Anthony Di Renzo 1

PLAIN DEALING: DANIEL DEFOE, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE ROOTS

OF MODERN BUSINESS PROSE ♦

hen my wife announced she wanted a Franklin Day Planner for our fifth

anniversary, I was nonplussed. I had wanted to buy her something more

romantic. However, I acquiesced, mostly for scholarly reasons. As a

professional writing instructor, I am fascinated by the history and development of American

business prose, and browsing at Franklin Quest, an office

supply chain founded on the principles and writings of

Benjamin Franklin, seemed like perfect research for this

article. I would not be disappointed.

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Even before I entered the store in the Syracuse

Carousel Center, I was greeted by a recording of a glass

armonica, Franklin’s musical invention, playing a Mozart

sonata. That eighteenth century atmosphere continued inside.

The showroom, all right angles and clean lines, was as

austerely elegant as a Georgian anteroom. Prints of Hogarths

and Palladian architecture adorned the walls, and crisply

dressed sales clerks paced amid displays of binders, brief cases, stationery, and books. Despite

their mincing decorum, however, their speech remained very American: brisk, forthright, direct.

Intrigued by the store's layout and design, I began studying the planners themselves.

Scientifically organized along the time management principles found in Franklin’s

Autobiography (1791), these ledgers also contain inspirational quotations and spaces for

Di Renzo, “Plain Dealing”

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reflective journal entries. One model, the Monticello, whose pages come with “blue marble

design on bright white paper complimented with a gold accent,” features excerpts from 18th-

century English writers and poets, including Daniel Defoe (Catalogue 63). Something seemed

oddly appropriate about Franklin Quest's unusual marketing technique, for despite its ersatz

approach to history, the company, which preaches effective business communication, was

honoring the 18th-century English roots of American business prose.

hough often considered a product of modern capitalism, American business writing actually

developed from the epistolary style of the early English Enlightenment. As Marshall

McLuhan has noted, Augustan London was the world's first consumer and mass media culture,

and it simultaneously gave us the novel and the business letter. For the first time ever, writers

could support themselves solely by writing.

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Unfortunately, even geniuses spent most of their time hacking: Swift was secretary to Sir

William Temple; Smollet produced health pamphlets; Johnson wrote advertising. Even Pope’s

Homer was the result of an extensive direct mail campaign.

Meeting strict deadlines and communicating to a wide audience

forced these writers to pare their prose. In fact, the Plain Style,

which critics often praise as the glory of Augustan literature, was

actually the language of trade, an expression of mass production

and standardization. Its origins, however, lie not in business but in

science and religion. During the Restoration, the Royal Science

Academy and the Puritan Church for different reasons argued that

simple and direct writing should be the norm of English society—

the former to stress rationality and objectivity, the latter to stress

honesty and utility. Ironically, the Plain Style became a common dialect in a world split along

Di Renzo, “Plain Dealing” 3

class and religious lines, one in which both parties, High Church aristocrats and Low Church

merchants, sought to exploit each other in a cruel and volatile market.

To survive in such a money-mad society, poets and novelists were compelled to combine

artistic imagination with entrepreneurial shrewdness. Indeed, the business of writing, the writing

of business, became the chief business of their art. For example, Samuel Richardson's epistolary

novels, Pamela and Clarissa, are modelled after the letter writing manuals he wrote and

produced in his own print shop. No writer, however, was more enterprising than Daniel Defoe,

often called the father of the Plain Style and the English novel. As merchant, chapman, amateur

scientist, and dissenter, Defoe valued plain speaking in his

personal and business affairs, and practiced it in his fiction

and journalism. According to Ian Watt, Defoe was “the

optimistic spokesman of the new economic and social order”

(89). Isaac Kramnick goes so far as to call him “capitalism’s

first great apologist” (192).

Unlike his fellow Puritan, John Bunyan, Defoe

relished Vanity Fair. Indeed, this subversive opportunist

religiously played the early literary market for his own ends.

Many critics have commented on how Defoe in Robinson

Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) transforms the discourse of Puritan confessional

literature into English's first how-to-succeed-in-business stories. Few critics, however, have

noticed the elaborate business documentation that shapes these novels. The marooned Robinson

Crusoe is a one-man corporation, and his journal contains proposals and progress reports to

himself as he struggles to make his island more productive. As a novel, Moll Flanders often

reads like a packet of bills, writs, and brochures, such as the pamphlet discussing the different

price ranges available at a lying-in-hospital in Drury Lane.

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As a prolific pamphleteer (he wrote over 500 tracts), Defoe often produced these kinds of

promotional and informative circulars. Most of these remain uncollected. Some, however, are

still in print and are among the most important early business documents in English. An Essay

Upon Projects (1699), for example, is “an astonishing compendium of proposed radical

reforms,” “a blueprint for a young capitalist society,” which includes such “daring” schemes as

"the establishing of a general bank, income tax and a roving commission to check evasion, the

direction of labour, the building of national highways,” and, significantly, “an academy for the

correction and refinement of the English tongue” (Burgess 10).

Defoe, however, had already taken steps to purify the language of the capitalist tribe in

his seminal pamphlet The Complete English Tradesman (1726), England’s first business writing

manual. Even after 270 years, Defoe’s tract remains fresh and contemporary because its thesis

still applies: “A tradesman’s letter should be plain, concise, and to the purpose. No quaint

expressions, no book-phrases, no flourishes. And yet they must be full and sufficient to express

what he means, so as not to be doubtful, much less unintelligible” (145). As in his fiction, Defoe

in this business manual adapts the rhetoric of Puritan devotional manuals for economic ends,

tempering sardonic humor with scientific severity. His section on cover letters reads like a

parody of the Prodigal Son. Defoe humorously contrasts two writers, an affected coxcomb and a

plain-dealing journeyman. Here is the first letter: Sir—The destinies having so appointed it, and my dark stars concurring, that I, who by

nature was framed for better things, should be put out to trade, and the gods having been

so propitious to me in the time of my servitude, that at length . . . I am launched forth into

the great ocean of business [and] I thought it fit to acquaint you . . . and hereby let you

know that I shall have occasion for the goods hereafter mentioned, which you shall send

me by the carrier. (144)

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This young man, Defoe gibes, “should turn poet instead of tradesman, and set up for wit,

not a shopkeeper” (144). Compare this bombast to the second letter:

BEING OBLIGED, SIR, by my late master’s decease, to enter immediately upon his

business, and consequently open my shop without coming up to London to furnish myself

with such goods as I presently want, I have here sent you a small order as underwritten. I

hope you will think yourself obliged to use me well, and particularly that the goods may

be in fine condition, though I cannot be at London to examine them myself. (145)

“This,” says Defoe, “was writing like a man that understood what he was doing; and his

correspondent in London would presently say—‘This young man writes like a man of business;

pray let us take care to use him well, for in all probability he will be a good chapman.’”

Here endeth the lesson. Go and do likewise.

Defoe was evangelical about effective communication in the marketplace, since this skill

had allowed him to triumph over England's rigid caste system to become a successful tradesman.

“The end of speech,” he declared, “is that men might understand one another’s meaning; . . . If

any man were to ask me, which would supposed to be a perfect style, or language, I would

answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various

capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all in the same manner with

one another, and in the same sense in which the speaker intended to be understood” (149).

His sermon on business writing stresses four points: an awareness of one's audience; a

plain, easy style; scientific accuracy; and personal integrity. With these tools, a man could write

himself out of poverty.

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efoe’s Gospel of Success changed the life of many young men seeking their fortune in

London at the time. One of them was an American printer's apprentice named Benjamin

Franklin, then in his late teens, who was working at Watt’s Printing House. Young Ben was

stranded in London between 1724 and 1726, after being sent there on a wild goose chase by the

Governor of Pennsylvania. While struggling to earn enough money for his return fare, Franklin

took to the streets of London the way privileged young men took to Cambridge, befriending

Bernard Mandleville, the author of The Fable of The Bees (1724), and attempting to arrange an

interview with Sir Isaac Newton.

D

Prior to his stay in London, Franklin was the unambitious son of a Boston candlemaker

who had fled to Philadelphia to avoid working for his tyrannical printer brother, William. But

London’s coffee houses, print shops, and book stores fired his imagination, and his discovery of

Defoe's tracts and novels marked the turning point in Franklin’s creative life. Franklin's gift for

political satire, his passion for practical science, his strategic interest in juntos (those associations

of freewheeling leather-aprons who would meet to

trade information) were all inspired by Defoe. One

could almost say that if Benjamin Franklin had never

been born, Daniel Defoe would have been forced to

invent him—the Self-Made Man in the New World.

Appropriately, when Franklin establishing his

printing house in Philadelphia, he honored his master

by bringing out American editions of Defoe’s work.

To be sure, there are important differences

between Defoe and Franklin’s attitude toward

business writing. As Max Weber observed, “what in

the former case was an expression of commercial

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daring and a personal inclination morally neutral, in the latter takes on the character of an

ethically colored maxim for the conduct of life” (27). If Defoe is the entrepreneur as artist,

bending the rhetoric of religion to suit the needs of the market, Franklin is the entrepreneur as

philosopher, bending the rhetoric of the market to suit the needs of religion. As business writers,

both men cultivated a shrewd and pragmatic style, but Defoe's was better suited for a cynical,

cosmopolitan city that was rich in resources and opportunities. Franklin’s style, homey, pious

could only have evolved in a remote Quaker colony. “In the backwoods small bourgeois

circumstances of Pennsylvania,” Weber explains, “where business threatened for simple lack of

money to fall back into barter, where there was hardly a sign of large enterprise, where only the

earliest beginnings of banking were to be found, [honest business practice] was considered the

essence of moral conduct, even commanded in the name of duty” (29).

Nevertheless, Defoe’s stylistic influence is blatant

in Franklin’s scientific and economic tracts, his self-help

articles, and his Autobiography, which together form the

fountainhead of American business prose. Given the two

men’s common religious and class heritage, this influence

should not be surprising. Like Defoe, Franklin was of

Dissenter, shopkeeper’s stock. As Franklin scholar

Kenneth Silverman has observed, the Autobiography

itself is written "in a Neoclassical version of the Puritan

plain style, without formal beauty or pretensions to

emotional force" (ix). As a matter of fact, Franklin’s

famous time management spreadsheet, the prototype of

the Franklin Day Planner, was created to measure his

moral rather than his financial account, though Franklin

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ecall Defoe’s four criteria for good business writing: an awareness of one's audience; a

style. During the French and Indian Wars,

Whereas, 150 wagons, with 4 horses to each wagon, and 1,500 saddles or pack horses

often insisted one was related to the other, hence the unusual quality of his business anecdotes,

which read like Biblical parables. We have already seen the same general technique in Defoe’s

The Complete English Tradesman, but Franklin even imitates the specifics of Defoe’s manual.

plain, easy style; scientific accuracy; personal integrity. I would like to illustrate these

points by reading examples from Franklin’s work.

The first example illustrates audience and

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Franklin served as an aide to General Braddock. Low on horses, the General wanted to

confiscate them from Pennsylvania farmers because he had no time to barter. Instead, Franklin

urged they advertise in a Lancaster paper. Here is the ad he wrote:

are wanted for the service of His Majesty’s forces, now about to rendezvous at Will's

Creek, and His Excellency, General Braddock, having been pleased to empower me to

contract for hire of the same; I hereby give notice that I shall attend for that purpose at

Lancaster from this day to Wednesday evening, . . . where I shall be ready to agree for

wagons or teams, or single horses on the following terms:

1. That there shall be paid for each wagon with 4 good horses and a driver, fifteen

shillings per diem. And for each able horse with a pack-saddle or other saddle . . . ,

two shillings per diem. And for each able horse without a saddle, eighteen pence per

diem.

2. e pay commence from the time of their joining forces at Will's Creek . . . That th

[until] after their discharge. (147)

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’s horse-trading transformed a potentially alienating situation into an occasion for

s scientific papers were

A FIRE THEN BEING MADE in any Chimney, the Air over the Fire is rarified by the Heat,

Franklin

colonial solidarity, at no small profit to the Pennsylvania farmers.

The second example illustrates scientific accuracy. Franklin'

written more for the market than the academy and read more like sales proposals than treatises.

Notice how Franklin makes the Franklin stove appealing to a skeptical and tightfisted audience.

First he explains how the product works in understandable language:

becom immediately rises in the Funnel, and goes out; the other Air e lighter and therefore

in the Room flowing towards the Chimney supplies its Place, is rarified in its turn, and

rises likewise; the Place of the Air thus carried out of the Room is Supplied by fresh Air

coming in thro' Doors and Windows, or, if they be shut, thro' every Crevice with

Violence, as may be seen by a holding a Candle to a Key-hole. (240-41)

Next Franklin explains the product’s benefits:

[The] advantages of [this Fire-place] above the common Fire-place are:

1. That your whole Room is equally warmed; so that People need not crowd so close round

the Fire, but may sit near the Window, and have the Benefit of the Light for Reading,

Writing, Needlework, &c. . . .

2. If you sit near the Fire, you have not that cold Draught of uncomfortable Air nipping your

Back and Heels, as when before common Fires, by which many catch cold, being scorcht

before, and, as it were, froze behind. (241)

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No wonder Hearth and Home and Vermont Casting have modelled their own fireplace

manuals after Franklin’s!

The last example, the most touching, illustrates personal integrity. Franklin in this public

service announcement uses the death of his younger son to defend inoculation:

Understanding ‘tis a current Report that my son

Francis, who died lately of the Small Pox, had it by

Inoculation; and being desired to satisfy the Public

in that Particular; inasmuch as some People are, by

that Report . . . deterred from having that Operation

performed on their children, I do hereby sincerely

declare, that he was not inoculated, but received the

Distemper in the common Way of Infection: And I

suppose the Report could only arise from its being

my known Opinion, that Inoculation was a safe and

beneficial Practice; and from my having said among my Acquaintance, that I intended to have my

Child inoculated, as soon as he should have recovered sufficient Strength from a Flux from which

he had been long afflicted. (284)

In his Autobiography, Franklin would add “This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that

operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it—

my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer

should be chosen" (112)

If these examples have a strikingly contemporary ring, it is because the rhetoric and ethos of

18th century English mercantile culture still influences business writing today even in an age

Di Renzo, “Plain Dealing” 11

of faxes, modems, and multinationals. Indeed, the Plain Style, as practiced by Defoe and

Franklin, is often cited as an ideal, even a moral imperative, in professional communications.

Think of the Plain English Revolution launched in the early Eighties by Alan Siegel of Siegel

and Gale, a New York consulting firm dedicated to simplifying language in business,

government, and law. According to Siegel, “Redressing the balance—making sure that the

documents consumers are expected to understand are made understandable—is a matter of

simple fairness, and simple efficiency”; in other words, of plain dealing (99).

However laudable this goal, we should remind ourselves that plain dealing does not mean

returning language to a natural simplicity but using a sophisticated rhetorical tradition, the

Puritan Plain style tempered by Neoclassical scientism, which

has a specific history and ideology. When we write a circular

explaining the hazards of NYSEG pipelines, a sales letter asking

for contributions to Loaves and Fishes, a memo outlining a

change in policy at Corning, no matter how clear and

straightforward our language, we are not being natural but

politic. As Anthony Burgess notes about Daniel Defoe’s

deceptively simple style, “The art is too much concealed by art

to seem like art, and hence the art is frequently discounted” (7), adding that simplicity “[can]

only be assumed by . . . sophisticated [writers] with long years of writing behind [them]” (17).

The same observation applies to Benjamin Franklin, whose self-effacing persona hides,

to quote Herman Melville, “deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an

air Arcadian unaffectedness” (qtd in Silverman xx). Such simplicity, though, is an illusion. From

Grub Street to Walnut Street, from Walnut Street to Wall Street, Plain English always has been

about selling, not informing. And if you don’t believe me, just visit Franklin Quest at the

Syracuse Carousel Mall. Their planners come in black, burgundy, and forest green.

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WORKS CITED Burgess, Anthony. “Introduction” A Journal of the Plague Year. By Daniel Defoe. (NY:

Penguin, 1966) 6-19.

Defoe, Daniel. “Excerpt from The Complete English Tradesman.” Writing About Business

and Industry. Ed. Beverly E. Schneller. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 144-49.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. Selected and Edited with an

Introduction by L. Jesse Lemisch. (NY: Signet, 1960)

Franklin Quest. “Fall 1995 Catalogue.” (Franklin Covey, 1995)

Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of

Walpole. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968)

Silverman, Kenneth. “Introduction.” The Autobiography and Other Writings. By Benjamin

Franklin. Edited by Silverman. (NY: Penguin, 1986) vii-xx.

Siegel, Alan. “The Plain English Revolution.” Strategies for Business and Technical

Writing. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. 3rd ed. (NY: Harcourt, 1989)

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. (Berkeley: U of

California P, 1957)

Weber, Max. “Excerpt from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Writing

About Business and Industry. Ed. Schneller. 26-30.