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Winter 2003

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Profile: The irrepressible Dr. Franklin's London digs

Patricia Wright




	PRESERVATIONIST: Márcia Balisciano ’88 of the Benjamin Franklin House (photo by Patricia Wright)

OF ALL THE THINGS UNCOVERED during the stabilization of 36 Craven Street, the numerous human bones in the basement were surely the most surprising. And Márcia Balisciano ’88 is not unconscious of the interest potential in such a possibly gruesome detail. As executive director of the Friends of the Benjamin Franklin House, a block from the River Thames in the City of London, Balisciano is in the business of sparking interest in the modest 18th-century row house where Franklin spent the better part of 15 years before the American Revolution.

Let it be said, however, that the bones in the basement are hardly the first thing brought up by Balisciano, or by anyone else connected with the drive to save 36 Craven Street as a Franklin museum. Rather, they properly stress the significance of the building as the only extant residence of the polymathic, bespectacled Founding Father, and the magnitude of his import and charm.

A self-assured young woman with glossy black hair and perfectly manicured crimson fingernails, Balisciano says she knew “next to nothing” about Benjamin Franklin before becoming involved with the house in 1999. Leading a group of journalists through its still-bare rooms last spring, she made short work of questions about how she herself got there: from Salem, Massachusetts, it turns out, by way of UMass Amherst, an M.A. in international relations at the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics.

“I will say though that my first job after having a paper route in Salem was as a tour guide,” she offered, adding that “the crème de la crème of Salem tour-guiding” is experienced on Halloween and the Fourth of July. So perhaps it was destiny. In any case, Balisciano is now manifestly devoted to this Anglo-American landmark and fluent in its history and Franklin’s.

The Philadelphia printer and politician arrived in London in 1757 as an agent of the colonial government of Pennsylvania. Landlady Margaret Stevenson provided the “genteel lodgings” that Franklin would occupy, except for a brief trip to America in 1762-64, until 1775, when he returned to Philadelphia to participate in the Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

During these years Franklin would not only become the de facto ambassador of the American colonies to the Court of St. James, but would also continue the scientific experiments and writing that had already won him renown.

“The Franklin stove was perfected in this house,” says Balisciano. “Franklin’s ‘glass harmonica,’ which Mozart and Beethoven composed for, was invented here. It was at Franklin’s initiative that a lightning rod was put on St. Paul’s Cathedral!”

From his rooms on the second story of the Craven Street house, the irrepressible Dr. Franklin – as he was known after receiving an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews – studied the effects of the Gulf Stream and the hydraulics of canals. He devised “an ‘economical’ clock with three wheels to ensure a perpetual 24-hour cycle.” He chose seeds of European plants to be sent to America.

He did not, of course, conduct experiments on human remains, or you’d have heard the bones in the basement long before this.

When the remains of 10 18th-century persons were discovered in the course of structural renovations completed in 1998, the Westminster coroner concluded that they were most likely anatomical specimens disposed of by William Hewson, a young surgeon, protégé of Franklin, and husband of Mrs. Stevenson’s daughter, Polly.

“The bones, and subsequent research, prove that Hewson operated an anatomy school from the lower level of the House,” the Friends’ Web site states. “The discovery has excited those interested in the history of surgery.”

To excite those interested in just about everything – as was Franklin himself – is the purpose, says Balisciano, of the multi-media experience being planned for the schoolchildren, scholars, tourists, and Franklin fanciers who will visit 36 Craven Street in the future.

“I think his interests were the reason Franklin lived so long and accomplished so much,” says Balisciano. “I think the interests of Benjamin Franklin were just about infinite.”

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Profile: The irrepressible Dr. Franklin's London digs