“I was always dispos’d to be serviceable to you, tho’ it seems I was once unlucky”: Mathew Carey’s Relationship with Benjamin Franklin

Mathew Carey’s first encounter with Benjamin Franklin took place in Paris in 1781, and his first experience of America when he emigrated to Philadelphia some three years later was shaped largely by his efforts to win Franklin’s patronage. The ties that bind a patron to a protégé can be very strong, but this article is less about the links that joined Carey and Franklin and more about their inability to connect. Although they were separated by age, religion, nationality, and social status, Franklin had easily overcome such barriers many times before. Theirs was more a difference of personality, and by exploring it, we learn something interesting about Carey, and also something new about Franklin. In his autobiography, written in 1833, Carey devoted only a single paragraph to the months he said he spent working with Franklin on his press at Passy. This meeting seemingly changed the course of his life, and he might be forgiven for dwelling at length on it, perhaps recalling how deeply he impressed the great Philadelphian with his potential. Instead, he downplayed it and went out of his way to portray himself as essentially useless to Franklin. As this article explains, Carey was not simply assuming the standard pose of the autobiographer ironically reflecting on his youthful self. On the contrary, his account of his first meeting with Franklin is vague and self-deprecating because he was concealing much greater humiliations that he experienced at Franklin’s hands, first in France and later in three separate episodes that took place in Philadelphia. Their meeting in Paris was just the beginning of a fraught relationship that continued until Franklin’s death in 1790, which was not even hinted at in Carey’s autobiography and never alluded to publicly or privately for the remainder of his life.