official, during his residence in Paris, which time has invested with a curious interest.
To the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia he is happy to acknowledge his obligations also for several interesting letters, but especially for one from the pen of Madame Helvetius, written to Franklin after his return to the United States. He doubts if there is any letter of that distinguished lady in print, as her early education would appear, from this specimen of her correspondence, to have been more sadly neglected even than Mrs. Franklin’s.
Irrespective of the Autobiography, restorations and corrections of the text taken from the Sparks edition, the reader will find in this collection between three hundred and fifty and four hundred letters and documents which have never appeared in any previous collection of Franklin’s writings, and I think I may add everything hitherto unpublished from Franklin’s pen of any importance that still survives him.
In previous collections, Franklin’s writings have been arranged more or less according to subjects. In this edition they will be arranged chronologically. Such a departure from the example of his predecessors requires from the editor a word of explanation. Much the larger part of Franklin’s writings were in the form of communications addressed to the public, or to some individual, and were essentially the offspring of the day or hour in which they were begotten. To be fully understood and appreciated they should be read in chronological order and by the light of current events, for every one of them was as much the product of its time and circumstances as the fruits and flowers of our gardens are of their respective seasons. Nor is this less true of his philosophic than of his literary and miscellaneous papers. Franklin was not a philosopher by profession. He never wrote a treatise on any science, nor ever attempted to define the ascertained limits of any department of human knowledge. He made experiments as opportunity offered, and if he discovered any thing which he thought of value, it was his practice to communicate it in the form of a letter to some scientific friend like Collinson and Priestley in England and Le Roy and Dalibard in France. His scientific correspondence of this kind covers a period of more than fifty years. His friend Collinson, without consulting him, and before he had become at all famous published the letters which he received on electricity by themselves, and it has suited the convenience of subsequent editors to follow his example. The editor has thought it best to give these, with all his other letters and papers, in the order of time in which they came from his pen.
In adopting this arrangement, these volumes become not merely the repository of Franklin’s best thought and work, but they constitute his autobiography. We know but little of Franklin except from himself, but he did little of importance which he had not occasion at some time or other to describe. These volumes, therefore, will give the most complete record of his life and of the growth of his influence and usefulness from year to year that it is now possible to produce.
The notes and editorial matter in the following pages will be limited strictly to illustrations of the text. Very few will occur which are not from the pen of the editor, and for all such as are not assigned to some other person, he is responsible.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
FRANKLIN began his Autobiography, the longest of his writings, during his residence in England as agent of the colonies, in the year 1771. He was at the time on a visit to the family of Dr. Jonathan Shipley, the bishop of St. Asaph, with whom he was on terms of peculiar and cordial intimacy. The part then written covers the period from his birth, in 1706, to his marriage, in 1730. It was executed to this point, he informs us, for the gratification of his own family. It afterwards was continued, at the solicitation of some of his friends, with the expectation that it would ultimately be given to the public. The second part, which is comparatively brief, was written at his residence in Passy, while Minister to France. The third part was begun in August, 1788, after his return to his home in Philadelphia, and brings the narrative down to 1757. This part ends the autobiography so far as it was printed up to 1867, when the first edition ever printed from the original manuscript was given to the public, and which contained a fourth part, consisting of a few pages written in 1789. Franklin died in the spring of the following year, and by his will left most of his papers and manuscripts, this autobiography among them, to his grandson, William Temple Franklin, who sailed for England a few months after, with the intention, as he then proclaimed, of publishing it in a collection of his grandfather’s works. This purpose was not destined to be realized, however, until after an interval of twenty-seven or eight years. Ref. 009 Meantime, and in the year following Franklin’s death, a French version of the first portion of the autobiography was published in Paris. From this point the history of this manuscript is a succession of surprises, which has scarce any parallel in ancient or modern bibliography, with the possible exception of the writings of Aristotle and the Table Talk of Martin Luther. Where the text was obtained, from which this translation was made, and by whom it was made, are secrets which the grave of time has not yet given up. Ref. 010 The Nouvelle Biographie Générale, Paris, 1858, attributes the translation to Dr. Jacques Gibelin, who, to the professions of physician and naturalist, added that of a translator from the English. Whether he or some one else made the translation is of very little consequence now. It would, however, be a satisfaction to know how he obtained the text from which he translated. The first sentence in his Preface practically concedes that it was obtained by some method which he does not think it worth his while to reveal to the public.
“I shall not enter,” he says, “into a detail of little importance to my readers—on the manner in which the original manuscript of these memoirs, which is in English, fell into my hands. From the moment I had run over it, it appeared to me to be so interesting that I do not hesitate to allow myself the pleasure of putting it into French.”
It appears by Franklin’s correspondence that copies of this first part of his autobiography were sent to two or three of his friends in Europe prior to his beginning work on the second part. It is probable—in fact, it hardly admits of a doubt, that the first French version of 1791 was made from one of these.
In a note to the Preface of this first French edition the publisher says: “Persons curious to see the Memoirs of the Private Life of Franklin in their original tongue may inscribe their names at Buisson’s, bookseller, rue Hautefeuille No. 20, for a copy of this work. It will be put to press as soon as four hundred subscribers are secured. The price for each subscriber will be 48 sols.” The requisite number of subscribers was probably not secured, for no English version of the autobiography appeared until two years later, in 1793, and then two separate translations were published in London, one edited by Dr. Price, and commonly known as the Robinson edition. In this the editor for the first time supplements the fragment of autobiography, which only comes down to 1731, with a continuation of Dr. Franklin’s life, most of which had appeared in the Columbian Magazine, Ref. 011 of Philadelphia. The greater part of this supplementary sketch was written by Dr. Henry Stuber, whose death at the early age of twenty-four, however, brought his work to a somewhat abrupt conclusion. Parsons’s edition is another translation from the French edition of Buisson. Ref. 012
There were three issues of Robinson’s edition in a short time, and it was soon reprinted in Dublin, Dundee, Edinburgh, New York, Salem, and in many other places, while of Parsons’s edition, though it contains some matter not to be found in Buisson’s edition, we have never seen a reprint.
The Robinson edition practically kept possession of the English market until 1817, when William Temple Franklin published a new edition of the autobiography in his collection of the works of his grandfather. It was taken from the copy that had been sent by Franklin to his friend Le Veillard, the mayor of Passy, one of his most devoted friends.
From this time forth the original manuscript of the autobiography went into eclipse. It was known not to be among the manuscripts in the possession of William Temple Franklin; but what had become of it—its destruction was hardly conceivable—was a mystery. Where and how it was discovered, after an interval of half a century, is one of the remarkable incidents in its remarkable history. We shall give the story here as it has been set down by the editor for another occasion.
Among my guests one day at dinner in Paris, in the summer of 1866,