The Rise of Poor Richard: Franklinian Fictionality, Republican Circumspection

This essay reconsiders Benjamin Franklin’s pre-Revolutionary writings and his later Autobiography (1771–90) within the historical frame of the rise of fictionality, as charted by Catherine Gallagher and others. Before the novel took off in America, fictionality developed in shorter, nominally non-fictional forms. In this article, Franklin’s essays, letters, and almanacs are read for their peculiar proto-fictional elements. More than simply being examples of a new brand of American humour or an emergent individualist ethos, Franklin’s wit and its absorption into a metafictional style of writing and publishing depended on readers’ assuming positions of “ironic assent,” or what this essay calls, in the context of eighteenth-century American politics and law, “republican circumspection.” This phrase names an epistemic attunement whereby subjects suspend the ontological security of the self for an empty screen or void onto which they can project character representations that straddle the line between private and public personae.