Tang of the Soil – Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack By Helen Mondloch

As a famed statesman serving in France around 1780, Benjamin Franklin once reportedly inspired the following rhetorical question from a bystander in a bustling Parisian crowd: "Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?"

Many Franklin observers before and since have attested to the startling diversity of his character. In the essay "Franklin's Character", Carl Becker calls him a "true child of the Enlightenment [who] ... lived on every social level in turn, was equally at ease with rich and poor, the cultured and the untutored, and spoke with equal facility the language of vagabonds and kings."

As Becker further reveals, Franklin maintained "a tang of the soil" even after a lifetime of magnanimous achievement. A man of humble Boston roots, the young Franklin worked long hours in his Philadelphia printshop, selling household goods and publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette. Beginning in 1732, he also published an annual edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, which became a best-seller – second only to the Bible – throughout the colonies.

In his thirties Franklin initiated a long career of public service, spearheading civic advancements such as paving and lighting Philadelphia streets and establishing America's first fire and police departments and lending library. He served as the city's first postmaster and later as postmaster general. By the time he was fifty, Franklin had also become a renowned scientist and inventor. Referring to his famous kite experiment and invention of the lightning rod, Immanuel Kant exalted him as the "new Prometheus who stole fire from heaven."

His inventions included the practical as well as the whimsical, among them, the Franklin stove, the water-glass harmonica, a rolling pin for copying letters, and bifocal glasses. The leading American scientist of his day, he probed smallpox and the common cold, earthquakes, sunspots, and other topics he expounded in his letters. As a revered statesman in his later years, Franklin campaigned at home and abroad for American independence, serving in the First Continental Congress and signing the Declaration of Independence.

While this lifetime of varied and prodigious accomplishments reflects rare gifts, Franklin never lost what Becker calls his "universal" spirit. That he understood the toils of average citizens, that he sustained the power to amuse and inspire them with his provincial wit, is evidenced best by the enormous popularity of the Almanack.

Borrowed wisdom

For twenty-five years, the homespun persona of Poor Richard Saunders, a humble farmer and philomath (lover of learning), narrated the comic prefaces to the almanac, making readers privy to his domestic hardships and outlandish astrological predictions for the year ahead. Like similar publications, the almanac itself provided practical information about farming, weather patterns, travel routes, and calendar events. Thanks to the pithy poetry and maxims sprinkled throughout, Poor Richard, also called "Poor Dick," earned fame and affection as a folk pontificator. His memorable verses--most of which were borrowed by Franklin from the poets and sages of bygone eras--wove themselves into the fabric of a nascent American culture.

Probing a range of human follies and virtues, Poor Richard became best known for his maxims on prudence, industry, and thrift. His creed is summed up by his famous prescription for prosperity: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." In the preface to his final almanac edition, Franklin extrapolated Richard's many maxims about frugal living from old Almanack issues and compiled them under a humorous pretext. Later published separately as "The Way to Wealth," the piece was translated into several languages and widely read at home and abroad as a primer on the capitalist spirit.

Poor Richard's popularity with his contemporaries yielded to a tradition of critical rebuke in the centuries that followed. Condemned as shallow and materialistic, the Almanack has continued to affect American thought in ways its ingenious creator probably never imagined.

Like many elements of colonial culture, the Almanack was conceived with borrowings from the British. In time it evolved into a cornerstone of Americana, something distinctly "Franklinian." Most of the Almanack's poems and proverbs did not originate with Franklin. He gleaned his verses from masters whose works he clearly relished, including Pope, Dryden, Gay, Bacon, and Aesop. Franklin's borrowing is the subject of an anachronistic slander in the May 2002 issue of American Heritage. Dubbing Franklin a "Founding Filcher," the magazine's "History Now" column cites an 1860 article from Historical Magazine as an early expose of Franklin's alleged thievery. A nineteenth-century historian therein provided a comparison chart, reproduced in Heritage, displaying more than a dozen Almanack sayings that were either taken verbatim or slightly modified from a collection of English proverbs published in 1678.

While Franklin never felt compelled to credit his sources by name--no doubt because the literary protocols of his day differed from our own-- he did acknowledge his borrowings. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (begun in 1771 but never completed), he explained that his maxims "contained the Wisdom of many Ages and Nations." The phrase echoed one uttered by Poor Richard himself to describe his sources. ("Not a tenth part of the Wisdom was my own," he confesses in the final preface.) Similarly, in his 1747 preface, Saunders speaks with characteristic charm and self-debasing humor in the following revelation about the poems featured each month:

"I need not tell thee that not many of them were of my own making. If thou hast any judgment in poetry, thou wilt easily discern the workman from the bungler. I know as well as thee that I am no poet born, and it is a trade I never learnt, nor indeed could learn. If I make verses, 'tis in spite of nature and my stars I write. Why then should I give my readers bad lines of my own, when good ones of other people are of plenty?"

An institution

Even if Poor Richard--in this spirit of common sense so abundantly endowed in his creator--borrowed freely from the wisdom of the ages, he swiftly emerged as an institution unto himself. Van Doren remarks that "the essence of Poor Richard, his humorous, homely character, was Franklin's own creation." Occasionally injecting a saucy commentary, his nagging wife, Bridget, also played a one-of-a-kind role in Poor Richard's folksy realm.

In his essay "The Almanac," included in Barbour's collection, Bruce Granger probes Poor Richard's success. He notes that Franklin considered the Almanack a "proper Vehicle for conveying Instruction among the common people, who bought scarce any other books," as revealed in the Autobiography. Accordingly, Franklin strove to make the Almanack both entertaining and useful.

"He approached this task with seeming earnest," says Granger, "thereby escaping the prosaic dullness that characterized most colonial almanacs." Franklin's memoir proudly noted that his almanac sold ten thousand copies a year--roughly one per every hundred citizens, according to many colonial observers.

His success clearly derived from his homely characters but also his crafty adaptations of verses unearthed from his voluminous library. "As a proverb stylist who often recast what he borrowed, Franklin was guided by such neoclassic ideals as perspicuity, elegance, and cadence," comments Granger. For example, Franklin took a line like "fresh fish and new-come guests smell, but that they are three days old" and refined it to read, "Fish and Visitors stink in three days." On occasion, says Granger, "yielding to a coarseness that was nature to him," Franklin altered his sayings "in the direction of the obscene or bawdy." Thus, "A good friend is my nearest relation" became "Relation without friendship ... [is] not worth a farto."

According to Van Doren, such coarseness, vastly appealing to Franklin's contemporaries, was prevalent in Poor Richard's early "gamy years" but became largely overshadowed by his more didactic passages on hard work and thrift, many of which appeared later. "The earlier Poor Richard was by no means always on the side of calculating prudence," says Van Doren.

Granger tell us that beginning in 1739, "Richard the honest philomath tends to be obscured by the emergence of Richard the moralizing philosopher." In his preface for that year, Richard foreshadows some coming innovations: "Besides the usual Things expected in an Almanack, I hope the profess'd Teachers of Mankind will excuse my scattering here and there some instructive Hints in Matters of Morality and Religion."

He is quick, however, to assure readers, with typical facetiousness, that his annual guide will not surrender its charm and levity (a promise Franklin made sure he kept): "Be not disturbed, O grave and sober Reader, if among the many serious Sentences in my Book, thou findest me trifling now and then, and talking idly. ... Squeamish stomachs cannot eat without Pickles; which 'tis true are good for nothing else, but they provoke an Appetite"

In the years that followed, Franklin's didacticism focused increasingly on matters of personal economy. His verses urged hard work and prudent savings not only as a means of attaining security but as the path to virtue. Likewise, they condemned sloth, credit payments, and frivolous spending. Van Doren argues that such preachings, rooted in the Protestant work ethic, shaped a young nation's sensibilities and ultimately prevailed as the Almanack's legacy. That legacy was sealed, he says, by the 1758 publication of "The Way to Wealth," a witty compilation of these aphorisms that proved immensely popular.

Probing the underpinnings of this thematic shift, Van Doren declares that Franklin the moralist "could see that the times called for Poor Richard's counsel. ... Few men of privilege had come from Europe to America. They had not needed to emigrate. Few of the European poor had come. They had not been able to. The colonists were 'middling people' and they must work and save if they were to survive and prosper."