A lithograph depicting Benjamin Franklin asleep during a Quaker Meeting for Worship was published in The Picture Book by the Educational Book Company in 1920. It was based on a half-tone engraving created by an anonymous artist in 1872. (Though there is a signature on the picture, it is illegible).
Franklin arrived in Philadelphia from Boston, in 1723, as a seventeen-year-old. Exhausted, hungry, he saw people entering a large building at Second and High Streets and followed them in. He looked around at the gathering, heard nothing, then fell asleep. At the end of the meeting, a man woke him. As Franklin noted later in his Autobiography, the building was the Great Meetinghouse, and the gathering was a Quaker Meeting for Worship. It was the first place he entered in Philadelphia.
I was charmed by the story and the lithograph. After all these years, it is still the practice in Meetings for Worship to leave people who are asleep undisturbed. (Except if they snore, when they are nudged gently!)
Gary Sandman
August 2026