Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin's Account of the Self

This article examines Franklin’s efforts to manage his debts in the early stages of his career as a Philadelphia printer, highlighting his feelings of guilt at spending money entrusted to him by the Rhode Island merchant Samuel Vernon. It goes on show how a combination of political, legal, and religious pressures on debtors in the 1730s required Franklin to pay more attention to his bookkeeping practices, arguing that these more vigilant accounting habits informed the schemes for moral self-regulation described in the Autobiograph