In Benjamin Franklin in London George Goodwin takes the reader through a chronological account of Franklin's years in London, including the formative period between 1724 and 1726 that he spent working in the London printing houses of Samuel Palmer and John Watts. He opens the book with a prologue describing Franklin's humiliating dressing-down before the Cockpit in January 1774 that brought his career as the leading American spokesman in London to a climactic close. But the gist of Goodwin's tale is Franklin's fundamental attachment to Britain and British culture. He was “born an Englishman in Boston” (11), Goodwin tells us at the start of chapter 1, “Life Before London,” in which he explores Franklin's roots, his early years as a printer's apprentice, and his flight to Philadelphia. In chapter 2, “A Young Man in London,” he covers Franklin's youthful sojourn in the British capital. Franklin was back in Philadelphia after just a year and a half, and in the next two chapters Goodwin covers his rise to prosperity as a Philadelphia publisher and journalist, his experiments in electricity, and his engagement in Pennsylvania politics between 1726 and 1757.

The meat of the book is Franklin's years as a colonial agent in London, between 1757 and 1775. The story of his first mission on behalf of the Pennsylvania assembly and his clash with the Penns over taxation of proprietary lands is interspersed with accounts of his clubs, his wide circle of acquaintance, his scientific interests, the learned societies that accepted him with open arms, and the household in Craven Street that became his home away from home. Goodwin writes smoothly, and he is enthusiastic in recreating Franklin's everyday London environment. (However, the brief chapter on the interval back in Philadelphia between 1762 and1764 that interrupted his lengthy service as colonial agent is unnecessary.) Goodwin opens his account of Franklin's return to London with a chapter on the Stamp Act Crisis. Franklin's final eleven years in London, during which time he became colonial agent for Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, when he evolved from British American patriot to committed proponent of American independence were surely the most momentous.

Goodwin adheres throughout to his multifaceted rendering of Franklin's London experience, for example opening the chapter on the Stamp Act crisis with a discussion of Georgian English eating habits and cookbooks, loosely correlating them to Franklin's own tastes. We are taken quickly through Franklin's role in the work of repealing the Stamp Act; his famous testimony before the House of Commons was “nothing short of superb,” but Goodwin provides no details (168). Ensuing chapters move between politics and his personal and social life. Chapters 11 and 13, “Pivotal Years” and “Seeking Balance,” recount, among other things, the controversy surrounding the Townshend Acts; the failure of Franklin's quest for royal government for Pennsylvania; and Franklin's interest in western land speculation, which brought him into conflict with American secretary Wills Hill, 1st earl of Hillsborough.

In between these discussions, Goodwin devotes chapter 12, “Home Comforts and Discomforts,” to Franklin's relationship with his surrogate English family, the Stevensons. A book on Franklin in London cannot avoid discussing his contacts and perambulations in the British Isles and on the continent, and in chapter 14, “1771–1772: Movements,” Goodwin takes the reader outside of London, tracing Franklin's travels through Ireland, Scotland, and England. With chapters 15 and 16, “Drawn to the Cockpit” and “The Last Year in London,” Goodwin conflates the drama of Franklin's final years in the imperial capital with the onset of the American War of Independence.

A puzzling aspect of the book is that in the very crowded field of works on Franklin, Goodwin offers no introduction or prelude explaining its purpose. Is it intended for a popular readership or as a contribution to scholarship? Two academic books have already been written on the American icon's London phase, Cecil B. Currey's Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England 1765–1775 (1968) and David T. Morgan's The Devious Dr. Franklin, Colonial Agent: Benjamin Franklin's Years in London (1996). Both offer in-depth explorations of this complex man's political career in the metropolis. Aside from his obvious genius, Benjamin Franklin was an individual whose motives and feelings can be difficult for the biographer to penetrate. Nowhere does this show up more clearly than in the London phase of his life, for example through his inconsistencies in attempting to replace the original proprietary charter of Pennsylvania with royal government; in seeking a place for himself as a civil servant at Whitehall at the same time that he was establishing himself as a public spokesman for American rights; his foray into western land speculation along with eminent British investors that created a conflict of interest for him in his service as an American agent; and his well-known initial failure to appreciate the extent of opposition in the colonies to the Stamp Act, for which he earned lasting suspicion from some quarters in America. All of these are noted in Benjamin Franklin in London without any new explanation or insight. Goodwin has chosen instead to offer a portrait that does not delve beneath the surface as he follows Franklin through his London environment. The result is a book that nonspecialist readers may enjoy for its sympathetic account of the famous American's years in Britain.