Deborah Franklin's Hand
Deborah Read Franklin ran the shop, the post office, and the household on Market Street through the years her husband spent in London, and she wrote to him constantly. Almost none of it survives outside the Franklin Papers. Her signature has come to market only a handful of times in a century: two bonds and a letter through Rosenbach in the 1940s, an earlier letter in 1919, and this fragment, sold by Charles Hamilton in 1976 as the first specimen of her hand he had ever seen. It has not been offered since, and no other example is known in private hands.
The twenty-six words are spelled as she heard them — A Leven, donte, Compleyments — and that is the point of keeping them. Franklin wrote the most famous English prose of his century; his wife, who had only what schooling a Philadelphia girl of 1720 was given, wrote as she spoke, and signed D. Franklin at the foot of it. The collection is about Franklin's world, and she was the center of it.
Deborah Franklin Parial LS
An excessively rare Deborah Franklin signature — the last example offered was this same piece. Her phonetic spelling, for which she apologized to her husband, is the surest authentication of her hand. Deborah kept the Philadelphia household and business through Franklin's long absences, and this letter is the one object in the collection in her voice.