Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said
But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name.
Franklin created his first alter ego when he was in his teens: a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. Mrs. Dogood allowed Franklin to evade an embargo against publication imposed by his jealous elder brother James, a printer to whom Ben was apprenticed. James had a newspaper and sought contributors, but he refused Ben’s submissions as corrosive of the master-apprentice relationship. So Ben disguised his handwriting and surreptitiously slipped letters from Mrs. Dogood under the door of the print shop. Franklin’s account of her life delighted readers while underscoring the difficulties facing widows and women of the day.
Polly Baker was a literal—as opposed to an actual—descendant of Silence Dogood. Polly had the misfortune of falling in love with men who had no intention of marrying her. When she became pregnant, she was brought before the magistrates to be punished for her crime of fornication. In defending herself, she said she had done nothing more than obey the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply. Anyway, she asked, why was no sanction brought against the men who were equally responsible for her illegitimate children and more responsible for the corruption, as the court insisted, of the honest if imperfect woman who stood before it?
Franklin’s most famous alter ego was Richard Saunders, an astronomer and a polymath who annually published Poor Richard’s Almanack. The almanac provided information on holidays, solstices, phases of the moon and the like. What made it special were the squibs of advice and humor that filled otherwise blank spots on the pages. “Fish and visitors stink in three days” recommended itself to guests and hosts alike. “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead” chided the garrulity of blabbers and the naïveté of confiders. (Franklin’s Saunders didn’t invent adages so much as he improved on earlier versions.)
