“Lost Years Recovered” Panel Discussion, 21 Sept.

In 1834 Margaretta Matilda Odell anonymously published a book called Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave.

Odell was related to the Wheatley family that enslaved the little African girl named Phillis, educated her, encouraged her writing while still keeping her in bondage, and finally emancipated her in 1774.

That family connection was how Odell got most of her information, but also her biases. She portrayed the Wheatleys in a highly positive light and suggested the worst thing that ever happened to Phillis Wheatley was going off on her own and marrying John Peters.

In discussing the years after the British evacuation, while the war was still going on, Odell wrote:

The inhabitants of Boston were fleeing in all directions; and Phillis accompanied her husband to Wilmington, in this state. In an obscure country village, the necessaries of life are always obtained with more difficulty than in a populous town, and in this season of scarcity, Phillis suffered much from privation—from absolute want—and from painful exertions to which she was unaccustomed, and for which her frail constitution unfitted her.

Wheatley scholars have relied on that sparse information for decades because it was the only thing available. But the latest issue of the New England Quarterly contains a study by Cornelia H. Dayton, professor at the University of Connecticut, which makes a major correction to that record and fills it out in surprising ways.

Odell was wrong in stating that John and Phillis Peters moved to Wilmington. In fact, in 1780 they moved to Middleton, in a different county. Furthermore, Essex County court records reveal why John Peters moved there and why he later had to move the family back to Boston. Read more here.

On Tuesday, 21 September, the first session of this year’s Maier seminar series at the Massachusetts Historical Society will be an online panel discussion of Dayton’s article featuring her, Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, literary scholar Tara Bynum, and moderator Joseph Rezek of Boston University.

Here is the page for signing up for this seminar. It’s scheduled to start at 5:15 P.M.