“A Volume of Manuscript Poems &c”: Phillis Wheatley Peters's Lost Book and a Found Proposal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay revisits the history of Phillis Wheatley Peters's “volume of manuscript poems &&.,” a collection of handwritten poems, which her husband, John Peters, advertised for its return in late 1784, just days after her death. Since no second volume of poems was published, and the manuscript has never been recovered, it has been presumed to be and lamented as lost. By taking stock of what is known about PWP's archive at the time of her death and the process of its painstaking recovery, I seek to temper this account of destruction and loss by calling attention to the discoveries of librarians, scholars, and collectors in the nearly two and half centuries since her death. It is in this spirit of continuing and collaborative recovery that this essay contributes new evidence about a final, posthumous proposal for a collection of PWP's poems and letters, printed over a five-week period, in July and August 1791, in Thomas's Massachusetts Spy; Or, the Worcester Gazette, a proposal that provides a clearer picture of PWP's archive as it existed at her death, and that can guide future recovery work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".