Benjamin Franklin in London
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Orion Publishing Group, Limited
Published: 2016-02-11
Language: eng
Number of pages: 365
ISBN-13: 9780297871538
Description: For the great majority of his long life, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal British royalist. In 1757, having made his fortune in Philadelphia and established his fame as a renowned experimental 'scientist', he crossed the Atlantic to live as a gentleman in the heaving metropolis of London. With just a brief interlude, a house in Craven Street was to be his home until 1775. From there he mixed with both the brilliant and the powerful. He counted David Hume, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Edmund Burke and Erasmus Darwin among his friends. He had access to successive Prime Ministers and even the King. However, Benjamin Franklin was also an American colonial representative. Though he long sought to prevent the break with Great Britain, his own actions would finally help cause that very event. On the eve of the American War of Independence, Franklin fled arrest and escaped by sea. He would never return to London. George Goodwin brilliantly describes the energetic, engaging but sometimes enigmatic Dr Franklin in the world's greatest city during the third quarter of the eighteenth century.