Reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography Second Part Without Losing Your Mind
Most people pick up Franklin's autobiography because they heard it was some great self-improvement manual. What they don't realize is that the thing was never finished by him, it was published in pieces after he died, and the second part — the section that covers his later years in England and France — is where the text gets genuinely complicated. I've spent years dealing with students and casual readers who try to use this as a straightforward reading experience. It doesn't work that way unless you know what you're walking into. The second part of Franklin's autobiography covers roughly the period from his return to America in 1775 after his second trip to England, through his diplomatic service in France, and into his final years back in Philadelphia. Franklin himself didn't write this section during a single sitting. He was working on all three parts in different periods between 1771 and 1790, and the prose quality shifts noticeably depending on which period produced which passage. That's something most editions gloss over entirely.
Benjamin Franklin Autobiography Part 2
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you start reading. The standard Penguin or Norton editions will give you a clean, edited text that looks continuous and polished. But Franklin's actual manuscript for Part 2 has a lot of cross-references, insertions, and areas where he clearly drafted passages and then rewrote them in the margins. The textual history alone is probably the most important thing to understand before you commit to reading this. Franklin sent copies of the manuscript to friends — Joseph Priestley, William Strahan, John Abbot — and each of those recipients made their own edits or omissions before passing the document along. By the time the book was first published in 1818 by the American Philosophical Society, editors had already shaped the text in ways that reflected their own agenda, not Franklin's. I ran into a real problem with this a few years ago. A graduate student was writing a thesis on Franklin's portrayal of the American colonies in Paris and she cited a quote about French society from the Part 2 text. She'd been using a widely available free online edition from a major ebook distributor. The quote looked perfectly reasonable. When I traced it back to the Pennsylvania Historical Society's manuscript images, the actual Franklin handwriting showed that the sentence had been heavily crossed out and replaced with something substantially different. The online edition had locked in an earlier draft as if it were the final text. That kind of discrepancy shows up in maybe one in every twenty passages across the whole Part 2 section. It's not catastrophic, but it's enough to make you distrust any edition that doesn't flag textual variants. The workaround is straightforward and I recommend it to everyone who reads this. Get the University of Chicago Press edition edited by Albert Henry Smyth, or better yet, the Library of America version that includes the fuller textual apparatus. These editions list the manuscript variants so you can see when Franklin changed his mind mid-sentence. The Smyth edition runs to about ten volumes of papers but volumes 1 and 2 cover the autobiography with full notes. The Library of America single-volume autobiography with notes is the cleaner entry point. If you're reading for pleasure and don't need the scholarly depth, the Penguin Classics edition is fine for a first pass — just don't quote from it in any academic work without cross-checking.
Another counter-intuitive detail about Part 2 that people miss. Franklin's writing style in this section becomes noticeably more formal and less conversational than in Part 1. Part 1 reads like a man talking to his son. Part 2 reads like a man who knows he's being read by future historians. He was aware of his own fame by the time he wrote these later passages. That changes the voice. You'll see it in how he handles his relationship with Benjamin West, his interactions with Congress, and especially his letters to his daughter Sarah Bache — passages that are arguably the most honest in the entire work but that get buried under the more famous advice sections from Part 1. The structure of Part 2 isn't chronological in any clean sense. Franklin jumps around between 1775, 1776, 1777, and then drops back to earlier reflections while he's drafting in 1788 or 1789. He was writing this while recovering from pleurisy, while managing his household in Passy, and while corresponding with Jefferson and Adams about the French alliance. The narrative reflects that. Don't expect a linear story. Read it as a series of connected memory-essays rather than a continuous memoir. Where to find a reliable copy — the full text of Part 2 is freely available on Project Gutenberg (search for "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin"), and the Thomas S. Ashcraft edition from Bartleby.com has decent formatting. The Google Books scan of the original 1818 Philadephia edition is also accessible and useful for seeing how the text looked to the first generation of readers. For serious study, the Franklin Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society have digitized manuscript images that let you compare what Franklin actually wrote against what editors printed.
Get the Full Details
One limitation worth stating plainly. Part 2 contains Franklin's most extended political writing, including his reflections on the Revolution and his time in France, but it's not comprehensive. He skips over significant events — the Conway Cabal gets only a passing mention, his disputes with Silas Deane are almost entirely absent. He was curating his own legend at this point, and the second part shows that curation more clearly than Part 1 does. If you're trying to get an unvarnished account of the Revolutionary era from this text, you're reading the wrong document. Use it for Franklin's own perspective on his own life, not as a historical record of the period. The practical reading approach that works best for most people. Start with Part 1 to get the voice and the early framing, then move to Part 2. Don't try to read it straight through in one sitting. The best section to begin with in Part 2 is Franklin's account of his arrival in France and his first meetings with French intellectuals — it's where his humor is sharpest and his diplomatic observations are most useful. The passages about his later relationship with his daughter are heavier and probably better saved for when you've already absorbed the earlier material. If you end up doing any analysis of Part 2, focus on the tension between Franklin's self-deprecating storytelling and the underlying arrogance that runs through almost every paragraph. He presents himself as a humble artisan who got lucky, but the text constantly undermines that performance. That's not a flaw in the writing. It's the actual psychological reality of the man, and it's what makes Part 2 worth reading instead of just skimming for the famous maxims everyone quotes.
