How to Save a Penny and More at Franklin’s Grave

Last week the Philadelphia newspapers ran a short article about an effort to preserve the gravestone of Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.

That marble stone, in the Christ Church Burial Ground across from Independence Mall, has developed “developed a significant crack on top of the pitting caused by the tens of thousands of pennies tossed onto the marker annually in tribute to Franklin.”

The article suggested people threw those pennies on the stone “in tribute to Franklin, who coined the adage that ‘a penny saved, is a penny earned.’” But throwing pennies away is hardly saving them, is it?

No, this was just another manifestation of tourists’ wish to make their mark everywhere (while reassuring themselves they’re not actually vandalizing sites or causing damage). I recall climbing up the Bunker Hill Monument a few years back and seeing that people had shoved pennies through the wire grills on the windows, all to leave some hard sign they had passed through.

What’s more, though the “penny saved” adage sounds like something Franklin would write, he never actually did. He didn’t even quote it in Poor Richard’s Almanac, the way many other old sayings came to be attributed to him.

[CORRECTION: My source on that was wrong, as the comments below reveal. When I searched Founders Online to confirm that source, I searched for “penny saved”—but Franklin used the spelling “penny sav’d,” darn him.]

We have three examples of Franklin using variations on that adage:

• In a 1732 Pennsylvania Gazette essay under the pseudonym Celia Single, Franklin wrote: “you know a penny sav’d is a penny got, a pin a day is a groat a year, every little makes a mickle…”
• In his 1737 almanac’s “Hints for those that would be Rich,” Franklin offered an even higher return: “A Penny sav’d is Twopence clear, A Pin a day is a Groat a Year.”
• In a 2 Oct 1779 letter on designing American coins, Franklin recommended that they display financial advice, including, “a Penny sav’d is a Penny got.”

But Franklin didn’t originate that saying.

According to this analysis, Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England (c. 1661) was the first book to note, “a penny saved is a penny gained.” Edward Ravenscroft’s Canterbury Guests (1695) preferred, “A penny sav’d, is a penny got.”

George Washington quoted the latter form of the adage to Anthony Whitting, an alcoholic farm manager at Mount Vernon, on 16 Dec 1792. And then again on 20 Jan 1793. And again on 5 May 1793. Whitting died later that year, or no doubt he would have read the words a lot more. Washington quoted the wisdom one last time to his last farm manager, James Anderson, on 29 Jan 1797.

At the end of 1831, the British and then American and then British political writer William Cobbett gave a lecture in Manchester in which he stated, “‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’ says the proverb.” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register printed that version of the saying in January 1832.

But the adage wasn’t done evolving. In 1841 Gould’s Universal Index, and Every Body’s Own Book, by the American stenographer Marcus T. C. Gould, offered yet another version. A lecture in that schoolbook starts off, “Franklin has said that ‘Time is money;’ that ‘A penny saved is worth two earned.’” So American authors were starting to link versions of the adage back to Franklin.

Finally, everything came together in the form we know in the sixteenth Annual Report of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind, published in Cambridge in 1848: “…according to Dr. Franklin, a penny saved is a penny earned.” Since then, many American sources have printed that version of the saying with that attribution. But Franklin himself said it a little differently.

Back to Philadelphia. The Christ Church Preservation Trust raised $66,000 for the gravestone restoration project before turning to GoFundMe for another $10,000. Within a day or two after local publicity hit, musician Jon Bon Jovi, his wife Dorothea, and the Philadelphia Eagles football team pledged the bulk of the money needed.

Washington’s Mickles in a Pickle

Last week’s episode of the television series Turn: Washington’s Spies was titled “Many Mickles Make a Muckle,” after a saying Gen. George Washington voiced early in the action.

Washington actually did write that phrase, albeit in 1793. That April he wrote to Anthony Whitting, a manager at Mount Vernon, about the importance of keeping track of expenses:

People are often ruined before they are aware of the danger, by buying every thing they think they want; conceiving them to be trifles—without adverting to a scotch addage—than which nothing in nature is more true—“that many mickles make a muckle.”

However, Whitting didn’t live up to Washington’s standards, and at the end of the year he wrote to William Pearce:

Nothing will contribute more to effect these desirable purposes than a good example—unhappily this was not set (from what I have learnt lately) by Mr Whiting, who, it is said, drank freely—kept bad company at my house and in Alexandria—& was a very debauched person—where ever this is the case it is not easy for a man to throw the first stone for fear of having it returned to him: and this I take to be the true cause why Mr Whiting did not look more scrupulously into the conduct of the Overseers, & more minutely into the smaller matters belonging to the Farms—which, though individually may be trifling, are not found so in the agregate, for there is no addage more true than an old Scotch one, that “many mickles make a muckle.”

And Washington still had that advice on his mind the following June when he told his Philadelphia steward James Germain:

There is an old Scotch adage, than which none in the whole catalogue of them is more true, or more worthy of being held in remembrance—viz.—“that many mickles make a muckle” indicating that however trifling a thing may be in itself, when it stands alone, yet, when they come to be multiplyed they mount high which serves to prove, that nothing, however trifling, ought to be wasted that can be saved—nor bought if you can do well without it.

However, as Betty Kirkpatrick at the Caledonian Mercury has pointed out, Washington misquoted the traditional adage. She explained:

Mickle and muckle, far from being opposites in meaning, actually mean the same thing. As nouns they both mean a large amount or a great deal of something. As adjectives they both mean large or great in size. Many Scots words have variations in spelling and muckle/mickle is an example. Meikle is another variation of the same word, as in the meikle stane (stone) mentioned in “Tam o’ Shanter.”

Kirkpatrick suggests the original phrase was “Mony a pickle maks a muckle,” which would indeed mean a lot of little things add up to a big thing.

There were a couple of other variations circulating in eighteenth-century America. In Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1737 Benjamin Franklin reminded readers, “Every little makes a mickle.” And in 1758 Poor Richard’s rendered the phrase as “Many a little makes a mickle.”