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?"

Дата добавления: 2014-01-05