James Ralph

James Ralph (c. 1705 – 24 January 1762) was an English political writer, historian, periodical essayist and Grub Street hack—best remembered for the scorn he attracted in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad—whose major works, the two‑volume A History of England during the Reigns of King William, Queen Anne, and King George I (1744–46) and the anonymously issued The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), shaped mid‑eighteenth‑century historical and literary debate.^[1][2]

James Ralph was born in London around 1705, according to recent scholarship based on apprenticeship records and other archival sources.^[3] Earlier reference works, including the 1935 Dictionary of American Biography and nineteenth‑century encyclopedias such as Appletons’, mis‑identified him as American‑born—an error probably encouraged by his early associations with Philadelphia and Benjamin Franklin.^[2]

Ralph likely arrived in Philadelphia as a teenage apprentice, probably by 1720.^[3] By 1723 he was working as a clerk and had joined a small “junto” of young intellectuals who met at Jonathan Read’s coffee house, including printer Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Watson, and Charles Osborne.^[4][5] Franklin described him as “ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker.”^[6] The two became close companions, sharing literary ambitions and philosophical conversation. Franklin later wrote that Ralph was “married and having one child,” though his wife’s name is not preserved in surviving correspondence.^[6]

On Guy Fawkes Day (5 November) 1724 Ralph sailed with Franklin aboard the ship London Hope.^{[7][note 1]} Franklin later recalled that Ralph “though married and having one child, had determined to accompany me … and never meant to return,” leaving wife and daughter behind in Pennsylvania.^[6][8]

Upon arrival in December 1724, Ralph searched unsuccessfully for work as a copyist, editor, or actor.^[9] He located relatives, including a sister lodging at Mrs Down’s in Brooke Street, Holborn,^[10] but soon exhausted his funds, so Franklin advanced him five guineas and kept lending. According to Franklin, Ralph’s borrowings eventually “amounted in the whole to near twenty‑seven pounds”—a sizeable sum for the two cash‑strapped friends.^[11][12]

On Franklin’s recommendation, Ralph took a post as village schoolmaster near Reading, Berkshire. Finding the work beneath his ambitions, he “did me the Honour to assume my Name,” Franklin later recalled, so that the employment would not embarrass him when “better Fortune” arrived.^[13][14] Around the same time, Franklin privately printed his philosophical tract, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, dedicating it to “J. R.,” almost certainly Ralph.^[6][15]

Ralph had meanwhile taken up with a young London milliner, whom he left in Franklin’s care while away. Franklin’s awkward flirtation provoked jealousy and severed the friendship; Ralph used the breach to repudiate his debts, and Franklin later disavowed at least one obligation and regretted the whole arrangement.^[16][17]

At the same time, a series of increasingly desperate letters to the dissenting minister Strickland Gough show Ralph begging for “six Guineas … at 80 per cent Interest” and pointedly styling the milliner “my wife.”^[14]

Franklin sailed home in July 1726, but Ralph remained in London and began actively pursuing a literary career. Franklin later recalled that Ralph “had a pretty good collection of poems and essays” and that he had encouraged him to publish, believing he might “turn them to account by printing them.”^[6]

Reflecting on their time in London together, Franklin wrote:

“I lov’d him, notwithstanding, for he had many amiable qualities. I had by no means improv’d my fortune; but I had picked up some very ingenious acquaintance, whose conversation was of great advantage to me.”^[6]

Left on his own, Ralph threw himself into blank‑verse poetry. Inspired by James Thomson’s Winter, he produced The Tempest (1727) and Night, a Poem in Four Books (1728). Contemporary reviewers derided his “loose pindarick” manner, but in the preface Ralph defended blank verse for its “variety of expression, strength of images, and beauty of metaphors.” begging critics to “compare [it] with Nature … before ’tis declared unworthy of the Muse.”^[18]

Between 1727 and 1729 he also published a catch‑all Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands—largely his own—and the Miltonic romance Zeuma; or, The Love of Liberty, whose Peruvian setting foreshadows the liberty‑myth in his later prose.^[19]

That same year saw the publication of Pope’s Dunciad A, and Ralph entered the fray with his satire Sawney, an Heroic Poem Occasion’d by the Dunciad. Literary historian Laird Okie argues that Sawney chiefly defends professional “hack” writers rather than attacking Pope on party grounds.^[9]

Pope nevertheless noticed, and in the Dunciad Variorum (Bk III, ll. 165–166) he jeered:

“Silence, ye Wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls
And makes Night hideous—Answer him, ye Owls!”^[20]

Ralph later complained that the insult soured London booksellers against him—an understandable belief, although other ”dunciad” targets such as James Moore Smythe, Edward Cooke, and Leonard Welsted continued to find publishers.^[9]

Hughes speculates that during 1726–29 Ralph toured Holland: Dutch scenes fill The Touch‑Stone, and his fond praise of country puppet‑shows suggests a writer fresh from observing Continental popular culture—an outlook that soon fed into Fielding’s burlesques.^[21]

When Night failed to draw the readership he expected, Ralph pivoted sharply from lofty blank verse to topical satire—first in prose and verse, then on the stage.^[14]

In 1728 Ralph issued the anonymous satirical handbook The Touch‑Stone (re‑titled The Taste of the Town in 1731). Casting a jaundiced eye over opera, plays, fairs and puppet‑shows, the book urged playwrights to abandon imported Italian subjects in favour of “our most noted domestick Fables” such as Tom Thumb, Whittington and His Cat, and Robin Hood. Literary historians—beginning with Helen S. Hughes in 1922—agree that these essays helped spark Henry Fielding’s abrupt turn from polite comedy to burlesque in The Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb (both 1730).^[22][23] For details, see

The two became friends. Ralph wrote the prologue to Fielding’s The Temple Beau, first printed on 2 February 1730. In it he rails at “Critics…whose Vile Arts would starve the Bard,” and defends “Authors, like other men, who must live by Wit.”^[24][25]

Later that spring he purchased one of the twenty‑five one‑sixteenth shares issued to finance Fielding’s Little Theatre in the Haymarket, joining the playwright’s circle of backers.^[26] The play’s satire on social pretension reflected Ralph’s own interests, and his involvement hints at an early influence on Fielding’s theatrical voice.

That same year Ralph also authored the ballad‑opera The Fashionable Lady, first advertised for 2 April 1730 at Goodman’s Fields and repeated for a total of nine nights in its opening season, with two summer revivals. Contemporary playbills hailed it as “a hyperbolic take‑off on The Beggar’s Opera,” skewering the vogue for Italian opera and managers’ pandering to it.^[27] The piece saw moderate success.

By 1731–37 London playhouses were becoming overtly partisan. Shut out of Walpole’s patronage, Ralph and Fielding aimed their burlesques squarely at “the Minister.” Ralph’s own adaptation, The Fall of the Earl of Essex (1731), darkened the portrait of an over‑mighty favourite in terms clearly meant for Walpole, while Fielding’s The Author’s Farce, Tom Thumb and, later, Pasquin carried the assault further.^[28][29] Historians note that prologues and epilogues now served as party broadsides, and managers treated the major houses as “political institutions” where opposition leaders courted public opinion.^[30][31]

During the same season Ralph contributed essays to Fielding’s periodical The Prompter while continuing to assist at the Little Theatre. Ralph and Fielding collaborated through the 1730s. Although Battestin suggests their political paths eventually diverged, the surviving publications are inconclusive.^[23]

The Licensing Act 1737 shuttered the Little Theatre and ended Fielding’s stage career, prompting both men to shift their focus to political journalism. Ralph wrote for the The Weekly Register and The Daily Courant and, beginning in 1737, co-edited The Champion with Fielding.^[9] He used these platforms to attack ministerial corruption and criticize the government’s conduct of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

When Sir Robert Walpole was elevated to the Lords in 1742, Ralph published The Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (1743), a scathing assessment of the outgoing Prime Minister. Fielding’s fiercest Walpole satire, Jonathan Wild, appeared the same year, and The Champion—still featuring Ralph’s political essays—continued until 1744.^[9]

In 1742 Ralph issued an anonymous rejoinder to Sarah Churchill’s’s Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough—The Other Side of the Question—denouncing both the duchess and the late Duke as self‑serving politicians. The following year he entered the circle of George Bubb Dodington, and—backed by Dodington and Lord Chesterfield—co‑edited the opposition weekly Old England with historian William Guthrie. Dodington soon made Ralph his private secretary; when his patron briefly joined the ministry in 1744, Ralph secured a pension of about £200 a year.^[32]

Between 1744 and 1746 Ralph published his folio History of England during the Reigns of William III, Anne, and George I (2 vols.). Dedicated to Horace Walpole, Baron Walpole of Wolterton, the work rejects triumphalist Whig story‑telling and emphasises trade, taxation, and the fiscal‑military state—an approach that later won praise from Henry Hallam and modern economic historians.^[1][33]

Issued the same year, The Use and Abuse of Parliaments (1744, 2 vols.) enlarges an essay by Algernon Sidney into a sweeping constitutional history, arguing that Parliament’s duty is to police ministerial “encroachments” on English liberty.^[34]

Dodington soon returned to opposition, and in 1747 Ralph launched The Remembrancer, a pro‑Prince Frederick paper, while also acting as an intermediary between the prince and Dodington.^[35] On 11 May 1749, Ralph was arrested on suspicion of leaking a parliamentary debate but was quickly released without charge.^[36]

Following Prince Frederick’s death in 1751 the faction collapsed,^[37] and early in 1753 Ralph launched The Protestor, a Bedford‑Whig weekly styled as the “voice of those who protest, though in the minority.”^[38]

Ralph’s politics aligned with Frederick, Prince of Wales and the “Broad‑Bottom” opposition, whose Bolingbroke‑inspired wing viewed Parliament as sentinel of popular liberty. Foord places Ralph in this camp: his pamphlets denounce ministerial “corruption,” exalt sovereignty of the people, and frame liberty as England’s birth‑right.^[34][39] The Use and Abuse of Parliaments (1744) restates Bolingbroke’s warning that any ministry ruling “by means repugnant to the constitution” must be resisted on principle.^[40][41] The same themes run through his History of England and even the early poem Zeuma.^[34]

In a resignation letter of 10 November 1753 Ralph told the Duke of Bedford that gout and “a prosecution of the heaviest kind” forced him to close The Protester, adding that he had returned £150 of the £200 advance from William Beckford and had “laid down the pen.”^[42]

While Ralph wrote for both Whig and Tory causes during his career, he was known for honoring his commitments once retained—prompting Kenny to liken him approvingly to “an honest politician … who when bought, stays bought..”^[43]

In 1753, the actor–manager David Garrick introduced Ralph to Lord Hartington, who arranged for him to receive a government pension—£300 annually and £200 paid down—on the condition that he cease political journalism.^[44] The arrangement was part of a broader effort by the Pelham ministry to quiet opposition voices, effectively pensioning Ralph into silence.^[1]

Beginning in 1756, Ralph reviewed political and historical works for The Monthly Review, carefully avoiding live controversies. In private, however, he remained engaged; in a 1756 letter to the Duke of Newcastle, he proposed extending stamp duties to the American colonies.^[43]

Ralph’s major late publication, issued anonymously in 1758, was The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated. It contends that the decline of aristocratic patronage left writers at the mercy of booksellers and theatre managers—a portrait of literary economics later echoed by Oliver Goldsmith, Isaac D'Israeli, and Thomas Macaulay.^[9]

With the accession of George III in 1760, Ralph secured an additional pension from the Bute administration.^[45]

Although Ralph never returned to America, he re‑established contact with Benjamin Franklin in July 1757, when Franklin arrived in London as Pennsylvania’s agent carrying a letter from Ralph’s daughter in Philadelphia, Mary Ralph Garrigues. Franklin replied advising her “not to write again until I let you know how to direct,” explaining that Ralph did not want his English household to know of his American family.^[46][45] Ralph and Franklin remained in intermittent contact thereafter.

Ralph’s English wife, Ann (née Curtis), died at Chiswick on 27 January 1760.^[2] Nearly two years later, in December 1761, their daughter Helen wrote Franklin that her father was “very dangerously ill,” asking for his assistance.^[47] James Ralph died shortly afterward, on 24 January 1762, reportedly while preparing to launch a pro‑Bute newspaper.^[1] Helen herself died only weeks later, in early March 1762, leaving Ralph with no immediate family in England.^[2]

On 5–6 April 1762 Ralph’s personal library—about 350 lots—was auctioned in York Street, Covent Garden; Franklin attended the sale and bought numerous volumes for a total of £6 5s.^[48]

In Philadelphia, Ralph was survived by Mary and her eleven children, none of whom he had ever met. Later that year, her eldest son, Isaac Garrigues, travelled to London and wrote Franklin, “my Mother is still very anxious to know many particulars concerning [my grandfather’s] death … with Respect to his leaving any children or will at his decease.”^[12][49]

Ann’s mother, Ann Curtis, stipulated in her 1765 will that her executor “pay all the just debts of my late son‑in‑law James Ralph Esquire,” indicating that Ralph left no estate to inherit.^[50]

• The Tempest; or, the Terrors of Death (1727) – Miltonic blank-verse meditation on mortality.^[35]
• Night, a Poem in Four Books (1728) – Ralph’s best-known verse, indebted to James Thomson’s Winter.^[9]
• Sawney, an Heroic Poem Occasion’d by the 'Dunciad' (1728) – Satirical riposte to Pope; drew Pope’s famous rejoinder in the 1732 Dunciad Variorum.^[20]
• Zeuma; or, The Love of Liberty (1729) – blank‑verse heroic poem set in a mythic South‑American kingdom ruled by King Zeuma; fuses Miltonic cadence with Whig “ancient liberty” politics and offers one of Ralph’s earliest Americanised liberty myths.^[51]
• Clarinda; or, The Fair Libertine (1729).
• Ballad to the Tune of Chevy Chase (1749).

• The Fashionable Lady (ballad-opera; Goodman's Fields, 1730)^[27] – Sometimes incorrectly cited as the first London staging by a colonial-born playwright.^[52]
• The Fall of the Earl of Essex (adapt. from The Unhappy Favourite; Goodman’s Fields, 1731; 2 performances).^[53][27]
• The Cornish Squire (adapt. from Squire Tralooby; Drury Lane, 1734; 5 performances).^[54][27]
• The Lawyers’ Feast (farce; Drury Lane, Dec 1743; 3 performances).^[55][27]
• The Astrologer (comedy; Drury Lane, 3 Apr 1744; 1 performance).^[55][27]

• The Touch‑Stone of Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays … (1728) – Satirical guide to London diversions that first attracted Henry Fielding’s notice.^[56][51]

• The Other Side of the Question (1742) – Rebuttal to the Duchess of Marlborough’s memoirs.^[57][1]
• A Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (1743).^[1]
• The Case of Our Present Theatrical Disputes Fairly Stated (1743).^[58]
• A History of England during the Reigns of King William, Queen Anne, and King George I (2 vols., 1744–46) – Ralph’s major historical project; praised by Henry Hallam.^[33]
• The Use and Abuse of Parliaments (2 vols., 1744) – Expands Algernon Sidney’s tract into a sweeping Whig history of Parliament and its “ancient” role as bulwark of English liberty.^[59][1]
• The Case of Authors by Profession (1758, anonymous) – Influential analysis of the economics of authorship;^[9] Ralph had earlier assisted his Chiswick neighbour William Hogarth with preliminary planning for The Analysis of Beauty (1753).^[60]

Note: The 1734 pamphlet A Critical Review of the Public Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster is now thought not to be by James Ralph the writer. The Dictionary of National Biography and the Grub Street Project attribute it instead to a different James Ralph (d. 1743), a government surveyor in Cambridgeshire.^[61] For a biographical account of the surveyor, see Shaw (1898).

• Contributor, The Weekly Register and The Daily Courant (1730s).^[9]
• Co-editor (with Henry Fielding), The Champion (1737–1744).^[9]
• Editor, Old England (1743) – opposition weekly backed by George Bubb Dodington.^[32]
• Editor, The Remembrancer (1747–Nov 1749) – pro-Prince Frederick paper; shut down by the ministry in Nov 1749.^[62][1]
• Editor, The Protestor (1753) – short‑lived Bedford/Beckford opposition sheet.^[38]
• Reviewer (hist./pol.) for The Monthly Review (1756–1758).^[44]

James Ralph’s contemporaries balanced ridicule with respect. As soon as Alexander Pope singled him out in the Dunciad,^[20] Ralph became a standing butt for Pope’s allies: the Grub‑Street Journal mocked “everything Ralph wrote,” Horace Walpole dismissed him as “a dull author,” and satirist Paul Whitehead lampooned the “tiny witling … / Full fam’d for tuneless Rhimes and short‑lived Plays.”^[63]

Ralph answered in his anonymous tract The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (1758), protesting that

A Man may plead for Money, prescribe for or quack for Money, preach and pray for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money, do anything within the Law for Money, provided the Expedient answers, without the least Imputation. But if he writes…for Money…he is branded as a Mercenary.^[64]

While his poetry remained derided, Ralph’s political and historical prose commanded attention. A History of England (1744–46) enjoyed a steady readership, and The Case of Authors—often called the first explicit defence of professional authorship—analysed the new commercial market that left writers “at the mercy of booksellers and theatre‑managers,” a diagnosis later echoed by Oliver Goldsmith, Isaac D'Israeli, and Thomas Macaulay.^[65][66] McKinsey notes that the tract also synthesised Ralph’s own wide experience across bookselling, the stage, and political propaganda.^[67]

Nineteenth‑century historian Henry Hallam praised Ralph as “the most acute and diligent historian we possess for these times,” referring to the era from the Glorious Revolution to the early Hanoverians.^[33]

Twentieth‑century reappraisals began with Helen Sand Hughes, who cast Ralph as a “literary dissenter” whose catholic curiosity—from Dutch strolling players to village puppet‑shows—fed directly into Fielding’s earliest burlesques.^[68] Robert W. Kenny then highlighted Ralph’s skill as an opposition journalist;^[69] Laird Okie saw him breaking with moralising Whig story‑telling in favour of institutional and economic analysis;^[70] and Elizabeth R. McKinsey read his entire output—from blank‑verse experiments to The Case of Authors—as the sustained programme of a self‑conscious professional author arguing for literary, economic and constitutional liberty.^[71]

Early questions about Ralph’s authorship of The Touch‑Stone (1728) were settled in the 1960s, when bibliographer John B. Shipley marshalled stylistic and documentary evidence confirming the attribution.^[72][73]

Some modern commentators have also overstated Ralph’s American ties: Kenny, for example, hailed The Fashionable Lady (1730) as the first play by an “American‑born” author staged in London,^[74] a claim overturned once archival evidence fixed Ralph’s birth in London.^[3]

• Battestin, Martin C.; Battestin, Ruthe R. (1993). Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge.

• Bolingbroke, Henry St John (1841). The Works of Lord Bolingbroke. Vol. 2. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart.

• Bradley, Matthew (2004). "Ralph, James (1705?–1762)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/23060. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

• Burling, William J. (1992). A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700–1737. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

• "Will of Ann Curtis, Widow of Chiswick, Middlesex". The National Archives (UK). 1765. Retrieved 24 July 2025.

• Fielding, Henry (2004). Lockwood, Thomas (ed.). The Plays of Henry Fielding, Volume 1: 1728–1731. The Works of Henry Fielding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Foord, Archibald S. (1964). His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• Franklin, Benjamin (1959). Leonard W. Labaree (ed.). The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 1. New Haven: Yale University Press.

• Franklin, Benjamin (1963). Leonard W. Labaree (ed.). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 7. Yale University Press.

• Franklin, Benjamin (1966a). Leonard W. Labaree (ed.). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 9. Yale University Press.

• Franklin, Benjamin (1966b). Leonard W. Labaree (ed.). The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 10. Yale University Press.

• Hallam, Henry (1872). The Constitutional History of England: From the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). London: John Murray. p. 497.

• Hanson, Laurence (1936). Government and the Press, 1695–1763. London: Oxford University Press.

• Hughes, Helen Sand (1922). "Fielding's Indebtedness to James Ralph". Modern Philology. 20 (1): 19–29. JSTOR 433329. Retrieved 25 July 2025.

• Kenny, Robert W. (1934). James Ralph, Author by Profession (PhD dissertation). University of Pennsylvania.

• Kenny, Robert W. (1940). "James Ralph: An Eighteenth-Century Philadelphian in Grub Street". The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 64 (2): 218–242. JSTOR 20087279. Retrieved 20 July 2025.

• Lemay, J. A. Leo (2006). The Life of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 1: Journalist, 1706–1730. University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Loftis, John (1963). The Politics of Drama in Augustan England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• Lowens, Irving (1959). "The Touch‑Stone (1728): A Neglected View of London Opera". The Musical Quarterly. 45 (3): 325–342. JSTOR 740520. Retrieved 20 July 2025.

• McKillop, Alan D. (1961). "James Ralph in Berkshire". Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. 1 (3): 43–51. JSTOR 449304. Retrieved 25 July 2025.

• McKinsey, Elizabeth R. (1973). "James Ralph: The Professional Writer Comes of Age". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 117 (1): 57–66. JSTOR 985948. Retrieved 20 July 2025.

• Okie, Laird (1967). "James Ralph: An Eighteenth‑Century Professional Writer". Huntington Library Quarterly. 30 (4): 874–875.

• Pope, Alexander (1732). The Dunciad, Variorum Edition. London: Lawton Gilliver.

• Ralph, James (1744). Of the Use and Abuse of Parliaments. Vol. 1. London: Printed for Jacob Robinson.

• Ralph, James (1758). The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated. London: Printed for R. Griffiths.

• Shaw, William A., ed. (1898). Calendar of Treasury Books and Papers, 1729–1745: Volume 2, 1735–1738. Calendar of Treasury Books and Papers. Vol. 2. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Retrieved 24 July 2025.

• Shipley, John B. (1956). "Franklin Attends a Book Auction". Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 80 (1): 37–45. Retrieved 21 July 2025.

• Shipley, John B. (1964). "James Ralph's Place and Date of Birth". American Literature. 36: 343–346. JSTOR 2923549. Retrieved 20 July 2025.

• Shipley, John B. (1968). "The Authorship of "The Touch‑Stone"". Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. 62 (2): 189–198. JSTOR 24301925. Retrieved 25 July 2025.

• Stephen, Leslie (1896). "Ralph, James". In Leslie Stephen (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 47. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 286–287.

• Wyndham, Henry Penruddocke, ed. (1784). The Diary of the Late George Bubb Dodington. London: J. Dodsley.

• Garrigues, George L. (2006). He Usually Lived With a Female. Quail Creek Press. pp. 11–12. ISBN 0963483013. – Discusses Ralph’s family connection to American journalist Charles Harris Garrigues.

• Okie, Laird (1991). Augustan Historical Writing: Historiography in England, 1688–1750. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. – Broader scholarly context for Ralph’s historical work.

• "Ralph, James" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.

• "Ralph, James" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin at Project Gutenberg – public-domain edition for general reference (note: pagination differs from scholarly editions).
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (various scans) at Internet Archive.