Benjamin Franklin in London by George Goodwin review – demolishing a legend

At the core of American political culture is a foundation myth. When, during the 1770s, the colonists threw off the tyranny of George III, they not only won independence from British imperial rule, but also achieved a kind of self-realisation; Americans-in-waiting became fully fledged Americans. This aspect of the country’s founding legend is, of course, largely nonsense, but a version of the story is hardwired into American identity, and not just among Tea Party activists. It remains an integral component of civic education in American high schools, and is difficult enough to dislodge even at university level.

Yet over the past half century or so several brilliant American historians have unpicked various strands of this fabric. We know that 18th-century colonists referred to themselves as English or British; that identification with one’s own particular colony easily trumped any sense of a shared identity as Americans; and that, with the percolation of English cultural standards and consumer lifestyles throughout the mid-18th-century colonies, anglicisation was the dominant trend in colonial life in the decades preceding the American revolution.

Still, it remains hard to grasp just how profoundly the founding fathers of the United States imbibed English values. For Benjamin Franklin, statesman, writer, inventor and much else, England was tangible, familiar, almost home. As George Goodwin shows in a sensitive, finely textured and moving account of Franklin’s years in London, he enjoyed a very generous measure of domestic contentment in the imperial capital over the course of nearly two decades (with one brief interruption in 1762-64).

Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1706, the son of a silk dyer turned tallow chandler and soapmaker from Northamptonshire. Ben inherited something of his father’s versatility. Apprenticed at 12 to an older brother James, a printer, his bent was literary as well as typographical, with a gift for humour. Soon his editorial takeover of James Franklin’s New England Courant led to a breach with his brother. Ben made a fresh start first in Philadelphia, and then again in London between 1724 and 1726. On his return to Pennsylvania in 1726, Franklin established himself as a man of substance within the colony: not only a printer, but also owner of a newspaper, an almanac maker, bestselling author in the self-help genre, a scientist of international renown and man of affairs.

In Pennsylvania politics, Franklin identified with the popular party that aimed to curb the powers of the Penn family, the proprietors of the colony, indeed to recharter the territory under royal control. This cause, whose royalist implications seem ironic in hindsight, was to be the main focus of Franklin’s political career, and the issue that brought him to London in the late 1750s as a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania assembly. The claims of America would force their way on to Franklin’s agenda only in the course of his third lengthy stay in the metropolis from 1764; and the option of republican independence, as a last resort, later still.

The Franklin who set out for London in 1757 had high hopes of solving Pennsylvania’s proprietorial problem. After all, Franklin’s networks and connections were imperial and metropolitan, and not restricted to his colony. In 1753, indeed, he had become deputy postmaster-general for the whole of North America. He had also appropriated a coat of arms from the Franklins of Badlesmere in Kent, which he had incorporated in his personal seal, his seal of office and on a silver tankard. Unusually, among his mid-18th-century contemporaries, Franklin pondered the future trajectory of Britain’s American empire. He was involved in the Albany Plan of Union of 1754, a project for intercolonial cooperation that proved fruitless. This was because the colonists did not yet think of themselves as “American”, and in the 1750s the idea of pan-colonial solidarity remained no more than a gleam in the eyes of Franklin and a few visionary colleagues.

Franklin lodged in London with Margaret Stevenson in Craven Street. Mrs Stevenson, together with her daughter Polly, came to constitute a second family for Franklin, who was sparing in warmth with new acquaintances but unbuttoned and relaxed with established friends, and in his domestic setups on both sides of the Atlantic. Back in Philadelphia, Franklin had a common-law wife of long standing, Deborah Read, but she was a reluctant traveller and stayed on in Pennsylvania in Franklin’s absences to run his financial affairs. During Franklin’s decade and a half in London, Deborah appears not as a cherished wife and companion, but as a business partner who is sometimes scolded for dilatoriness.

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In London he integrated easily into parts of the British establishment. He became a pillar of the Royal Society, to which he had already been elected, and formed close friendships with Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, and – notwithstanding his exiguous religious beliefs – with Bishop Jonathan Shipley and his family. Yet when Franklin ran into outright snobbery and chilling aristocratic hauteur, these – which existed aplenty – brought out a prickly, assertive pride in his artisanal origins. Franklin vacillated uneasily between a leather-apron identity as a tradesman who had risen in life through his own efforts, and a relaxed acceptance of inherited privilege and hierarchy. Although Goodwin records several instances of slights and putdowns, Franklin still possessed considerable clout. In 1763 his son William was appointed the royal governor of New Jersey.

During his years in London the focus of Franklin’s lobbying activities shifted from the Pennsylvania charter to the emerging crisis in relations between London and the colonies. While a policy of coercion prevailed, from which flowed a demand for American independence, the struggle in the highest circles of British policymaking between the proponents of coercion and conciliation was a close-run thing. There was nothing inevitable about independence. The chance play of personality – and especially a handful of wilfully obtuse characters such as Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1770s, and the Earl of Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the colonies between 1768 and 1772 – played as large a part in the eventual estrangement of the colonies from Britain as the brute realities of geography.

George III emerges from Goodwin’s story not as a tyrant, but “most emphatically” as “a pedant”. Where did authority lie – with the British parliament, or with the parliament-like bodies found in the colonies? Franklin believed that the monarch was the “ultimate protector” of the colonial legislatures against the pretensions of Westminster. But George III was reluctant to overstep the bounds of British constitutional convention. The tyrant of patriot demonology was a straw man.

As relations between Britain and the colonies worsened, Franklin’s own position became precarious. In the colonies there were suspicions that the all-too-worldly Franklin had gone native in the imperial capital. In London, on the other hand, Franklin’s outspoken campaigning on behalf of the rebellious colonists began to smack of treason and sedition. Eventually, scenting arrest, he made his way back across the Atlantic in March 1775.

Back “home” in Pennsylvania, Franklin, nimble as ever, successfully inserted himself into the patriot cause. On a personal level, however, his return was grim. Deborah had died in December 1774, having suffered a stroke five years before, about which Franklin seems not to have been aware – or perhaps did not want to know. William wrote sternly to his father that he had left his return too late: “I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment in that respect preyed a good deal on her spirits.” Soon the breach with William was political too, the last royal governor of New Jersey returning to exile in England, while Benjamin Franklin reinvented himself in the last 15 years of his life, both in the US and on a further mission to France, as a homespun, demotic American.

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