7 Benjamin Franklin 7artisan crafts. In an age that privileged the firstborn son,
Franklin was, as he tartly noted in his Autobiography, “the
youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations
back.” He learned to read very early and had one year in
grammar school and another under a private teacher, but
his formal education ended at age 10. At 12 he was appren-
ticed to his brother James, a printer. His mastery of the
printer’s trade, of which he was proud to the end of his
life, was achieved between 1718 and 1723. In the same
period he read tirelessly and taught himself to write
effectively.
His first enthusiasm was for poetry, but, discouraged
with the quality of his own, he gave it up. Prose was
another matter. Young Franklin discovered a volume of
The Spectator—featuring Joseph Addison and Sir Richard
Steele’s famous periodical essays, which had appeared in
England in 1711–12—and saw in it a means for improving
his writing. He read these Spectator papers over and over,
copied and recopied them, and then tried to recall them
from memory. He even turned them into poetry and
then back into prose. Franklin realized, as all the
Founders did, that writing competently was such a rare
talent in the 18th century that anyone who could do it well
immediately attracted attention. “Prose writing” became,
as he recalled in his Autobiography, “of great Use to me in
the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my
Advancement.”
In 1721 James Franklin founded a weekly newspaper,
the New-England Courant, to which readers were invited to
contribute. Benjamin, now 16, read and perhaps set in type
these contributions and decided that he could do as well
himself. In 1722 he wrote a series of 14 essays signed “Silence
Dogood” in which he lampooned everything from funeral
eulogies to the students of Harvard College. For one so