Book of Ages by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307958358
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

Franklin’s story doesn’t fit neatly on one side of that divide, nor Jane’s on the other. Their lives were messier than that. John Adams found Benjamin Franklin impossible to account for. “His name was familiar to government and people,” Adams wrote Jefferson, “to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as to plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chamber, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him a friend to human kind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.” Adams knew, though, that a large part of Franklin’s fame, high and low, was a consequence of the eighteenth century’s revolution in reading and writing: “Throughout his whole life he courted and was courted by the printers, editors, and correspondents of reviews, magazines, journals, and pamphleteers, and those little busy meddling scribblers that are always buzzing about the press,” Adams fumed. “If a collection could be made of all the Gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon ‘le grand Franklin’ would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.” But there was more behind Franklin’s fame, too: something to do with history itself. Writing his biography, Adams believed, would require telling the story of an entire century; explaining Franklin would require writing a book of ages. “To develop that complication of causes, which conspired to produce so singular a phenomenon, is far beyond my means or forces,” Adams wrote. “Perhaps it can never be done without a complete history of the philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century. Such a work would be one of the most important that ever was written; much more interesting to this and future ages than the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ ”16

John Adams was puzzled by the insufficiency of history. As history, the story of a life like Franklin’s is, finally, a mystery, unless it’s told alongside the story of a life like Jane’s. In 1806, Charles Brockden Brown hinted at this in an essay called “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature.” Brown, who believed fiction to be truer than history, blamed historians for blinding readers to the pathos of small lives. “The human character appears diminutive, when compared to those we met with in history,” Brown wrote, “yet am I persuaded that domestic sorrows are not less poignant, and many of our associates are characters not inferior to the elaborate delineations which so much interest in the deceptive page of history.” This, for Brown, was the historian’s darkest deception, the idea that only the great are good: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are

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