Benjamin Franklin, Writing by Hand: Manuscript, Print, and Political Imagination

Abstract

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, WRITING BY HAND: Manuscript, Print, and Political Imagination Ann C. Dean Several images ofBenjamin Franklin holding a quill pen found ready markets during his lifetime.1 More recently, however, it has become difficult to imagine the Philadelphia printer using such an archaic object, rather than his bifocals, his electrical apparatus, or his printed newspaper. It is worth caUing up an image of the printer writing with a quiU, however, because it can help us see an important distinction in his work, a distinction between his uses of media to distribute his writing and his uses of media as metaphors within his writing. In executing his lifelong project ofrepresenting the future ofprint, Franklin often used a quUl. Scholars of print culture have fruitfuUy examined Franklin's visionary experiments with print's capacities for representing the abstract nature of a republican polity. Michael Warner and Mitchell Breitwieser both see Franklin 's work as a project ofconstructing a representative personality. They point to his use ofprint and republican theory to explain his writing as a concerted project of presenting his readers with an image of "representational legitimacy " (Warner 73; Breitwieser 173). On Franklin's desk, however, drafts of pieces destined for anonymous newspaper publication sat next to personal letters and diplomatic dispatches destined to remain in manuscript and to circulate only among smaU groups of family, friends, and political allies. This scribal work has provided much ofthe evidence for a group of recent books THE JOURNAL FOR EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004) © 2004 90 E THE JOURNAL FOR EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES on Franklin by historians: A LittleRevenge, The Devious Dr. Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin and his Enemies. These books, whose titles promise to show us a darker side of the affable Franklin, document his quests for patronage, his angry break with his son WiUiam, and his careerist self-promotion. The gap between this historical Franklin and the representative personality described by Warner and Breitwieser has been produced in part because Franklin's scribal writing has generaUybeen read by historians, whUe literary critics have focused on his printed writing. It is worth reading the two groups oftexts together , with an eye to the generic conventions and metaphorical resonances of each. Doing so reveals Franklin's detailed awareness ofthe political and social relations imaginable through work with differing media: oral, scribal, and printed. In aU media, Franklin consistently presents the relation between narrator and audience as a rhetorical construction that signifies a political possibUity . The conventions of scribal writing provided language for negotiating aUiances, promising and coUecting favors, and testing and displaying loyalty. The conventions ofprint, as Franklin practiced them, provided language for critique, analysis, and the questioning ofclaims to legitimacy. The political relationships implied by these languages were the subject ofFranklin's work in the 1750s and 60s. Franklin spent these years in London, employed as the agent of the Assembly of Pennsylvania and those of several other colonies to lobby for pro-American policies with the British government and people. He did so through addresses to powerful individuals in the government, addresses he made both oraUy and in writing, and through a flood ofnewspaper pieces concerning questions important to Americans. In his work as agent, Franklin found himselfworking between two different systems of conceptualizing colonial administration. His aUies in the colonies were arguing for a strictly republican theory of representation, and practicing something close to it in their colonial assemblies. The administration ofthe colonial government in London, however, treated the colonies as sources ofpatronage jobs for ministers and governors, and thus as part ofthe court administration that republican theorists found most suspicious. These two different understandings of colonial administration were related to two sets ofconventions for writing about politics: those ofscribal writing , which emphasized relationships, aUiances, the influence and importance ofthe great; and those ofprinted writing, which emphasized the general good, rational analysis, and the universal grounds ofvalue. The writing Franklin did for print in the 1750s and 60s consistentlyaddresses a public ofrational, critical newspaper readers. His scribal, or manuscript, communications written dur- DEAN ft 91 ing the same period, such as diplomatic dispatches and personal letters, on the other hand, exploit the medium...