This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-07-16T11:25:07+00:00 The Hiddenness of Collaboration 2 Chiles Page 5 plain 2022-08-22T14:29:05+00:00 Thus, as we can now appreciate, this is likely a collaboratively produced letter that documents the collaborative labor that produced Poems on Various Subjects.  Susanna and Wheatley’s probable collaboration on this letter to Occom—a letter that itself records the many collaborations that went into Poems—has remained a largely hidden literacy, which is both striking and absolutely to be expected.  Readers and scholars have commented on labors many others put into Poems—Susanna as enslaver patron and publicist, Calef as agent, Bell as printer, Huntingdon as dedicatee and de facto endorser, Moorhead as illustrator, and Occom as bookseller—but overlooked Phillis’s probable labor in writing the letter that lists these other forms of labor. And this is not even to mention Obour Tanner, a literate Black woman who was Wheatley’s dear friend and correspondent, who circulated Wheatley’s book proposals and later sold her books; the white Bostonian women who suggested topical content and requested elegies;12 and, the collaboration most worried over by Wheatley scholars, that of Susanna or someone else, which, according to an 1850 note from Philadelphian Edward Ingraham tucked into a first edition of Poems at the Library of Congress, made him think “that there must have been an elaboration of them by some one other than Phillis herself.”  Ingraham states he had “the originals of many of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems” and “compared them with those in this copy—many differences were found, and the style and spelling had been corrected by someone.”  This, to my mind, sounds an awful lot like copyediting, an essential step inherent to the publication process where a copyeditor or other trusted interlocutor suggests revisions to one’s manuscript for clarity, precision, and style.13