… and what that data might tell about Wheatley, *Poems*, and curricular and collections priorities at both Black-centered and historically-white institutions. Congrats on presenting at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, Caleb!
My undergraduate research fellow Caleb worked all year with me on the @wheatleycensus.bsky.social! He became interested in a tricky and uneven data point: year of last institutional collection (the last time a particular copy of the first edition of *Poems* entered an institutional library)…
Screenshot from the Wheatley Census with “extant copies: 200” highlighted in blue.
The census of the 1773 first edition hit 200 copies today! Thanks to our Undergraduate Research Fellow Caleb who located records of THREE copies at Hampton University’s Peabody special collection of African American and African diasporic materials! Welcome WC # 1394, 1396, & 1398!
New entry in the list of 1773 first editions: the copy at the University of St Andrews. This copy came to St Andrews in 1773 as a Stationer’s deposit library. Its bound with another book. And theres a fully digitized version of it! Check it out: www.wheatleycensus.org/wc/1392/
Today is the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Along with British East India Company Tea, the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects was among the cargo carried from London to Boston on The Dartmouth. Today, the Boston Tea Party museum displays WC #1234: www.wheatleycensus.org/wc/1234/
So even though there were readers/translators of Wheatley amongst French abolitionists, why aren’t there obvious surviving copies in institutions? English vs French language books? Protestant print in a Catholic country? The tumult of the 1780s/90s? Can anyone help me find find copies in France?
Roy also put me in touch w Gabriel Darriulat who works on Gregoire’s papers & personal library. I thought finally we will find the copy that Gregoire was working from for his translations. But no! Darriulat confirmed that at this time there is no evidence of a copy of *Poems* in Gregoire’s library.
By 1808 Abbé Henri Gregoire had translated (into French) and commented on Wheatley’s poems in his De la Littérature des Nègres. On conference trips to Paris in 2018 & ‘25, I searched library catalogs & asked around finding nothing! Michaël Roy, French scholar of AfAm lit confirmed he knew of none.
A map showing mostly Europe with red dots indicating book locations in the UK and Germany, nothing in France.
Today’s Wheatley Census mystery: are there really no copies of the 1773 first edition in France? Published in London in 1773 and distributed, in part, through Methodist networks of Selina Hastings, there are copies all over the UK. But none in France?
The Wheatley Census Number (WC #) is a unique and durable identifier assigned to each book (or fragment) recorded in the census. This enables *copy-specific citation* in scholarship, bookselling/provenance research, and anywhere identifying and citing at the individual copy level is needed.
Thanks to our advisory board members for visioning, help, and ongoing review. And special thanks to editors of other digital censuses @zacharylesser.bsky.social of Shakespeare Census and Rob Carson of Marlowe census for both technical and bibliographical consultation!
If you have a copy near you, please send us information about it! We want to proliferate copy-specific data and you can tell us more about provenance, marginalia, bindings, and other copy-level data! Please share that and photos here: blog.wheatleycensus.org/2025/11/08/h...
The census has an accompanying blog for documentation, description, and sharing. The blog currently contains a mission statement, mapped data, and a form for sharing data about copies you work with. blog.wheatleycensus.org
Following the conventions of other digital censuses/enumerative bibliographies (Shakespeare, Marlowe - with whom we share underlying software) every book copy is assigned an enduring number, the WC#.
The census of the 1773 first edition currently lists 196 copies, and we believe this to be the first attempt to systematically locate and describe all surviving copies of this edition. www.wheatleycensus.org/issue/2/
The Census aims, eventually, to document every surviving copy of every edition of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (and closely related editions under different title) from 1773 to 1909. In 1909, the AME Book Concern published an edition, the first by an explicitly Black press.