Page 10 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com
P. 10
By making himself a character in the text, and having that character be
lectured, Franklin makes it clear he is aware that so much good advice
delivered in one chunk is like having your ear bent. By your grandparents.
Which is never that comfortable and leaves me, for one, with the uneasy
feeling that I’m being told how to invest money that I had previously
earmarked for gob stoppers and sherbet dip dabs.
That tone alone is enough to have modern adults quietly putting the book
down after only a few lines. Which is a pity because Franklin reserves a
little surprise at the end which explains why he has the advice delivered by
the daunting Father Abraham rather than by himself. Despite being written
as a harangue, The Way to Wealth is a very human book about very human
strengths and weaknesses. If this modernisation helps keep alive even a
small part of that homely wisdom in the context of today’s high-tech world
then Franklin would have approved. Only he woul dn’t have put it that way,
of course. He’d probably have nodded sagely and muttered something along
the lines of ‘many a little makes a mickle’. And how right he’d have been.
