will do.
I slalom through the crowds at Waterloo Station, then board a Southeastern Rail train. We depart on time at 9:53 a.m. and after whooshing past a blur of green countryside arrive eighty-three minutes later. It took Ben a full day’s carriage ride to make the same fifty-mile journey. He had recently turned sixty-five and was in relatively good health, so he probably endured the journey well, but as he aged, he suffered from kidney stones, among other ailments, and the jostling of the carriage made such journeys painful.
I disembark at Shawford, a cute-as-a-button English village with a pub and not much else. I follow Anna’s directions, so much more personal than anything Google Maps could cook up. I parallel the Itchen River, famous for its trout, and see why Ben savored “the sweet air of Twyford.” I take a deep, luxurious breath and confirm that, yes, the air is indeed sweet and the ambiance tranquil. Dogs pass me, soaking wet from the river, their owners trailing close behind and apologizing profusely. I know they don’t mean it. Was this dissembling a violation of Ben’s virtue of sincerity? I don’t think so. Such niceties may be deceitful but they are not hurtful. Helpful deceit is the very definition of politeness.
I walk a bit farther before spotting a sign that reads, “Entrance to Twyford House.” I step through a gate and onto a gravel driveway. There it is: the house—estate is more like it—is set back from the twenty-first-century road and looks like a scaled-down Downton Abbey. If there are other houses nearby, I don’t see or hear them.
I am greeted by Anna Leyland and her husband, Ben (naturally, he’s named Ben), and their two children, Alfie and Eira. They all have slim, athletic builds and straight teeth, and they are wearing neatly pressed clothes. Perfect is the word that comes to mind, but perfect, I know, is an illusion, a trick that relies on the magic of distance. From afar, people’s lives often look perfect, like a gleaming city skyline. Get closer, though, and the smudges and imperfections become visible. Ben Franklin’s life was not perfect. God knows mine isn’t. And neither, I’m sure, are the Leylands’.
I step inside the house—the house Ben stayed in—and immediately like it. The house, large and old, feels like a home, not a museum. I don’t know what to say, so I sputter, “What a beautiful old house.”
Actually, says Ben Leyland, for Franklin, this house was new, with a cutting-edge design. “It was the equivalent of staying at a glass-and-steel building today,” he says. Old. New. These are relative terms, meaningless without context.
The Leylands knew about the Franklin connection when they bought the house. The real estate agent mentioned it, naturally. What better proof of history’s value? A house with a storied past—Franklin slept here!—increases the price, while a house with a sullied past—people were murdered here!—decreases it. Real estate and history have a lot in common. Both rest on the solid ground of location, as well as the shakier ground of perception.
Anna invites me outside. The view stuns me: chalk hills set against a gray-metal sky and, in the distance, the river I had shadowed. The same view Franklin saw. We sit down for tea and scones. I ask the obvious question: “You live in the house Ben Franklin visited, a house where the matriarch was named Anna, and your names are Ben and Anna. Are there some mysterious forces at work here?”
Ben Leyland insists it is pure coincidence, nothing more. Anna is not so sure. Nor is she sure about “the man, friendly and nice” whom her son Alfie used to talk to but nobody else saw. It was probably just the fertile imagination of a young boy, but you never know. Franklin the Possibilian would keep an open mind. Never close a door until you’re certain there’s nothing behind it.
Consciously or not, I slip into the same role Franklin played at Twyford House: the wise yet slightly cracked uncle. I regale the Leyland kids with my bottomless reservoir of Franklin trivia. Did you know he invented an instrument called the glass armonica and that it is featured in the Harry Potter movies? Did you know he could read Italian and Spanish? Did you know he crossed the Atlantic eight times? Did you know he invented the flexible catheter? Wait. That last one wasn’t exactly age appropriate. I pivot, Ben-like, and ask Alfie what it’s like living in such an old house.
“Well,” he says, sounding far wiser than his eight years, “you are really quite comforted by thinking about what and who was here before.” Franklin couldn’t have said it better.
After tea, we walk the grounds. Anna points out an enormous mulberry tree just like the one Ben used to sit under at Franklin Court in Philadelphia. Trees make a mockery of our puny life spans. They reveal their true nature only over time. The same is true for houses, and people, points out twenty-first-century Ben. “Character is a pattern,” he says. Eighteenth-century Ben would agree. But it is not a randomly acquired pattern. Character doesn’t just happen. It is molded and shaped. That’s why Franklin strived to acquire good and virtuous habits. He knew that character is never bequeathed, always earned. An eight-year-old—even one as bright and precocious as Alfie—might impress, but we wouldn’t say he had character. That demands time.
Twyford House is as rich in character as any, and it’s also full of surprises, Ben Leyland tells me. Like that time a ceiling collapsed, or when they discovered it had no central heating. “And the floors are a bit wibbly wobbly,” adds Anna. “The higher up you go, the more wibbly and wobbly they get.” There have been pleasant surprises too, like the eighteenth-century coat buttons they found scattered on the grounds and the three jigsaw puzzles discovered under a sealed windowsill. The puzzles, now framed and hanging in their living room, are maps of England and France. The date reads 1767. Were they a gift from Franklin to the Shipleys perhaps? A learning project for the Shipley girls? No one knows.
The Leylands make use of the fertile land at Twyford House, growing apples and roses and Annabelle hydrangeas, just as in Franklin’s time. Eira plucks a black currant from a tree and hands it to me. I hesitate, making a lame joke about food coming from the supermarket, not trees, before taking a bite. It is sweet and delicious.
We walk down a gravel path before reaching a small cottage with a red brick exterior, white framed windows, and an arched doorway. A vine flowering with pink roses climbs the front wall. This is the place. This is where 250 years ago, Ben Franklin sat down one August morning and, quill in hand, began to write his autobiography, a classic of the American canon.
Ben wrote on large sheets of folio paper, folded in half. Each page measured ten by fifteen inches, roughly the size of a laptop computer. Ben penned a draft on the left side of the page and jotted notes on the right. Each evening, he’d read his day’s writing to the Shipleys and their five daughters, the book’s first audience.
The words did not come easily, at least at first. Ben made more revisions on the first page than any other. Writing with no clear purpose, he was in uncharted waters. The book begins with these words: “Dear Son.” An epistolary hand extended to William. The two were growing apart. William, forty years old, was three thousand miles away in New Jersey, where he was serving as royal governor, a position he owed at least in part to his father’s connections. But more than distance separated them. William, London educated and posh, did not share his father’s growing antipathy for British rule. He was, and would remain, a devout Loyalist.
Franklin possessed the rare ability to live his life and observe it simultaneously. He could stand apart from himself with bemused detachment, a state of mind Christians call holy indifference. “He speaks of himself as if he were speaking of another person,” said his French friend, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. This skill is one reason the autobiography is such a delight to read. Ben doesn’t take himself too seriously. He happily reveals his shortcomings and doubts, often with self-deprecating humor. The same cannot be said of Adams, Jefferson, and other founders whose wooden memoirs elicit nods but no smiles.
Still, Ben’s honesty only goes so far. He showed no interest in his interior life. There’s no soul-searching akin to St. Augustine’s or tell-all confessions like Rousseau’s. Ben does not get naked on the page. The autobiography is a useful, do-it-yourself guide to moving up in the world, not only financially but morally too. It is a self-help book, America’s first and, I think, still its best. Ben—or, rather, the character Ben created on the page—is funny and smart and ambitious. Most of all, he is resourceful, the first self-made American.
At the time, attitudes about the self were shifting. Once considered mysterious and unknowable, the self was now seen as something that could be unraveled, a code to be cracked. “A mighty maze! But not without a plan,” wrote the poet Alexander Pope. Usually that plan doesn’t reveal itself until the end of our days, and Franklin wasn’t anywhere near his. He was a young sixty-five, with many productive years ahead of him. He exercised regularly. He never smoked and predicted tobacco would go out of style in a century. (Right idea, wrong timing.) And he had good genes. His mother lived until eighty-five, his father until eighty-nine.
At first, Ben’s desire to reminisce surprised me. He was a possibilian, and possibility lies in the future, not the past, right? Not exactly. The future needs the past, could not exist without it. You are about to try something and you recall the last time you tried it. Was it a success or failure? Without a sense of the past, you couldn’t recognize something, anything, as new. “Enjoy the present hour, be mindful of the past,” Franklin said.
A few years earlier, he and William had traveled to the village of Ecton, seventy-five miles north of London and home to generations of Franklins. Ben, the youngest son of ten, marveled at the fact his father was the youngest son too, as was his father, going back five generations. He also discovered he had a doppelgänger. Uncle Thomas, an ingenious problem solver and “chief mover of all public spirited undertakings,” died four years to the day before Ben was born. Had he died on the same day, observed William, “one might have suppos’d a transmigration.”
Even a futurist like Ben Franklin needed to stand on the firm and reassuring ground of the past. He possessed a deep appreciation of history. When he founded the Philadelphia Academy, the progenitor of the University of Pennsylvania, he included history as one of the core subjects (along with swimming). Yet somehow we’ve forgotten this side of Franklin and refashioned him as a far-sighted visionary fixated on the future, not the past. Yes, Franklin was forward-looking, but as he sped ahead, he never lost sight of where he had been, never forgot that, as one modern scholar said, “humans are history-bearing animals.”
Not long ago, I was talking on the phone with a Franklinista named Nian-Sheng Huang. He grew up in China, and life was hard. During the Cultural Revolution, he spent ten years exiled in Inner Mongolia. He eventually immigrated to the United States and enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied American history, specializing in Franklin. It’s no coincidence Huang chose history as his discipline. The Chinese are awash in history, while we Americans wade in shallow waters.
“To many Chinese, America is just a baby,” he said. “We Americans don’t really care about history; if something is more than ten years old that’s ancient. We’re constantly looking for something new, something fresh, something different. We really don’t have the time to listen to the past. That’s why we can move along quite rapidly in many fields. But there are also prices to pay for this attitude.”
“What sort of prices?” I ask.
One major cost, he said, is wisdom lost. “The answers are already there. We just don’t care to listen anymore.” Ben Franklin did listen. The past was another door to knowledge, one he always kept ajar.
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. For a long time, it was considered a psychiatric disorder, a sign of encroaching dementia among the elderly or neurological damage among the young. Symptoms included uncontrolled weeping, anorexia, and suicidal thoughts. Reminiscing was involuntary. It was not something you did; it was something that happened to you, and that something was awful. Nostalgia, concluded Johannes Hoffer, the seventeenth-century Swiss physician who coined the word, was “a cerebral disease of essentially demonic cause.”
This dark view of nostalgia persisted into the twentieth century. British novelist Somerset Maugham captured the prevailing sentiment. “What makes old age hard to bear is not a failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.” But must memories be a burden? Must old age be hard to bear?
No, said psychiatrist Robert Butler, in a groundbreaking 1963 academic paper. He coined a new phrase, “life review,” to describe this new interpretation. Far from pathological, reminiscing is “naturally occurring” and therapeutic. Old, unresolved conflicts resurface and “can be surveyed and reintegrated.” Life takes on new meaning, and the prospect of death feels less terrifying. Reminiscing, Butler concluded, should be encouraged. He quotes an anonymous seventy-six-year-old man: “My life is in the background of my mind much of the time; I cannot be any other way. Thoughts of the past play upon me; sometimes I play with them, encourage and savor them; at other times I dismiss them.”
Many recent studies validate this view of nostalgia. The simple act of reviewing your life—telling your story—has been found to decrease depression and anxiety and increase life satisfaction. It boosts optimism and softens the sting of loneliness. Reminiscing makes us happier. The past may be a foreign country, but it is one we’d be wise to visit regularly.
I like the concept of a life review but not the term. It sounds judgmental, like a performance evaluation conducted by God. I prefer “life story.” Reviews don’t generally have happy endings. Stories often do.
We can’t change our past, but we can change how we perceive it. A life review, or life story, is active, not passive. We may be recalling the past, but that recollection takes place in the present. Memory is subjective, and it is creative, more painting than photography. To tell your life story is to regain a semblance of mastery and control and, if you’re lucky, acceptance.
But why does looking back at our lives make us happier? A group of researchers from Guangzhou, China, investigated that question and found the secret ingredient (“mediating factor,” in social science speak): gratitude. Looking back at our life, we are often filled with gratitude, not regret. Reading about that study, I couldn’t help but think of Ben’s invocation: “Be quiet and thankful.” That was, I think, what propelled him to Twyford House and the first pages of his autobiography. He was overflowing with gratitude and wanted to share that sentiment with others. More than that, he wanted to supply a road map so that others might reach this happy place too.
At first, I envied the Leylands. I dip in and out of Ben World. They are immersed in it. They sleep in rooms he slept in. They walk the ground he walked. They never know when they might stumble across another Franklin artifact when walking the dog or taking out the trash. That could be me, I think, if I lived here, if—to get to the heart of the matter—I could afford to live here. Franklin’s namesake, Benjamin Leyland, works in finance. Currency is his currency. Ideas are mine. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I salivate at the thought of writing where Ben wrote.
It is a brief salivation, more of a dribble. After a few minutes, I realize that, no, I wouldn’t want to write in the Franklin cottage. It is the last place I would want to write. I recall meeting artists in Florence and philosophers in Athens. They were complete wrecks. Their cities’ past greatness weighed them down. A glorious past can inspire. It can also paralyze. I’ll take my little home office in suburban Washington, DC, any day.
I check my hybrid watch. I have not yet violated Franklin’s famous rule of thumb about visitors. I do not stink like a three-day-old fish, but why push it? Yes, it is time to leave the Leylands to their giant mulberry tree and their Annabelle hydrangeas and their house brimming with character and Ben-ness.
Twenty-first-century Ben offers to drive me to the train station in his electric Mini Cooper. I turn and see Anna and Alfie and Eira smiling and waving as if I were a departing family member. I return their wave, and am caught off guard by the warm feeling welling inside my chest. I don’t know these people, not really. We’ve just met. But I’m going to miss the Leylands, especially Alfie, so bright and curious. He doesn’t have character, not yet, but he will.
This is, I imagine, how Franklin felt when he boarded his carriage for the long and bumpy ride back to London. He was leaving paradise, the sweet air of Twyford, and returning to the world of dust and smoke and polite English treachery. I wonder if he experienced the same sinking sensation I do, like a ship taking on water faster than the crew can bail it. I suspect he did not. Ben’s emotional buoyancy was portable. He always traveled with it.
On the train back to London, I gaze out the window at the progressively urban scenery and wonder: Why don’t I review my life too, à la Ben? I am not that much younger than he was at the time. And I have tools at my disposal he couldn’t dream of: a laptop, a camera, ADHD meds.
Yet I find myself resisting this idea. Unlike Ben, I am not a founding father. I am not even a founding uncle or founding third cousin once removed. Then again, neither was Ben when he sat down to write his memoirs in 1771. Yes, he was famous and respected (by most), but he was not yet the larger-than-life Franklin of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention.
Still, I resist. Reviewing your life sounds like something old people do, and I am not old. I am not done with life yet, so why would I want to review it?
Somewhere around Clapham Common, the absurdity of my rationalization hits me. Reviewing a life still in progress means you still have time to make course corrections, large and small. Reviewing life is the first step toward improving it. You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.
Until now, I have exhibited little interest in my ancestry. What little familial excavation I have done has unearthed a rare and disturbing combination of dullness and drama. I had my DNA tested. It wasn’t my idea; I was working on a story for NPR. I spat into the little tube and a few weeks later the results landed in my inbox. I clicked and soon was reading what was surely the dullest ancestry report ever produced. Ninety-five percent Ashkenazi Jewish, mainly from eastern Europe and Russia. My hopes spiked when I saw I am 2 percent South Asian. That is statistically insignificant, though. I suspect the good people at Ancestry.com threw it in to make me feel better.
Yet within this plain-vanilla gene pool, darkness lurks. An uncle committed suicide. Decades later, my father threatened to do so and was briefly hospitalized for depression. I know these demons reside in me too, and honestly, it is a daily struggle to keep them at bay. My demons never sleep. At most, they power-nap. Exhuming my past, I’m afraid, might stir them from their light torpor.
Besides, my impending birthday, the one that features the number six, marks the beginning of an awkward age. The adolescence of senescence. Just as my teenage daughter toggles hourly between fully grown independent woman and helpless child who would really, really like Dad to cook dumplings for her, I toggle between youthful exuberance—I can do anything!—and a sober realization that, while not old by any means, I am no longer young either.
Ben aged without angst. Reviewing his correspondence, I detect no whining or grumbling about the onset of old age. His body was beginning to show signs of wear and tear: kidney stones and gout, to name just two. Yet Ben, unlike me, never let his various ailments disturb his equilibrium. He never became a crabby old man. If anything, he grew more serene with age. Buddha Ben on the ascendance. That same summer of 1771, shortly before decamping to Twyford House, he wrote to his sister Jane. He had witnessed much wickedness, seen how “mankind were devils to one another,” he said, but added, “Upon the whole I am much disposed to like the world as I find it.”
As my train pulls into Waterloo Station, I wonder: Where did that hopefulness, that stubborn optimism, come from? Was it innate or learned? I sure hope it was the latter.