Silence Dogood

In 1722, a series of letters appeared in the New-England Courant written by a middle-aged widow named "Silence Dogood". The letters poked fun at various aspects of life in Colonial America, such as the drunkenness of locals and the fashion for hoop petticoats.

Silence was particularly fond of ridiculing Harvard. She complained that it had been ruined by corruption and elitism, and that most of its students learned nothing there except how to be conceited.

Silence also wrote that she had once been married to a minister with whom she had lived for seven years before he had died, leaving her with three children. She coyly admitted that she didn't enjoy the life of a widow and could be easily persuaded to marry again.

The readers of the Courant thought she was a charming woman. So charming, in fact, that a few of the male readers themselves wrote in, upon learning that she was single, and offered to marry her.

Unfortunately for her would-be suitors, Silence Dogood didn't exist. She was the invention of a sixteen year-old boy named Benjamin Franklin whose older brother, James, was a printer in Boston. It is not known whether James was privy to the true identity of Silence Dogood, or whether, like the rest of Boston, he was fooled by his younger brother.

This was the first of Franklin's many hoaxes.