"The fine and noble china vase, the British Empire": Benjamin Franklin's "Love-Hate" View of England
THE MANY CAREERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN provide some of the most familiar images in American history: his birth in 1706 on Milk Street, Boston, as one of seventeen children of a poor candle-maker; his famous arrival in Philadelphia at the age of seventeen, when he was all but penniless and able only to buy "three great puffy rolls" of bread; his following the crowd to what he found was a meetinghouse, where he fell fast asleep; and ultimately his crowning glory as a wise and benevolent Founding Father of the young republic. Moreover, he was, in his Autobiography and in a vast correspondence, his own image-maker, blending fact and fancy so that in the end neither reader nor author could be sure of truth. Among the images is that of a runaway apprentice; Whitfield Bell, in jest, has even suggested that Franklin has, among all his "firsts," probably been hailed somewhere "as America's first, or at least most successful, juvenile delinquent." If Benjamin Franklin began his many careers—printer, journalist, inventor, scientist, citizen, postmaster, legislator, politician, diplomat—in Philadelphia, it was not his native but only the first of his adopted cities, to be followed by London and then by Paris. He was bred on the Boston waterfront. Thoroughly urban, he rapidly and easily became a cosmopolitan. To each city he took easily, even greedily; in each, in turn, he expected to settle and to die. On arrival in London in 1757 he was fifty-one