YOUNG BEN FRANKLIN
Aldridge, Alfred Owen
Young Ben Franklin The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by L. W. Labaree and W. J. Bell, Jr. Yale University Press. Vol. II (January 1735—December 1744). 471 pp. Vol. Ill (January 1745—June...
...His most important work for this period, Poor Richard's Almanac, contains the outstanding collection of proverbs in the Western Hemisphere...
...In his literary efforts, Franklin was equally involved with the practical and particular, presenting realistic appraisals of human character...
...In his youth he had explored this problem and given up in exasperation...
...His later international reputation as an electrical wizard grew out of these investigations...
...Bibliographical footnotes in these two volumes are exhaustive, but there are some allusions in Franklin's texts which could stand explanatory notes...
...Reviewed by Alfred Owen Aldridge Tn these volumes we are able to trace Benjamin Franklin's activities between the ages of twenty-five and forty, the period during which his main efforts were directed toward establishing himself as a printer and citizen in Philadelphia...
...The original piece in the Magazine which should have been printed in full is an "Essay on Paper-Currency, Proposing a new Method for Fixing its Value...
...His lighter mood is presented through his racy squibs, "Old Mistresses Apologue" and "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker...
...10 each...
...This statement is as inaccurate for the American colonies as for England and has no validity...
...The editors have done a superb collecting job...
...Until this edition, it was not apparent that even before Franklin's electrical experiments learned men in England and the colonies recognized him as one of the outstanding thinkers in America...
...Their chief oversight consists in failing to recognize as Franklin's an original article which he published in his General Magazine and Historical Chronicle...
...His correspondence and newspaper articles reveal his intellectual development and the range of his business affairs, but the writings which have survived give only a meager insight into his personal life...
...Notable in this connection is his correspondence with the evangelist George Whitefield and his essays in The Pennsylvania Gazette concerning ethical problems raised by the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury...
...At other periods in his career he may have been concerned with scientific theory, but at this time he was merely investigating particular phenomena...
...513 pp...
...In one of the few unfounded statements which the otherwise meticulously careful editors have allowed themselves, they affirm that "Eighteenth-Century periodicals contained almost nothing original, and the General Magazine was no exception...
...Franklin's absorption in religion was moral—a never-ending quest to learn how man could best serve God and humanity...
...The manuscript in Franklin's own handwriting exists in the American Philosophical Society...
...A major editorial project such as the Franklin Papers must be judged by its degree of success in two primary functions: assembling documents and presenting them through annotation and interpretation...
...However, the editors are to be commended for the remarkably complete picture of the young Franklin and his environment which emerges from these volumes...
...During these years, Franklin's main activities were those of printer and postmaster, and his chief intellectual interests religion and science...
...In science also Franklin was not investigating broad relationships in an effort to discover new laws...
...In his religious speculation Franklin was not concerned with the metaphysical problem of man's place in the universe and his relation to other creatures...
...Ill (January 1745—June 1750...
...Also unaccountably missing from the present edition is a major essay Franklin wrote for The Pennsylvania Gazette (1737) in which he ridicules Titan Leeds, a rival almanac-maker...
...Nor was he primarily interested in polemical divinity—although we can read tracts he wrote for a controversy in the local Presbyterian church in which he was the principal contender...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
