Poor Richard's Almanack (sometimesAlmanac) was a yearlyalmanac published byBenjamin Franklin, who adopted thepseudonym of "Poor Richard" or "Richard Saunders" for this purpose. The publication appeared continually from 1732 to 1758. It sold exceptionally well for a pamphlet published in theThirteen Colonies; print runs reached 10,000 per year.[1]
Franklin, the Americaninventor,statesman, and accomplishedpublisher and printer, achieved success withPoor Richard's Almanack. Almanacks were very popular books incolonial America, offering a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements.[2]Poor Richard's Almanack was also popular for its extensive use ofwordplay, and some of the witty phrases coined in the work survive in the contemporary Americanvernacular.[3]
On December 28, 1732,Benjamin Franklin announced inThe Pennsylvania Gazette that he had just printed and published the first edition ofThe Poor Richard, by Richard Saunders, Philomath.[4] Franklin published the firstPoor Richard's Almanack on December 28, 1732,[5] and continued to publish new editions for 25 years, bringing him much economic success and popularity. The almanack sold as many as 10,000 copies a year.[6] In 1735, upon the death of Franklin's brother, James, Franklin sent 500 copies ofPoor Richard's to his widow for free, so that she could make money selling them.[5]
TheAlmanack contained thecalendar,weather,poems,sayings, andastronomical andastrological information that a typical almanac of the period would contain. Franklin also included the occasionalmathematical exercise, and theAlmanack from 1750 features an early example ofdemographics. It is chiefly remembered, however, for being a repository of Franklin'sproverbs, many of which live on inAmerican English. These maxims typically counsel thrift and courtesy, with a dash of cynicism.[7]
In the spaces that occurred between noted calendar days, Franklin included proverbial sentences about industry and frugality. Several of these sayings were borrowed from an earlier writer,Lord Halifax, many of whoseaphorisms sprang from, "... [a] basic skepticism directed against the motives of men, manners, and the age."[8] In 1757, Franklin made a selection of these and prefixed them to the almanac as the address of an old man to the people attending an auction. This was later published asThe Way to Wealth, and was popular in both America and England.[9]
Jill Lepore points out that "Franklin didn't write most of Poor Richard's proverbs. By his own guess, he wrote perhaps one out of every ten; the rest he found in books, especially anthologies likeThomas Fuller's 1732Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British.[10] She adds that Franklin was adept at modifying and sharpening the proverbs he found, for example, Fuller had written, "A Man in Passion rides a horse that runs away with him", whereas Franklin converted it to, "A Man in a Passion rides a mad Horse."[10]
Franklin borrowed the name "Richard Saunders" from the seventeenth-century author ofRider's British Merlin, a popular London almanac which continued to be published throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin created the Poor Richard persona based in part onJonathan Swift's pseudonymous character, "Isaac Bickerstaff". In a series of three letters in 1708 and 1709, known as the Bickerstaff papers, "Bickerstaff" predicted the imminent death of astrologer and almanac makerJohn Partridge. Franklin's Poor Richard, like Bickerstaff, claimed to be aphilomath andastrologer and, like Bickerstaff, predicted the deaths of actual astrologers who wrote traditional almanacs. In the early editions ofPoor Richard's Almanack, predicting and falsely reporting the deaths of these astrologers—much to their dismay—was something of a running joke. However, Franklin's endearing character of "Poor" Richard Saunders, along with his wife Bridget, was ultimately used to frame (if comically) what was intended as a serious resource that people would buy year after year. To that end, the satirical edge of Swift's character is largely absent in Poor Richard. Richard was presented as distinct from Franklin himself, occasionally referring to the latter as his printer.[11]
In later editions, the original Richard Saunders character gradually disappeared, replaced by a Poor Richard, who largely stood in for Franklin and his own practical scientific and business perspectives. By 1758, the original character was even more distant from the practical advice and proverbs of the almanac, which Franklin presented as coming from "Father Abraham," who in turn got his sayings from Poor Richard.[12]
One of the appeals of theAlmanack was that it contained various "news stories" inserial format, so that readers would purchase it year after year to find out what happened to theprotagonists. One of the earliest of these was the "prediction" that the author's "good Friend and Fellow-Student, Mr.Titan Leeds" would die on October 17 of that year, followed by the rebuttal of Mr. Leeds himself that he would die, not on the 17th, but on October 26. Appealing to his readers, Franklin urged them to purchase the next year or two or three or four editions to show their support for his prediction. The following year, Franklin expressed his regret that he was too ill to learn whether he or Leeds was correct. Nevertheless, the ruse had its desired effect: people purchased theAlmanack to find out who was correct.[13] (Later editions of theAlmanack would claim that Leeds had died and that the person claiming to be Leeds was an impostor; Leeds, in fact, died in 1738, which prompted Franklin to applaud the supposed impostor for ending his ruse.)
For some writers the content of theAlmanack became inextricably linked with Franklin's character—and not always to favorable effect. BothNathaniel Hawthorne andHerman Melville caricatured theAlmanack—and Franklin by extension—in their writings, whileJames Russell Lowell, reflecting on the public unveiling inBoston of a statue to honor Franklin, wrote:
... we shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston, and invented being struck with lightning and printing and the Franklin medal, and that he had to move toPhiladelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance, and that he revenged himself on his native town by saddling it with theFranklin stove, and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind.[14]
TheAlmanack was also a reflection of thesocial norms andsocial mores of his times, rather than a philosophical document setting a path for new-freedoms, as the works of Franklin's contemporaries,Thomas Jefferson,John Adams, andThomas Paine were. HistorianHoward Zinn offers, as an example, the adage "Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely" as indication of Franklin's belief in the legitimacy of controlling the sexual lives of servants for the economic benefit of their masters.[15]
At least one modern biographer has published the claim that Franklin "stole", not borrowed, the name of Richard Saunders from the deceased astrologer-doctor. Franklin also "borrowed—apparently without asking—and adapted the title of an almanac his brotherJames Franklin was publishing at Newport:Poor Robin's Almanack (itself appropriated from a seventeenth-century almanac published under the same title in London)".[16]
KingLouis XVI of France gave a ship toJohn Paul Jones who renamed it after theAlmanack's author—Bonhomme Richard, or "Goodman (that is, a polite title of address for a commoner who is not a member of the gentry) Richard" (the first ofseveral US warships so named).[17] TheAlmanack was translated into Italian, along with thePennsylvania State Constitution (which Franklin helped draft) at the establishment of theCisalpine Republic.[18] It was also twice translated into French, reprinted in Great Britain inbroadside for ease of posting, and was distributed by members of theclergy to poor parishioners. It was the first work of English literature to be translated intoSlovene,[19] translated in 1812 byJanez Nepomuk Primic (1785–1823).[20]
TheAlmanack also had a strong cultural and economic impact in the years following publication. InPennsylvania, changes in monetary policy in regard to foreign expenses were evident for years after the issuing of theAlmanack. Later writers such asNoah Webster were inspired by the almanac, and it went on to influence other publications of this type such as theOld Farmer's Almanac.[21]
SociologistMax Weber consideredPoor Richard's Almanack and Franklin to reflect the "spirit of capitalism" in a form of "classical" purity." This is why he filled the pages of Chapter 2 of his 1905 bookThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with illustrative quotations from Franklin's almanacks.[22]
Numerousfarmer's almanacs trace their format and tradition toPoor Richard's Almanack; theOld Farmer's Almanac, for instance, has included a picture of Franklin on its cover since 1851.
In 1958, the United States mobilized its naval forces in response to anattack on Vice President Richard Nixon inCaracas, Venezuela. The operation was code-named "Poor Richard".[23]
See also:
Poor Richard's Almanack public domain audiobook atLibriVox
