The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (25 page)

The most
famous of Franklin’s alter egos was Richard Saunders. Had Franklin known what a lasting success Richard Saunders would be, he probably would have chosen the name with greater care, for the confusion that arose in readers’ minds—was this Ben Franklin speaking or Richard Saunders?—was compounded by the existence of a real Richard Saunders, a physician and astrologer who had produced an almanac in London for two decades during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Franklin certainly knew of Saunders; he may have read surviving copies of Saunders’s almanac. Yet even if Saunders’s publication physically escaped him, the success of Saunders’s almanac—and of almanacs generally—did not.

Almanacs had existed in one form or another for several centuries.
The word was said to derive from the Spanish-Arabic term
al manakh,
for “calendar”—although other etymologies were forwarded by imaginative scholars, not excluding the almanac-makers themselves. Samuel Ellsworth, a contemporary of Franklin, solved the mystery once for all, and simultaneously applauded the superlative, but not unlimited, talents of himself and others of his vocation:

As to the abilities requisite for composing an ALMANACK, the obvious etymology of the word is sufficient to convince us that in the opinion of the ancients they must be very extraordinary; ALMANACK, an evident abbreviation of ALL MY KNACK, or ALL MAN’S KNACK, plainly intimating, in the most expressive and laconic manner, that ALMANACK was the
ne plus ultra
of human genius, that this astonishing art engrossed all the powers and faculties of the mind, to that degree that a man that had a KNACK at this could not have had a KNACK at anything else.

As the more pedestrian Arabic origin suggested, almanacs were constructed around a calendar. Samuel Atkins, who produced an almanac in Pennsylvania half a century before Franklin, explained that on his journeys through the mid-Atlantic provinces he found “the people generally complaining that they scarcely knew how the time passed, nor that they hardly knew the day of rest, or Lord’s day, when it was, for want of a diary, or daybook, which we call an
Almanack.”

Calendar-keeping was complicated in Franklin’s era by the confusion that attended the changeover from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian. Catholic Europe had accepted Pope Gregory XIII’s reform in the late sixteenth century, but Protestant Europe, including England, remained behind the times—literally, by about eleven days. The question of when the year started also occasioned confusion: in March, according to the old style, or January, by the new? A person happening upon an antique newspaper bearing such date as “January 6, 1705” needed to know whether this was old style or new, since the difference amounted to nearly a whole year. (Thus Franklin, born January 6, 1705, by the old calendar, was born January 17, 1706, by the new.) Conscientious date-writers solved the problem by the device of “January 6, 1705/6.” Not till 1752 would the British government formally decree the changeover within the British empire.

Beyond mere enumeration of days, almanacs noted fixed holidays and such movable feasts as Easter. They charted the phases of the moon,
which constituted essential intelligence for travelers and others in an era before extensive artificial lighting, and the related timing of tides, upon which sailors and fishermen, as well as seafaring travelers, depended. Farmers relied on the almanacs’ identification of likely latest and earliest frosts. Citizens with legal business took note of the court-meeting days.

No one, of that age or later, could deny the influence of the sun and moon on human existence; from this incontrovertible fact it was a small step to the belief that other heavenly bodies also influenced life on earth. Although Newton was demystifying the mechanism of the cosmos, astrology retained a hold over many people who knew no better explanation for myriad misfortunes large and small, for wondrous and mundane delights, and for all those other things that remained inexplicable in a prescientific time. Almanac-makers may have placed more or less importance on planetary conjunctions and transits than almanac readers, who themselves varied greatly in the store they put in such things. But readers expected astrology with their equinoxes and eclipses, and publishers did not disappoint them.

Readers expected other expert information as well. For centuries astrologers had doubled as physicians, and vice versa—the real Richard Saunders being a recent example. Moreover, an age that swallowed the idea of witches hardly choked on a magical connection between the macrocosm of the stars and planets and the microcosm of the liver and bowels. Almanackers made the connection explicit; the “man of signs,” a woodcut or engraving identifying various organs with signs of the zodiac (the two arms with Gemini, the heart with Leo, the bowels with Virgo, and so on), was a standard feature of nearly every almanac. On a more practical plane, almanacs included recipes for poultices, emetics, and potions that ranged from the rankly superstitious to the semiscientific. What a later era would call psychological counseling was included as well; this completed a circle with the astrological element by identifying particular days as good for this activity or bad for that.

Style, naturally, counted. Indeed, it counted for a great deal, since most of the substance of what went into almanacs was common knowledge—or common ignorance, as the case happened to be. The very familiarity of almanacs made them old friends to their readers; to tamper too much with the formula would disappoint—and damage sales. In consequence, such differentiation as took place between almanacs took place within relatively narrow constraints. What an almanacker said often mattered less than how he—or she, in a few cases (including that of James Franklin’s widow and Ben’s sister-in-law, Ann, who took over the printing business upon her husband’s death in 1735)—said it.

In short, almanacs attempted to be all things to all people. One English almanacker summarized the craft:

Wit, learning, order, elegance of phrase,
Health, and the art to lengthen out our days
Philosophy, physic and poesie,
All this, and more, in this book to see.

The best of the almanacs succeeded famously. Sales figures are elusive, but such as survive indicate that in England in the 1660s, total sales averaged about 400,000 annually. Even after the government, remarking the plumpness of this goose, levied a fat tax, sales topped 450,000 a century later. In America, almanac publications outstripped those of all other books combined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most popular of the American almanacs, produced by Nathaniel Ames, sold between 50,000 and 60,000 per year. A man could get rich by almanacs.

Franklin
intended to do just that. He had already been in the business of publishing almanacs, starting with Thomas Godfrey’s
Pennsylvania Almanack
in 1729 (for 1730) followed by John Jerman’s
American Almanack
the next year. Either Jerman was hard to please or he liked to keep his printers off balance; he had been with Andrew Bradford before coming to Franklin, and he returned to Bradford in 1732. Godfrey too abandoned Franklin for Bradford that year, perhaps for economic reasons, perhaps as part of the general falling-out between his family and Franklin. Whatever the reasons, Franklin found himself staring at the final months of 1732—prime almanac season—with nothing to offer his customers.

So he decided to write his own. He stole the name of Richard Saunders from the deceased astrologer-doctor. He borrowed—apparently without asking—and adapted the title of an almanac his brother James was publishing at Newport:
Poor Robin’s Almanack
(itself appropriated from a seventeenth-century almanac published under the same title in London). His format followed any number of other almanacs. His facts were public property or easily deducible therefrom.

What was peculiarly Franklin about
Poor Richard
was the pushy manner in which he marketed it and the distinctive voice in which its
author spoke. “Just Published for 1733,” declared the
Gazette
on December 28, 1732:

Poor Richard: An Almanack containing the Lunations, Eclipses, Planets’ Motions and Aspects, Weather, Sun and Moon’s Rising and Setting, High Water, &c., besides many pleasant and witty Verses, Jests and Sayings, Author’s Motive of Writing, Prediction of the Death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds, Moon no Cuckold, Batchelor’s Folly, Parson’s Wine and Baker’s Pudding, Short Visits, Kings and Bears, New Fashions, Game for Kisses, Katherine’s Love, Different Sentiments, Signs of a Tempest, Death a Fisherman, Conjugal Debate, Men and Melons, H. the Prodigal, Breakfast in Bed, Oyster Lawsuit &c.

Gazette
readers intrigued enough to buy the bound version (priced at three shillings sixpence per dozen, obviously intended for resale) or the broadsheet edition (two shillings sixpence the dozen) were introduced to Richard Saunders, Philomath—a standard honorific for almanac-makers—by Saunders himself. “Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than the public good; but in this I should not be sincere, and men are nowadays too wise to be deceived by pretenses how specious soever.” Like the printer Franklin apologizing for the advertisement that gave offense to certain customers, Saunders confessed to monetary motives. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud. She cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow while I do nothing but gaze at the stars, and has threatened to burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my Dame’s desire.”

Twenty-five years earlier Jonathan Swift, writing as Isaac Bickerstaff, had drawn attention to his own almanac by solemnly predicting the death of his rival John Partridge. Lampooning those who took astrological predictions seriously, Swift supplied the precise day and hour of Partridge’s demise: 11
P.M.
on March 29, 1708. The dread day arrived, and was followed shortly by printed accounts, written in a style suspiciously Swiftian, of Partridge’s passing. Partridge, outraged, protested that he remained very much alive. Swift dismissed the protests as a hoax perpetrated by persons intent on deceiving the public.

Franklin knew of the Swift stratagem—and knew that most readers in America did not. So he had Richard Saunders declare that the only reason he was commencing publication of his almanac just now—he had long been excessive poor and his wife excessive proud—was that his good friend and fellow student of the stars, Mr. Titan Leeds, was about to expire. Mr. Leeds (really) published an almanac of his own each year, and Saunders said he had not wished to injure him in any regard. “But this obstacle (I am far from speaking it with pleasure) is soon to be removed, since inexorable death, who was never known to respect merit, has already prepared the mortal dart, the fatal sifter has already extended her destroying shears, and that ingenious man must soon be taken from us.”

Typically, Franklin twisted the template he employed; he injected an element of competition into his forecast of impending doom. As colleagues in the astrologic art, Saunders said, both he and Mr. Leeds had cast the latter’s horoscope. By Saunders’s calculation, death would come for Leeds at 3:29
P.M.
on October 17, 1733. By Leeds’s calculation (Saunders said), it would tarry till the 26th of the same month. “This small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these 9 years past…. Which of us is most exact, a little time will now determine.” Yet whether Leeds’s days were the few more or the few less, they were, by Saunders’s reckoning, irretrievably delimited. “As therefore these provinces may not longer expect to see any of his performances after this year, I think myself free to take up the task, and request a share of the public encouragement.” The reader—purchaser, rather—who provided such encouragement might consider himself “not only as purchasing an useful utensil but as performing an act of charity to his poor friend and servant, R. Saunders.”