THOUGH PREFACE HOUGH a voluminous writer and one of the great masters of English expression, Franklin wrote habitually with a single eye to immediate practical results. He never posed for posterity. Of all the writings to which he mainly owes his present fame, it would be difficult to name one which he gave to the press himself or of which he saw the proofs. Yet he never wrote a dull line nor many which a century of time has robbed of their interest or value. Whatever he wrote seems to have been conceived upon a scale which embraced the whole human race as well as the individual or class to whom it was specifically addressed, the one evidence of true greatness which never deceives nor misleads. If he wrote to his wife, it was more or less a letter from every husband to his wife; if to his daughter, it was a letter that any daughter would be pleased to receive from her father; if to a philosopher or a statesman, there was always that in the manner and the matter of it which time cannot stale, and which will be read by every statesman and philosopher with the sort of interest they would have felt had it been addressed personally to them. The Autobiography is here printed in the text as edited by Mr. John Bigelow for the Collected Edition of Franklin's Works. It is the only text of this famous volume which is based on the original manuscript, and which is given without mutilation. Mr. Bigelow writes (in the Introduction to the Works of Franklin, published in 1879): Most of the versions of this delightful work are reprints of a translation from the French, in which language it happened first to be given to the world. The actual text was not discovered until some thirty years back when the editor was fortunate enough to become possessed of the original manuscript. It was then found that the first edition, which purported to be made from the original manuscript, and was published in 1816, under the nominal editorship of William Franklin Temple, the grandson of Dr. Franklin, had in fact been prepared from a copy and from a copy that was incomplete, and that the text had been further mutilated to suit the political taste of the time in England, and, it is presumed, the personal exigencies of the editor. Upon a careful collation of the edition of 1816 with the autograph manuscript, it was discovered that over 1200 alterations had been made in the text, and, what was more remarkable, that some of the later pages of this masterpiece of biography had been omitted altogether. It was a text of this incomplete London reprint that was followed by Dr. Sparks in his edition of Franklin's works, and that has been utilized for all the popular English editions of the volume. |