Benjamin Franklin
Clark, Ronald W.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Ronald W. Clark / Random House / $22.95
Tom Wendel
found work outside London. There is no certainty as to Franklin's authorship of A Witch Trial at Mount Holly. The Letter to the...
...they deal not with genealogy but with the lightning rod...
...It is doubtful that it made the Revolution inevitable...
...The list of omissions would equal that of the commissions, and then there are errors of interpretation...
...Franklin's position on the Anglo-American dispute seems ambiguous at best...
...The emphasis on science is made clear from the striking opening pages of this volume...
...Even worse, he has little knowledge of colonial Pennsylvania, the arena in which Franklin won his first political battles...
...Why leave out the archetypical story of young Franklin's bedraggled entrance into Philadelphia, parading before his future wife's house while clumsily holding three great puffy rolls...
...He not only was known to his colleagues as author of the Dogood Papers, he himself "discovered" his authorship to them...
...The book begins in tnedias res, in 1752...
...it had a run of only six issues...
...Franklin's other scientific interests are expertly-if all too briefly-delineated...
...so does Clark's ability to "spin a yarn": even though we know how it all comes out, there is some real suspense here...
...Is it carping to point out: Franklin was 65, not 55, when he began the Autobiography...
...The Generalist has a little background in a few of the aspects of Franklin's career...
...The opening pages are a harbinger of things to come...
...As it is, Benjamin Franklin is seriously, maybe crucially, flawed by innumerable historical errors...
...he is portrayed as "obsessed" (Franklin is frequently obsessed in this book) with healing the breach, but then in the Hutchin-son affair he is motivated to bring about "a major row or confrontation" to resolve the dispute (which, among other things, was simply not Franklin's style...
...The Specialist, on the other hand, comes to Franklin through an interest in one of the good doctor's activities, be it medicine, meteorology, autobiography, diplomacy, typography, hydrology, convection, the Constitutional Convention, physiocracy, democracy, music, Pennsylvania, electricity, sociology (as he was the first everything in our history, his "Observations on the Increase of Mankind" make him our first sociologist), the common cold, or the common man...
...And although Clark is excellent on the affair of the Hutchin-son letters, he attributes too much to that crisis...
...Ronald W. Clark is more of a Specialist than a Generalist, his primary interest being science, or, to be more exact, scientists...
...He has written biographies of Einstein, Freud, J.B.S...
...Among these are Clark's frequently admirable style and the interesting bibliography particularly strong in English sources...
...We have multi-volume biographies of relatively dull people like George Washington and James Madison...
...If we can excuse Clark's errors, then, his Benjamin Franklin is an enjoyable and readable account...
...Which brings us to hyperbole: Franklin had "almost alone given Philadelphia the library, the hospiWith predictable regularity, one-volume biographies of the incomparable Benjamin Franklin issue forth ,from the nation's presses...
...Although such examples abound, Clark's book, in all fairness, is not hagiographical...
...He is usually broadly familiar with American revolutionary historiography and the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment...
...And there are errors of omission as well as commission...
...The Letter to the Royal Academy was written in the 1780s, not the 1730s...
...The book is full of cogent quotations from Franklin and his contemporaries...
...he left her in his friend Franklin's eager hands while he tal...
...Nor is it without other positive attributes, the above error list notwithstanding...
...Here, the Generalist could have come to the aid of the Specialist/One or two errors would be a slight matter, but their multiplication, I should think, is proper cause for comment...
...Haldine (biochemist and geneticist), the Huxleys, the philosophical scientist Bertrand Russell, and he is currently working on a biography of Darwin...
...Franklin's work in France "made American victory possible...
...Of all of these and more, their practitioners are drawn to Franklin...
...The General Magazine was not successful...
...Why not one of Franklin...
...Clark is superb on Franklin as electrician, though for the complete story one must still turn to I. Bernard Cohen's Fra Kifcm and Newton...
...The Albany Plan of Union did not involve "states," but colonies, and the Stamp Act had no effect on "the United States," which would not be born for another eleven years...
...BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Ronald W. Clark / Random House / $22.95 Tom Wendel found work outside London...
...But about electrical currents and other scientific matters he is a novice...
...And why leave out old Franklin's superb vindication when the great Chatham praised him before the House of Lords...
...the scene is Marly-la-Ville, where the Frankliniste Francois Dalibard verified the identity of electricity and lightning...
...Pennsylvania's Royal Charter does not exempt the Penn family estates from taxation...
...Biographers who tackle the "first American" come in two categories: the Generalist and the Specialist...
...A book published in 1977 shows the way: Arthur Bernon Tourtellot's Benjamin Franklin, the Shaping of Genius: the Boston Years...
...Ralph did not "abandon" his mistress...
...The book would have been immensely strengthened had Clark devoted more space to these...
...Its fascinating and learned 440 pages take us to the year 1723- Franklin to age seventeen...
...Myriad unusual details hold the reader's attention...
...But by virtue of its one-volume format, it is also an incomplete account: what is needed is a multi-volume "Franklin," written by a Generalist willing to become a Specialist...
...and so on, throughout the entire book...
...There is really no sense here of the radical Whig milieu from which the American Revolutionaries drew their ideology...
...Far better that someone pick up that challenge than for one more redundancy to appear, no matter how felicitous it maybe...
Vol. 16 • September 1983 • No. 9
