ABSTRACT
No information about James Wheeler has survived, other than that which appears in the pages of his posthumously published work, The Rose of Sharon. The unnamed editor of the volume includes a prefatory note, addressed 'To the Reader', containing these details of Wheeler's life:
The following Poem was composed by James Wheeler, a labouring man in the parish of St Giles's, Reading, and finished but a few days before he was suddenly called away by death, on April 17, 1788, in the 70th year of his age, from his labour and service here below, to the enjoyment of that rest which remaineth for the people of God in glory ... The Author being with respect to human learning an illiterate (though doubtless sincere) Christian, it may very probably receive the censures of the Critic. Yet the serious Christian Reader will, I am persuaded, herein discern so much of real experimental religion as may afford him both pleasure and profit. ... This was a principal motive in inducing the indigent widow of the deceased to offer it to public view: and should it, with a divine blessing, be made useful to any, it may also be a means of procuring a small sum for her own relief.
The publication of the poem, a pious work of forty-two quatrain stanzas on Christ's forgiveness of sinners, is styled by the editor as an opportunity for the reader to participate in a charitable act of rescue. This is a common editorial appeal in this period, and is also evident in volumes of verse by Ann Yearsley, Elizabeth Bentley, Ellen Taylor, and John Forster, though Wheeler's volume is unusual in being for the benefit of the poet's survivors rather than for the author.