Class was about more than wealth and family name; it was conveyed through appearances and reputation. Franklin understood this. The first portrait of him, painted in 1746, did not show him in his leather apron setting print type; nor was he pushing a wheelbarrow along the street, as he described himself—a dutiful tradesman—in his Autobiography. He was wearing a respectable wig and a fine ruffled shirt, and assumed all the airs of the “Better Sort.”21
So, for all the rhetoric and idealizing, he was well aware of the realities of the circumstances because he lived in and bowed to them.
