Sources of forming the author’s position in Benjamin Franklin’s «The Silence Dogood Letters» essay

Abstract

The article analyzes peculiarities of Benjamin Franklin’s publishing and journalistic work, based on the essay «The Silence Dogood Letters». Here we establish different sources of the written work and the reflection of the author’s political and life views into it. Using the scientific and periodical data, background and information sources, we find the origins of the author’s position in «The Letters», which we conditionally divide into the following thematic groups: 1) descent and family relations; 2) parenting and life stories; 3) personal experience; 4) literary preferences of the author. The main features of the work we define as: unobtrusive statement of ideas in conjunction with a clear author’s position; the religious and at the same time democratic nature of the author’s ideological beliefs; respect for knowledge and scientific research. According to the results of the comparative analysis of the work «The Silence Dogood Letters» and the established primary literary sources, it was concluded that the correlations between their contents (in particular, the plot) and the forms existed. It can be explained through a wide use of popular editions by a young autor as a literary ground for his text, besides they influeced the most on forming his personality. Among them, the English magazine «The Spectator» of Addison and Steele and an allegorical novel of the рuritan writer John Bunyan «The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come». The work of the latter, in our opinion, had the greatest influence on the formation of the author’s position and the architectonics of «The Letters», and an essay from the magazine «The Spectator» – on the choice of form and individual fragments of the analyzed work.