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The Hiddenness of Collaboration
12019-07-16T11:25:07+00:00Emma Sternberg9dd1d1d0edcde572d5819158147f717e072da3b911Chiles Page 5plain2019-07-16T11:25:07+00:00Emma Sternberg9dd1d1d0edcde572d5819158147f717e072da3b9Thus, 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 whose direct writing on Wheatley’s manuscript, according to an 1850 note from Philadelphian Edward Ingraham tucked into a first edition of Poems at the Library of Congress, resembles “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
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12019-07-16T11:33:37+00:00Emma Sternberg9dd1d1d0edcde572d5819158147f717e072da3b9Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas12Katy L. Chiles Commentaryplain2021-03-11T22:50:50+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141
12021-02-16T20:07:58+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141IndexJoelle Thomas8Index of all pagesvispath2021-02-16T21:16:42+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141