Of formal education Franklin had little, despite his early fondness for reading. (In the Autobiography he mentions being put into grammar school at age eight and staying there for "not quite one Year," after which his father put him in a school for learning writing and arithmetic.) When he was ten he began work in his father's shop. Two years later (at the customary age) he was apprenticed to his brother James to learn the printing trade.
The office of James Franklin's newspaper, the New-England Courant, turned out to be a propitious environment for Benjamin Franklin's development as a writer. The presence there of a group of young writers of satire (whom the Mathers had dubbed the Hell-Fire Club because of their opposition) stimulated young Ben to try his hand at this kind of writing. The resulting Dogood essays, which he wrote over the pseudonym of Silence Dogood, a young widow, satirized from her point of view such varying subjects as extravagant female dress, moonlight strolling, religious hypocrisy in government office, bad verse obituaries (the famous recipe for a New England elegy, attacking sentimentalism), alcoholism, Harvard education, and the expulsion of Timothy Cutler, the rector of Yale College, for his Arminian and Anglican views.
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