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Several images of Benjamin Franklin holding a quill pen found ready markets during his lifetime.1 More recently, however, it has become difficult to imagine the Philadelphia printer using such an archaic object, rather than his bifocals, his electrical apparatus, or his printed newspaper. It is worth calling up an image of the printer writing with a quill, however, because it can help us see an important distinction in his work, a distinction between his uses of media to distribute his writing and his uses of media as metaphors within his writing. In executing his lifelong project of representing the future of print, Franklin often used a quill.
Scholars of print culture have fruitfully examined Franklin's visionary experiments with print's capacities for representing the abstract nature of a republican polity. Michael Warner and Mitchell Breitwieser both see Franklin's work as a project of constructing a representative personality. They point to his use of print and republican theory to explain his writing as a concerted project of presenting his readers with an image of "representational legitimacy" (Warner 73; Breitwieser 173). On Franklin's desk, however, drafts of pieces destined for anonymous newspaper publication sat next to personal letters and diplomatic dispatches destined to remain in manuscript and to circulate only among small groups of family, friends, and political allies. This scribal work has provided much of the evidence for a group of recent books on Franklin by historians: A Little Revenge, The Devious Dr. Franklin, and Benjamin Franklin and his Enemies. These books, whose titles promise to show us a darker side of the affable Franklin, document his quests for patronage, his angry break with his son William, and his careerist self-promotion. The gap between this historical Franklin and the representative personality described by Warner and Breitwieser has been produced in part because Franklin's scribal writing has generally been read by historians, while literary critics have focused on his printed writing. It is worth reading the two groups of texts together, with an eye to the generic conventions and metaphorical resonances of each. Doing so reveals Franklin's detailed awareness of the political and social relations imaginable through work with differing media: oral, scribal, and printed. In all media, Franklin consistently presents the relation between narrator and audience...