Featured Artifact: Phillis Wheatley, Signed First Edition

Features the title pages, the left, an engraving
of Wheatley at her writing desk. Poems on
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.” MORR 9321

Phyllis Wheatley was one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies. This pioneering African-American poet was taken from her home in Senegal/Gambia and enslaved in Boston, in 1760. She was purchased by John Wheatley as a house servant due to her young age. The prominent Wheatleys immediately noticed the young girl was exceptionally gifted.

Young Phillis had a precocious ability to learn and Mr. Wheatley decided to educate the young girl. She quickly mastered English, religion, astronomy, and especially poetry. She was moved by some of the more lyrical portions of the Bible and her early work follows patterns of writing established centuries ago. Her first published bound work was in 1773.

Features her signature and the dedication.

During the Revolution she proved herself more than a "curiosity" and under the patronage of the Wheatley's she traveled to Britain and maintained a voluminous correspondence with a wide array of individuals. Sadly, after John Wheatley died, she found it hard to sell much of her poetry (even as a manumitted servant) and worked as a maid cleaning houses. Though economic conditions were unbearably inequitable for free persons of color, she did continue to write and publish on a small scale, and many of those works are being re-examined today by scholars in an effort to more fully understand this remarkable woman. Her lists of accomplishments is yet being compiled. The first edition of her 1773 book of poems in the Morristown NHP library comes from the Lloyd W. Smith collection. While impressive in itself, the Morristown edition has the added significance of bearing the signature of Phillis Wheatley--a truly rare link with the past indicating she actually held the volume we are featuring.

Wheatley's signature close up.