Benjamin Franklin is of course one of the brightest lights in the pantheon of American history. We sometimes forget, over two hundred years later, that he was already an established and respected public figure, in America and Europe, long before those eventful years of revolution and independence. A selfmade man, we have mostly forgotten his antecedents.
Franklin is celebrated as the epitome of an enlightened Age: a boy of humble origins who, by his own efforts, became a successful man of affairs, a scientist and inventor, a philosopher, and a stateman. The youngest son in a family of seventeen children, he left Boston at the age of eighteen. The only real tie he had with the family he left behind was his affection for his lively youngest sister, Jane. The two of them wrote to each other faithfully for the rest of their lives, and it was Jane (Jenny to Franklin, as he was Benny to her) whom he came to see on his rare trips to the city of his birth.
Franklin was a prodigious correspondant even in an age when letters were the primary means of ommunication, and he wrote more frequently and faithfully to Jenny than to anyone else, starting when he was twentyone (and she fourteen) and continuing until his death at 84. And yet, as Lepore points out, Franklin never mentions his sister in his autobiography or in any of his published works. She remained as obscure as he was famous. Married at fifteen to Edward Mecom, who never seems to have succeeded at anything, and who was perennially in debt, Jane cared for her aging parents and bore twelve children (the last when she was 39). Mecom could not even provide a home for his family.The Mecoms lived with Jane's parents until her father and mother died. Some of her children died in infancy, some lived to grow up and marry, but none of them prospered. Two of her sons had mental problems; one had to be confined and his mother bore the cost of his care. One was lost and presumed dead. During the War Jenny was forced to flee the British occupation of Boston with no more than she could carry --- but she carried away her brother's letters and the books he sent her. His letters were, she wrote, the chief pleasure of her life.
In her widowhood he made provision for her care and comfort, and she lived more happily then than she ever had before. If Lepore first began her research about Jane because of Franklin, she soon became absorbed in Jane for Jane's sake. Comparatively few of Jane's letters to Franklin have survived; the earliest written message of hers that has been preserved is just a sentence she added to a letter written by their mother in 1751.
But with prodigous effort, building on what little we know of the life of ordinary people in eighteenth century Boston, Lepore has created a portrait of a woman with grit, determination and wit to match her brother's. A clever boy like Franklin could go off to seek his fortune, improve his circumstances and prosper. A clever girl like Jane had no comparable options. Her possibilities were circumscribed and constrained: house, husband, children; duty, submission, devotion. And yet, through her brother, Jane found something more for herself, an acknowledgement of worth and meaning in his lifelong affection. Her story provides a new perspective on Franklin's life and accomplishments; but more importantly, her life provides a new perspective on the unrecorded, unknown history of our nation.
Check out this interview with Jill Lepore on Vimeo, as she talks about the challenges and the satisfactions of recovering Jane Franklin's canny, witty and passionate voice.
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