1. Greene, Donald J., The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 20, 18Google Scholar, passim; Ameter, Brenda, “Samuel Johnson's View of America: A Moral Judgment, Based on Conscience, Not Compromise,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Anderson, David R. and Kolb, Gwin J. (New York: MLA, 1993), 71–77Google Scholar; and Boswell, James, The Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, George Birkbeck and Powell, L. F. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934–1950), 2: 312, 294, 315 n. 1; 3: 290.Google Scholar

2. Boswell, James, Boswell in Search of a Wife: 1766–1769, ed. Brady, Frank and Pottle, Frederick (New York: McGraw, 1956), 300.Google Scholar

3. John Adams, quoted in Ziff, Larzer, Writing in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Van Doren, Carl, Benjamin Franklin (1938; New York: Viking, 1964), 419Google Scholar; Krutch, Joseph Wood, Samuel Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 1944), 373Google Scholar; Boswell in Search, 292Google Scholar; and Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 2: 59 n. 3.Google Scholar

5. Quinlan, Maurice J., “Dr. Franklin Meets Dr. Johnson,” in New Light on Dr. Johnson, ed. Hilles, Frederick W. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 107–20.Google Scholar

6. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 277Google Scholar. Labaree does not identify the source of this quotation that appears in his entry for “Cave, Edward.”

7. Johnson, Samuel, “Review of Lewis Evans, Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America (1756),” in Political Writings, ed. Greene, Donald J., vol. 10 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 201 and n. 198.Google Scholar

8. Labaree, , Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 242 n. 6Google Scholar. The edition hereafter cited in the body of my text is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo and Zall, P. M. (New York: Norton, 1986).Google Scholar

9. Wimsatt, W. K. Jr., Philosophic Words (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1948), 31, 38, 92Google Scholar. See also Schwartz, Richard B., Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 39–40Google Scholar; and DeMaria, Robert Jr., “Johnson's Dictionary,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Clingham, Greg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 100Google Scholar. If Johnson was not the first to use the word to describe a charged political atmosphere, and I have no absolute reason to think he was, without a search beyond the OED, his pamphlet, notorious in some English, as well as colonial, quarters, at any rate gave the conceit impetus and wide circulation (see Jefferson, Thomas, Autobiography, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Koch, Adrienne and Peden, William [New York: Modern Library, 1944], 9–10)Google Scholar: “The effect of the day; through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity.” John Adams, who had only contempt for Johnson, seems to follow Johnson closely, associating Franklin, electricity, and the revolution when he writes to Benjamin Rush in 1790: “The history of our Revolution will be that Dr. Franklin's electric rod smote and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrised him with his rod, and thence-forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war” (quoted in Ferguson, Robert A., The American Enlightenment 1750–1820 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997], 2Google Scholar). In a letter to Jefferson on May 21, 1812, again the word serves a galvanized political situation: “The Embargo and the Vote against any Augmentation of the Navy … has … electrified and revolutionized all the subsequent Elections” (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Cappon, Lester J. [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988], 304).Google Scholar

10. Citations to Taxation No Tyranny by volume and page in the body of my text are to Johnson, Political Writings.

11. See also Johnson, , Political Writings 10: 141, 174–75Google Scholar; and Greene, , Politics of Samuel Johnson, 218Google Scholar. The astute connection between Johnson's “nativism” and mercantilism is made by Curley, Thomas M., “Johnson and America,” in The Age of Johnson, ed. Korshin, Paul J. (New York: AMS, 1994), 6: 31–73.Google Scholar

12. The Political Writings of Dr. Johnson, ed. Hardy, J. P. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 145Google Scholar n. It may be worth pointing out that Jefferson's work, A Summary View …, which when printed in London “ran through several editions,” “interpolated a little by Mr. Burke,” as Jefferson says in his Autobiography, advances ideas, admittedly in the radical circles not original, but cogent in argumentation, all of which are rebutted in Taxation; for instance, immigration as a freeing event, enslavement of the colonists, the numerical inferiority of the English “electors” imposing its legislative will on a colonial population, the dismissal of representative assemblies, the injustice of closing the Boston port, etc., and undergirding Jefferson's entire argument, the illegitimacy of Parliament's right to rule the colonies (Koch, and Peden, , Life and Selected Writings, 293–311Google Scholar). Johnson could have turned up Jefferson's pamphlet in the high volume of argumentation that he said, thinking probably of Franklin, “thundered in our ears” (10: 418).

13. In the 18th-century aesthetic formulation, lightning, a manifestation of the sublime in nature, evokes awe, wonder, terror, astonishment, admiration, etc., “for lightning is certainly productive of grandeur, which it owes chiefly to the extreme velocity of its motion” (Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful …, vol. 1 of The Works of Edmund Burke, 3rd ed. [Boston, 1869], 156)Google Scholar. For other connections between Franklin's “weird” dominance over lightning and politics, see Tyler, Moses Coit, A History of American Literature: 1676–1765 (Boston, 1878), 2: 360–61.Google Scholar

14. Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 173.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., 503, 509, 511–13. Hardy (145 n) observes that a part of Chatham's speech that Johnson paraphrases actually derives from Franklin's “opinion.” Among other radical intellectuals to whom Johnson implicitly refers, and with whom Franklin lived on cordial terms, are Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, fellow members in the “Honest Whigs” club (Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 421Google Scholar). See also Boswell, 's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 1773, ed. Pottle, Frederick A. and Bennett, Charles H. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 370 n. 1.Google Scholar

16. The proof is reproduced in a cut adjacent to page 455 of Greene, , Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 10Google Scholar. Greene prints in reduced typeface the two suppressed paragraphs in the place Johnson wanted them, following immediately the final paragraph of the text as it was published; Greene also summarizes textual issues and history on pages 401–2 and 410 of volume 10. The length and exact end of Johnson's original text are points that cannot be determined. Boswell, too, is in the dark: “How it ended I know not, as it is cut off abruptly at the foot of the last of these proof pages (Life of Johnson, 2: 315Google Scholar). The interference — copy that was, as Boswell says, “revised and curtailed” (2: 313) — appears substantial; for other evidence of textual corruption, see pages 313 and 315 (n. 1) of volume 2.

17. Franklin, Benjamin, Writings, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo (New York: Library of America, 1987), 373Google Scholar. Johnson had every opportunity to consult this influential essay. It appeared in London as early as 1755, when it was also somewhat abridged in Gentleman's Magazine, and made later appearances in Great Britain in 1756, 1760, 1761, and 1769, and so “entered the current of English economic thought” (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W. and Bell, Whitfield J. Jr. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961], 4: 226).Google Scholar

18. Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 488 f., 494, 504, 509Google Scholar; and Johnson, , Political Writings, 10: 414Google Scholar n. 5 and 6.

19. DeMaria, Robert Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 255–56.Google Scholar

20. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Lonsdale, Roger (London: Longman, 1969), 160.Google Scholar

21. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. and intro. Stone, Albert E. (New York: Penguin, 1986), 70Google Scholar. However, the American farmer proposes to raise his son as a husbandman unspoiled by literary pretensions.

22. James Thomson, quoted in Quinn, Arthur, A New World (New York: Berkeley Books, 1994), 428Google Scholar. See also Elliott, Emory, Revolutionary Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 29Google Scholar. There is the queer further consolation afforded those who take the long view of the instability of civilizations over time: “If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary [and].… Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilised society;, and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions” (Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [New York: Modern Library, n.d.], 2: 441).Google Scholar

23. Williams, Aubrey L., Pope's Dunciad (London: Methuen, 1955), 48.Google Scholar

24. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 3: 326.Google Scholar

25. Bate, W. Jackson, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977), 443–44.Google Scholar

26. Cochrane, J. A. (Dr. Johnson's Printer: The Life of William Strahan, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964], 185, 189, 193–94)Google Scholar traces this course of events. McCamic, Charles (Doctor Samuel Johnson and the American Colonies [Cleveland: Rowfant Club, 1925], 23–24 n. 5)Google Scholar says he read in Boswell's original proofs of this section of The Life of Johnson, owned by R. B. Adam, but later excised by Boswell, that Johnson thought Sir Grey Cooper had eliminated passages from Taxation.

27. The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Redford, Bruce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 2: 184–85.Google Scholar

28. In Franklin's pamphlet “The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe” (1760), to which he appended his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries,” he again in a slight recasting of the text limits his computations to the comparison with England: “I know, that their common rate of increase … is doubling their numbers every twenty five years.… I think this increase continuing, would probably in a century more, make the number of British subjects on that side the water more numerous than they now are on this.” Franklin assumes the pose an of Englishman on his native soil, rather than a colonial (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], 9: 77).Google Scholar

Whatever source Johnson used for Franklin's figures, then, the comparison is explicitly with England. Of course, Johnson may be using the generic term Europe for Britain. The very next sentence warning the “princes of the earth” implies that he is thinking in sweeping terms of the threat offered the Old World by the New. Oddly, Van Doren, in Benjamin Franklin, repeats Johnson's mistake (288), although earlier (217) he did not.

29. Redford, , Letters of Samuel Johnson, 2: 185.Google Scholar

30. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 2: 312–15.Google Scholar

31. Labaree, and Bell, , Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 3: 442, 453–54Google Scholar; The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Labaree, Leonard W. and Ketcham, Ralph L. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 6: 84, 171Google Scholar; and Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 272.Google Scholar

32. The earliest sign of Franklin's disaccord comes indirectly, and therefore not authoritatively, from a second party, John Borthwick, whom the editors of the Papers cannot identify. In his letter to Franklin (September 8, 1770), he refers abusively to “P — y Johnson.” It is clear that Borthwick thinks Franklin may be amused or perhaps in agreement with the vulgar epithet, any of several that one can insert (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Willcox, William B. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973], 17: 216–18)Google Scholar. See also Joy, Neill R., “A Samuel Johnson Allusion in a Letter to Benjamin Franklin Explained and Amplified,” ANQ 8 (1995): 13–16.Google Scholar

33. Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 769.Google Scholar

34. Willcox, , Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 22:96–97.Google Scholar

35. Jefferson, , Autobiography, 25–26.Google Scholar

36. Willcox, , Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 22: 93–94, 96.Google Scholar

37. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 2:317–18.Google Scholar

38. Crèvecoeur, , Letters, 67Google Scholar; and Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. and intro. Peden, William (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 164–65.Google Scholar

39. Smith, John, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles … in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Barbour, Philip L. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 2:144.Google Scholar

40. Johnson, , Political Writings, 10: 136, 148, 186–87Google Scholar; and Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 1: 455Google Scholar n. 3. For Johnson's vehement opposition to the twin evils of “racist imperialism” as the violent abrogation of “universal human rights ordained under the natural law,” see the important essay by Thomas M. Curley (“Johnson and America”).

41. Johnson, , Political Writings, 10:137Google Scholar; and Idler 87.Google Scholar

42. Without being responsible for the details of what follows in this paragraph, my colleague Linck Johnson has helped me to expand to the fullest the possible implications and ramifications of Franklin's response. More generally, the essay in an early state benefited from his careful and informed reading. The eminent Johnson scholar, E. L. McAdam Jr., reads the Johnson passage with exactly this inference: “The reader is allowed to imagine the blacks attacking their former masters” (Johnson and Boswell: A Survey of Their Writings [Boston: Houghton, 1969], 82).Google Scholar

43. In the 1730s, Franklin had dealings in slaves (Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 129Google Scholar). He advertised their sale and sold them. He himself owned slaves “for over thirty years” (Lopez, Claude-Anne and Herbert, Eugenia W., “Slaves,” in The Private Franklin [New York: W. W. Norton, 1975], 23: 292)Google Scholar. He hired out a male “at a dollar a week” (Hawke, David Freeman, Franklin [New York: Harper and Row, 1976], 82Google Scholar) whom he did not want in “my own house”; he will sell the man and his wife on the “first good opportunity” (Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 197–98Google Scholar). Slavery is an expense to the owners (ibid., 216). He carried bis slave Peter to England with him. (Would Johnson and many of Franklin's radical friends have known this? To Johnson the marked contrast would be Fred Barber, the ex-slave Johnson educated and sustained in his household.) In 1770 the casuistry of Franklin's pamphlet refutation of the charge that the existence of slavery in the colonies and their demands for liberty is a contradiction makes for depressing reading (ibid., 393–94; and Willcox, , “A Conversation on Slavery,” in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 17: 37–44Google Scholar). In later years, though, Franklin became interested in improving the slaves' plight and in abolition. In the last months of his life, he served as president of the Quaker organization, “The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.…” He signed its memorial which when presented to Congress was duly rejected as lying outside that body's purview. His last piece of public prose was a parody, “On the Slave Trade,” adopting the voice of a persona partly in the mode of Defoe and Swift, to satirize a congressman's speech defending the peculiar institution (Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 774–75Google Scholar). The early alteration of Franklin's attitude toward slavery coincides, John Van Home suggests, with his involvement in the Associates of Dr. Bray, when he was inducted in 1760 and served as Chairman in the years 1760–62 (“Collective Benevolence and the Common Good in Franklin's Philanthropy,” in Reappraising Benjamin Franklin, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993], 433–35)Google Scholar. He had proposed a school for Negroes in Philadelphia in 1758, responding to the Association's inquiry. A definite turning point comes when during an interlude in Philadelphia in 1763, between his London residences, he paid a visit to the school for black children and had his idea of the intellectual inferiority of Africans confuted (ibid., 436). By the “early 1770s,” he is set against slavery; and in an unsigned letter, “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade” (1772)Google Scholar, for the first time publicly castigates slavery, proposes an end to slave trafficking, and proposes granting freedom to the children of slaves when they come of age (Lopez, and Herbert, , The Private Franklin, 298–99Google Scholar). Franklin was slow to change, but however uneven the progress, once it came the change was thorough, irrespective of his doubts and ambiguities about the integration and absorption of the free blacks into colonial society. Franklin's wife, Deborah (nee Read), about whom we hear so little, must have had a softening and enlightening influence. She owned slaves, true enough, but apparently treated them with consideration and genuine concern. She sent one boy, Othello, to be educated, and grieved at his death. And in Franklin's absence she acquired a portrait of the radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay, indicative of her sympathies, I should think (Hawke, , Franklin, 301Google Scholar; and Lopez, and Herbert, , The Private Franklin, 292Google Scholar). Of course, sympathy in this matter goes only a little way. She may have been no more than a good mistress in a Quaker city. The conclusive test would be whether she freed slaves if they were her property, and/or whether she exercised an early influence urging and convincing Franklin eventually to free any slaves under his ownership and to join at last the Abolitionist ranks. See Franklin, 's WritingsGoogle Scholar (1154–60) for his last words on the subject.

44. Willcox, , Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 22: 97, 98.Google Scholar

45. Franklin, , Writings, 1123.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., 1126.

47. Franklin entirely distorts Johnson's language. Nonetheless, to point out that the moralist has changed to the moralist militant strikes a nerve. Boswell thought he detected Johnson's chagrin when confronted by the discrepancy between the sentiments of Taxation and the ethical teaching of the Idler and Rambler papers (Life of Johnson, 2: 316Google Scholar). But Johnson must also be given his due. He sincerely hoped at the end of Taxation that war could be avoided and that “this commotion may end without bloodshed” (10: 452, 453).

48. Franklin, Writings, 1130.Google Scholar

49. Middlekauff, Robert, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 132, 137.Google Scholar

50. Burke, , Works, vol. 2Google Scholar: “A Speech on American Taxation” (53, 71) and “A Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America” (171), respectively.

51. Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 517–18, 513.Google Scholar

52. I have consciously paraphrased as appropriate here a sentence from James, Henry, The Spoils of Poynton (Oxford: World's Classics, 1982) 29Google Scholar:“… what a strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring!” In the story the spoils of an estate, artfully conceived in all its relationships and fitted out over a lifetime, are disputed. Spoils offers a subtly displaced version of James's theme of the American—European encounter of misunderstanding, suggestive of the colonial impasse. The closest of relationships fails: the acquisitive mother's sure taste has been vitiated by vulgar cupidity; the son is a boorish naif insensitive to elegant tradition nurtured and handed down, but (with his crass, legalistic fianceé forcing his hand) insistent upon his lawful (natural) rights.

53. Dryden, John, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, in Of Dramatic Poetry and Other Critical Essays, ed. Watson, George (London: Dent, 1962), 2:136–37.Google Scholar

54. Aldridge, Alfred Owen, Benjamin Franklin and Nature's God (Durham: Duke University Press, 1967), 158–59Google Scholar, quoting from Moncure D. Conway's fine The Life of Thomas Paine (1892)Google Scholar. After his youth, Franklin was scrupulous in avoiding all religious controversy out of a deep conviction of religious tolerance and the belief that all faiths offered a common core of practical morality.

55. Patterson, Mark R, Authority, Autonomy, and Representation in American Literature: 1776–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–33Google Scholar. In a remarkable study, Christopher Looby reads the Autobiography as a typos or allegory of youthful rebellion against the father; but in due course with the new nation volatile and unstable after its successful revolution, the call of the Autobiography is now for a return to order and authority, and accordingly the son is reconciled and the moderation of the father is accepted (Voicing America Language, Literary Form and the Origins of the United States [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 99–144).Google Scholar

56. Zall, P. M., ed., Ben Franklin Laughing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 99Google Scholar; and Aldridge, , Benjamin Franklin, 266.Google Scholar

57. My use of the word culture (or acculturation) is adequately conveyed by Johnson's primary definition: “To Civilize … to instruct in the arts of regular life.”

58. My description of culture as organized work only abstracts the contemporary understanding; witness Henry Fielding, echoing Aristotle and Plato: “Society alone affords an Opportunity of exerting all the human Faculties … it alone can provide for all the Wants of which our Nature is susceptible. In Society alone, Men can mutually enjoy the Benefit of that vast Variety of Talents with which they are severally endowed; the Members of the Body Corporate, like those of the Natural Body, having their several different Uses and Qualifications, all jointly contributing to the Good of the Whole” (“A Plan of the Universal Register-Office,” in The Covent-Garden Journal and a Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Goldgar, Bertrand A. [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988], 1).Google Scholar

59. Rambler 60Google Scholar; and Idler 84.Google Scholar

60. Labaree, Introduction to Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 6.Google Scholar

61. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 3: 245.Google Scholar

62. Idler 22 (09 9, 1758)Google Scholar, in the original sequence as the papers appeared; however, Johnson withheld this paper when the Idler was published in book format. To sense the vigor of Johnson's affirmation of human will and freedom in the world, contrast Pope on “instinct” in An Essay on Man: Epistle III (1734)Google Scholar, a compendium of received assumptions and opinions — a poem for which Johnson held no regard.

63. Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs, ed. Farrand, Max (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 306Google Scholar n.183. For the meticulous depiction of Franklin's manuscript revisions of this paragraph, see The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Generic Text, ed. Lemay, J. A. Leo and Zall, P. M. (Knoxville: University of Kentucky Press, 1981), 129Google Scholar. Although diction is recast with some rigor, the number of sentences and their sequence are absolutely steady. The expression of the main idea and its elaboration were entire in Franklin's mind and directly transferred to the page.

64. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 1: 433–34 n. 4.Google Scholar

65. Citations in the body of my text to volume and page refer to Johnson, Samuel's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Lascelles, Mary, vol. 9 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Johnson published Journey on January 18, 1775, a few months before Franklin vacated his official post in London. And although there is no ground for direct influence, surely Franklin would read it, wanting to refresh and relive that time, “six weeks of the densest happiness,” when he too had toured Scotland in 1759, and again in 1771, esteemed, like Johnson, a learned sojourner, and compare the trips with the experience of another extraordinarily perceptive traveler (Van Doren, , Benjamin Franklin, 282, 392–93Google Scholar). The chronology of Franklin's composition of the paragraph eliminates Johnson as the prime source. The paragraph, the last one in an eleven-page insert into the text, was written, according to Lemay and Zall, “between December 9, 1788, and May 1789” (Lemay, and Zall, , Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, xxiiGoogle Scholar, also xxvii); however, one of its central components, the diurnal measure of happiness illustrated by a barber with a razor, is a remake of a passage from Franklin's letter to Lord Kames on February 28, 1768 (Lemay, and Zall, , Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, 108 n. 9Google Scholar); hence, the easy familiarity of the prose. This is an instance of Franklin's extraordinary verbal retention; he well might have remarked the seminal paragraph in Journey also. If so, the most one can say is that Franklin would have been struck with the coincidence of their thinking, and he might therefore have been confirmed in his intention to use that piece of text in his Autobiography. We have an analogue, not an example of direct influence on Franklin. For the full text of the letter, which adds nothing to this one rich thought, see Willcox, (Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 15: 60–62).Google Scholar

66. For the opportunities and occasions that Johnson neglected, see Clark, J. C. D., Samuel Johnson, Literature, Religion and English Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 221–25Google Scholar. Johnson was strangely and uncharacteristically ambivalent about the '45 (see Bate, , Samuel Johnson, 233 nGoogle Scholar). For one presentation of Johnson's Stuart sympathies, see Clark's study (Samuel Johnson), a view at odds with Greene's. A debate is in progress: for positions on each side, see the essays on Johnson's Jacobitism by Howard Erskine-Hill and Clark opposed by Donald Greene, Howard D. Weinbrot, and Thomas M. Curley in volumes 7 (1996) and 8 (1997), in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS).

67. Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 1: 264–65Google Scholar. See Krutch, (Samuel Johnson, 116–23)Google Scholar for a balanced analysis of the Chesterfield incident. Of the two poets most admired in Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Pope is esteemed for his adamant resistance to the temptation of purchasing favors with disingenuous praise, whereas Dryden is faulted for the gross sycophancy of his dedications to patrons and the nobility, although in mitigation the age extracted encomiums from the author's wants, and that is detestable.

For a useful survey of political and social patronage and, over time, its growing abuses and decline brought on by factors such as the political and aristocratic disassociation from the writing “tribe,” a general discrediting of patronage, the rise of the bookseller (publisher), and expansion of the reading public with consequent authorial independence, see Collins, A. S., “Author and Patron,” in Authorship in the Days of Johnson (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927)Google Scholar, ch. 3. Johnson was a loud spokesman for and noble example of the freedom of the man of letters.

68. Heretofore the idea that the reciprocity of labor activities constitutes and consolidates culture was present theoretically in his mind (see, for example, Idler 19 and 22Google Scholar); Scotland gave it a demonstrable, immediate reality.

69. Franklin, , Writings, 975–83.Google Scholar

70. Boswell, 's Journal of a Tour, 174–75, 208–9Google Scholar. This preference Johnson carried over intact to his reading of imaginative literature. Robinson Crusoe, one of the three books Johnson wished longer, fictionalizes the epic replication of 18th century culture by means of mastering the many skills and domestic practices that lift mankind out of nature, elevate him from a castaway sleeping in a tree with a club in his hand, Defoe's archetype of early man, to economic increase beyond marginal survival and one variation of a social contract. Crusoe says, “By making the most rational Judgment of things, every Man may be in time Master of every mechanick Art” (Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Crowley, J. Donald [Oxford University Press, 1981], 68Google Scholar). It is meritorious, Johnson says, that Defoe, “a tradesman, had written so variously and well” (Boswell, , Life of Johnson, 3:268 n. 1).Google Scholar

71. The convenience of a single shop is brought home to Johnson when paper and ink, even a needle, are wanted: “A shop in the Islands, as in other places of little frequentation, is a repository of every thing requisite for common use. Mr. Boswell's journal was filled, and he bought some paper.… To live in perpetual want of little things is a state not indeed of torture, but of constant vexation. I have in Sky had some difficulty to find ink for a letter; and if a woman breaks her needle, the work is at a stop” (Journey, 9: 130Google Scholar). Johnson's ordering of the human condition runs: luxury, convenience, necessity — desperation. Convenience, then, is the mean (9:137–38).

72. Parenthetically, when dress was an insignia and signal and not merely the vogue or necessary protection, their plain, unfashionable (therefore ostentatious) dress, with rare exception adhered to throughout a lifetime under all social situations, makes visual their psychological insistence upon class origins, pride in and loyalty to the middle station. In effect, they live and move within the raiment of their class ethos. They do not dress up to society, and to the extent that they wear their class guise — clothes are a potent symbol of social attachment in the age — under the gaze of haute couture, as it were, they dress down to that high echelon as a matter of declared identity and confidence in private merit and in their class.

73. Ralph Lerner reads precisely this passage by Franklin as a declaration of the contributions to be made by a citizenry pursuing their modest affairs, and as an illustration of the faith and hope of the “shapers” of the “commercial republic.” By granting all due weight and essential value to hitherto neglected “ordinary folk” at their necessary labors, the working population becomes conscious for the first time of their significance in the social scheme, which translates into the jealous and self-interested protection of their enhanced (by means of the vote) political standing against the heroic tyrants and power geniuses (The Thinking Revolutionary [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987], 213–14).

74. Robert Voitle coins the term altruistic utilitarianism in his examination of the political, social, and economic views of Johnson (Samuel Johnson: The Moralist [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961], 60, 149, esp. 109–10Google Scholar; also see Greene, , Politics of Samuel Johnson, 194–95).Google Scholar

75. Wright, Esmond, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge: Belknap, 1986), viii–ix, 352.Google Scholar

76. Adventurer 67Google Scholar offers a thumbnail anthropology in terms of necessity and convenience as corollaries of savage and civilized life. Necessity, the bare minimum required for existence, contrasts with civilization. As “paucity” is surpassed and outdistanced, culture advances in convenience, security, freed intellect, and prosperity. Happiness is proportional to convenience, or to wants supplied by the “concurrence of endeavors” of “innumerable occupations.” Man, entering society of multiple arts, is less a forked, unaccommodated thing, and separates from the “savage.”

77. Novak, Maximillian E., Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 50–51.Google Scholar

78. Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders, ed. Sutherland, James (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1959), 112, 168.Google Scholar

79. Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees, ed. and intro. Harth, Phillip (London: Penguin, 1989), 67.Google Scholar

80. Fielding, Henry, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” in vol. 9 of The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. Browne, James P. (London: Bickers and Son, 1871), 416.Google Scholar

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82. All such attacks on Franklin are zestfully, hyperbolically, even somewhat hysterically epitomized in D. H. Lawrence's accusation that Franklin, the “first dummy American,” although not an “archetype,” sets up his “dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern” and puts him on the road, “theoretic and materialistic,” that suits the absolute type. Lawrence's great insight into the fugitive, repressed “deepest self” alienated from tame, modern European civilization, together with his fascinating misapprehension of the Enlightenment Age, leads him in comic dismay to his shallow and preposterous stereotyping of Franklin. Once safely out of the lucid, orderly atmosphere of rationalism, so disabling to Lawrence's historical sympathies, Lawrence's defect converts advantageously to an idiosyncratic, brilliant interpretation of a number of 19th-century American Romantics’” art speech.” (Lawrence, , “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature, in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Wilson, Edmund (London: W. H. Allen, 1956), 915, 919, 926, 913, 907.Google Scholar

83. Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Kitchin, G. W. (London: J. M. Dent, 1973), 25.Google Scholar

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85. Williams, William Carlos, In the American Grain (1925; rept. New York: New Directions, 1956), 154Google Scholar. Williams is disparaging “Poor Richard.” See also Jones, Howard Mumford, O Strange New World (New York: Viking, 1964), 209.Google Scholar