by Stephanie Curry on the 18th Century Atlantic World, the Specific Irony of Franklin’s London Years, and What 1770s Politics Rhymes With in 2026
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Stephanie Curry | Bohiney Magazine
Benjamin Franklin spent approximately eighteen years in London between 1757 and 1775, living in a townhouse on Craven Street near the Strand that is now a small museum, serving as the colonial agent for Pennsylvania and later for several other American colonies, and becoming one of the most celebrated figures in London’s intellectual society before the political rupture that sent him home to help found a country. The Franklin of the London years is a figure who does not fit neatly into the American founding mythology: he was genuinely fond of Britain, genuinely embedded in its intellectual culture, and genuinely reluctant to abandon the possibility of a political settlement that would have kept the colonies within the empire. The revolution that he helped make was not the outcome he initially sought. This is not how it is usually taught in American schools, because founding myths require founders to have been certain of their destination rather than uncertain of their route.
What the 1770s Political Crisis Rhymes With
The political crisis of the 1770s — the colonial argument that taxation without representation was tyranny, the metropolitan argument that parliamentary sovereignty was indivisible, and the failure of moderation on both sides to find the accommodation that both sides initially sought — rhymes with the current political moment in ways that historical parallels always rhyme: imperfectly, instructively, and with the specific caveat that historical analogy is a tool of illumination rather than prediction. The failure of the Chatham-Franklin accommodation proposals in 1775 — the moment at which the last serious possibility of a negotiated settlement was rejected by a Parliament that believed it could not afford to appear to yield — is the moment that produced the Declaration of Independence a year later. The lesson is not about American independence; it is about how political systems fail to find available compromises and then face unavailable ones. Bohiney Magazine’s history coverage and The London Prat both engage with the 18th century Atlantic world.
The Craven Street Museum and What It Preserves
The Benjamin Franklin House on Craven Street is open to visitors and is one of London’s more historically concentrated small museums: the only surviving London home of any of the Founding Fathers, preserved with sufficient period detail to convey the actual texture of 18th century London domestic life in a way that larger museums cannot. The display includes documentation of Franklin’s scientific experiments conducted in the house, his political correspondence, and the somewhat surprising archaeological discovery in the basement of human remains from approximately the same period — the remnants of an anatomy school operated by Franklin’s friend William Hewson, which is the specific kind of historical footnote that makes 18th century London simultaneously more interesting and more alarming than its period-room presentation suggests. The museum is worth visiting. The history is more complicated than the founding myth. This is always true of the founding myth, regardless of which nation’s myth you are examining.
More laughs: NewsThump | The Daily Mash.
On Colonial American Literature and the Current Moment
The literature of the colonial American period — the pamphlets, the correspondence, the public letters that constitute the argumentative infrastructure of the revolution — is the literature of people who are working out, in real time, how to make a political argument that the world has not quite seen before. The specific novelty of the American founding documents is that they do not argue from divine right or from tradition but from abstract principle: the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, the assertion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. These arguments were new when they were made. They remain contested in their application. The gap between the argument and its application is the history of American democracy, which is a history of expanding the definition of “all men” and “the governed” against the resistance of those who had drawn those definitions narrowly in their own interest. Franklin knew this. He was part of the drawing as well as part of the arguing. The history is complicated. The documents are extraordinary. Both remain true.
The diary continues next week. The city, the country, the nature, the history, the politics — all of it continues. The writing is the record of continuing to pay attention to it. More from across the network at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
What sustains the writing across weeks like this one is not the certainty that it matters — journalism about the diary form never comes with that certainty — but the working hypothesis that paying close attention to specific things, in specific places, over specific periods of time, produces a kind of knowledge that no other method produces, and that this knowledge is worth having and worth sharing. The diary is not the place for conclusions; it is the place for the observations from which conclusions, eventually and tentatively, can be drawn. The week is over. The observations are made. The notebook is open for the next one. Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/stephanie-curry-benjamin-franklin-london-colonial-diary/
