Big Ben

Stephen Fender

• Franklin of Philadelphia by Esmond Wright
  Harvard, 404 pp, £21.25, May 1986, ISBN 0 674 31809 9

Professor Wright’s third book on Benjamin Franklin is advertised as the ‘first comprehensive biography’ of the American printer, scientist and statesman ‘in fifty years’. What makes it possible is not only the life’s work of a British scholar but also, says the blurb, ‘Yale’s massive edition-in-progress of Franklin’s papers ... and the many specialised studies inspired by the correspondence’. Yet in one sense this claim is misleading. Although we do, of course, learn more about Franklin as the papers emerge, in another sense we are for ever rediscovering and re-inventing him according to our predilections. Franklin is a phenomenon very like what T.S. Eliot called a classic – entailing, to use Frank Kermode’s words in his book of that name, ‘the paradox that there is an identity but that it changes.’