The Silence Dogood Letters

About this book

In 1722, the world—or at least a bustling seaport in the British Province of Massachusetts Bay—was introduced to the wit and wisdom of Benjamin Franklin. Writing anonymously in his brother’s newspaper, the teenage Franklin took the first small steps that would make him the greatest American personage of his day. Young Benjamin was an apprentice to his brother, James Franklin, who had founded The New-England Courant, a popular anti-establishment newspaper in Boston. It was within this environment that young Ben also determined to make his first efforts as a journalist. Writing in his autobiography, Franklin says of this “I was excited to try my hand among them. But being still a Boy, and suspect that my Brother would object to printing any thing of mine in his Paper, if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in the night under the door of the Printing House.” Thus was born Silence Dogood—the first in a long string of pseudonyms that Benjamin Franklin would write under during his lifetime. The paper that young Ben had written and slipped under the door was a Letter to the Editor from a middle-aged Boston widow named Silence Dogood. The Dogood letters were met with almost immediate approval. In all, Ben wrote fourteen letters in the hand of Silence Dogood, never revealing his true identity. Franklin admits in his autobiography that he felt “exquisite pleasure” upon first hearing the praise for his first letter and the musings of his brother’s colleagues as to who the clever writer might be. The letters are a whimsical slice of colonial American satire. That Ben Franklin wrote so delightfully—and convincingly—in the voice of a forty-year-old woman as a sixteen-year-old boy was proof of his budding genius. This annotated edition includes all fourteen of the original Silence Dogood letters along with a very informative Foreword, Afterword, and Chapter notes for each letter.