[In the following review of Paul Edwards' 1968 reprint edition of Sancho's Letters, Brown claims that Sancho's assimilation into European culture was not as complete as Edwards indicates and that the writer was aware of his status as an outsider and alien despite the fact that his background and frame of reference were essentially European.]

In his biographical essay on Ignatius Sancho, Jekyll is at some pains to depreciate his own undertaking: “Of a Negro, a Butler, and a Grocer, there are but slender anecdotes to animate the page of the biographer.” Jekyll is too modest. His subject was likely to attract considerable attention in eighteenth-century England, for the career of Ignatius Sancho did not wholly conform with the popular image of the “sable race.” After an early beginning as a slave, Sancho served as a freedman-butler before establishing himself as a “gentleman-grocer” in London. And before his death in 1780, his acquaintance included not only aristocratic patrons, but also literary figures like Laurence Sterne, David Garrick, and Samuel Johnson (who, according to Jekyll, was originally scheduled to write Sancho's memoirs). Moreover, the extremely heavy subscription to the first edition of the letters in 1782 attests to the general interest in Africans at that period. After all, the “Negro question” is not an entirely twentieth-century phenomenon, and it never failed to “animate” imaginations, and tempers, in the eighteenth century.

This interest is not really remarkable. Despite the notorious invisibility of the African in Western history and scholarship, he is of some significance in the dynamics of eighteenth-century civilization, particularly in the case of Europe's colonial powers. Like it or not, the mercantile economy was rooted in the slave trade. As both sides took pains to point out during the abolition debates, the total fabric of English society was bound up with slavery: according to James Boswell (Life of Johnson), the African slave rightly contributes to a “very important and necessary” branch of “commercial interest,” and in “The Negro's Complaint,” William Cowper sarcastically links the civilized comforts of his society, its “jovial boards” and “sweets,” to the blood and tears of the black slave. In an eighteenth-century context, the African is both an incorrigible “savage” and a valuable unit in the socio-economics of the civilized state.

The ambiguity of the African as an outside contributor to “progressive” society is analogous to his paradoxical status in the description of European civilization itself. The ethnocentric criteria of the European's culture consign the non-white to a subhuman role. But ironically, the stereotype of the prelogical savage is also a prerequisite for the analysis of what Europeans define as civilization. As Defoe's fiction demonstrates, the eighteenth-century European registers African slaves and “wild” Indians as symbols, as invaluable signposts from which to measure the “progression” of one's civilization. In Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees the savage provides the indispensable contrast that illuminates all the requirements of a “polite Nation”—language, intelligence, familial traditions, religion, and moral principle. The subhuman image of the non-white is therefore a European creation: Defoe's “noble” Friday and Shakespeare's not so noble Caliban are linked by the fact that they are both creatures of white eschatology. They project the “civilized” man's fearful fascination with an horrific image of the instincts, of the id. The primitive is consequently necessary in the self-analysis of the “polite Nation”: Prospero's identity is incomplete without his Caliban; the civilized rationalism of Swift's Houyhnhnms must be defined in relation to those typical savages, the Yahoos; and the brutalization of the African in slavery and in cultural myths is integral to the economics and the psychology of European civilization.

All of which has a direct bearing on the personal presence of the African in eighteenth-century England. He did command an obsessive attention, but he was the object of an extremely selective awareness. The personal achievements of the free African and his voluntary contribution to European society are obscured by the popular image of the mindless savage. Moreover, the constitutional and legal debates which culminated with the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century tended, quite naturally, to focus well-meaning attention exclusively on the ex-slaves and the disadvantaged blacks in Britain, as well as on the slaves themselves. When the African did achieve some prominence, the public response was, predictably, one of admiring astonishment. The London Magazine (1773), for example, was enraptured by the poetry of the American, Phillis Wheatley, not because of any poetic genius, but because she was a Negro. This cultural exclusivism, to put it mildly, has not been peculiar to the London Magazine, for modern African writers still meet the same response in British and American reviews.

Altogether then, the role of the free African in eighteenth-century Europe has always been non-existent, or distorted, in the narrowly ethnocentric perspectives of Anglo-American scholarship. The mythic stereotypes have absorbed the energies of both the literary critic and the historian. But in spite of his “invisibility,” the African is undeniably present. Even the condescending Jekyll is obliged to acknowledge the existence of poets like the American Phillis Wheatley and the Jamaican Francis Williams. And the multifarious activities of Africans in eighteenth-century Europe are typified by the careers of personalities like Amo, a Guinean graduate of Wittenberg (1734), and counsellor of state in the Prussian government; M. Liflet, a correspondent with the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and Eliza Capitein, a Protestant cleric in France. Historians of the abolitionist movement have also been true to tradition in their failure to record the African's contribution to antislavery protest. British politicians and humanitarians like Clarkson, Sharp, and Wilberforce were not the only spokesmen for the black slave. As Paul Edwards points out in his informative introduction to Sancho's letters, abolitionist literature included works by several Africans, particularly James Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawasaw Gronniosaw (1770), Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789), and Venture Smith, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a native of Africa (1798). Moreover, Equiano acted as “Commissary of Provisions and Stores” in a mismanaged expedition that was designed to repatriate the “black poor” of England to Sierra Leone in 1786.

The career of Ignatius Sancho is far less eventful than Equiano's. The latter spent his boyhood in Africa before being shipped as a slave to the West Indies, and after obtaining his freedom, worked as a seaman from North America to Europe, from the Caribbean to the Arctic. By contrast, Sancho arrived in England as a two-year-old in 1731, and he led a relatively secure and sheltered life as butler, then as grocer, until his death. Unlike some of his African contemporaries in Europe, he did not become an active member of the abolitionist movement. Neither do his letters, written in the style of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, display any strikingly original qualities. But the reviewer in the Gentleman's Magazine (1782) missed their real significance when he declared that few of the letters are “little more than common place effusions, such as many other Negroes, we suppose, could, with the same advantages, have written, and which there needed ‘no ghost to come from the grave,’ or a black from Guinea, ‘to have told us.’” For in spite of the derivative style and “common place” subject-matter, Sancho's letters are interesting precisely because they provide us with some rare insights into the personality of an African who was, to all appearances, thoroughly experienced in the social and literary modes of eighteenth-century England.

All the signs of cultural assimilation are there. He was very well read, particularly in English literature. And as an intimate of Sterne he was even partly responsible for the inclusion of the anti-slavery episode in Tristram Shandy (book IX, chapter 6). He can be very indignant at the “fashion” of treating the royal family with disrespect (pp. 50-51). The American Revolution arouses the patriot who prays that the “thirteen counties return to their allegiance,” and that “the British empire be strongly knit in the never-ending bonds of sacred friendship and brotherly love!” (pp. 117-118). This patriotic loyalty easily lends itself to the usual rhetoric of Anglo-French rivalry: “We, to our immortal honor, have never yielded them the palm in courage, wisdom, or gallantry” (p. 129). And he is well versed in the colonialist's usual clichés on the perennial “Irish Question” (pp. 225-226).

But on the whole this “assimilation” is not as unquestionable as Paul Edwards would have us believe. For what makes Sancho's correspondence so significant is the fact that it reveals him as a cultural archetype. The personality exposed in these letters has been conditioned by the typical tensions and ambiguities of the African in the West. Sancho is conscious of himself both as an Englishman and as an alien. His status is therefore analogous to the paradoxical perspectives which enable the European to see him and his kind as indispensable outsiders. The parallel is appropriate, for whenever Sancho loses his sense of cultural integration, it is as a result of those brutalizing criteria which have always excluded the African from European definitions of civilization. One moment he is the true child of John Bull, lauding the traditions of “British liberty,” and hailing England as “the nurse of freedom—Europe's fairest example—the land of truth, bravery, loyalty, and of every heart-gladdening virtue!” (p. 284) But at other moments he is “Afric's son,” the outsider whose racial identity allows him less flattering insights into British notions of liberty. Consequently, the chest-thumping patriotism of some letters is counteracted by a cool detachment, by an ironic self-depreciation that is modelled on the European myth of the African savage. The American Revolution, for example, does not always inspire sympathetic loyalty to king's cause: “For God's sake! what has a poor starving Negroe, with six children, to do with kings and heroes, and armies and politics?—aye, or poets and painters?—or artists—of any sort?” (p. 120) Indeed Sancho's irony delights in subverting the standard images of the “uncivilized” Negro. He dubs his Shandean style as “a true Negroe calibash” of assorted matters (p. 249), slyly deplores the “worse than Negro barbarity” of the Scots during the Gordon riots (p. 270), and, with true heathenish gusto, commends the “Christian” slaughter-houses of Europe's wars (pp. 293-294).

In effect, Sancho is the historical counterpart of a literary convention—the eighteenth century's practice of looking at itself satirically through “alien” eyes. Of course these aliens owe their perspectives to their English creators: Goldsmith's “Citizen of the World,” Lien Chi Altangi, is no more Chinese than Goldsmith himself, and the Brobdingnaggians or Houyhnhnms are products of philosophical traditions in Swift's European heritage. So that in spite of all the narrative trappings, this kind of satire is not really predicated on a conflict between two distinct cultures. Swift's irony, for example, simultaneously encompasses the acceptance of Europe's civilized ideals, and the alienation from the betrayal of those standards. His critical “outsiders” are incontrovertibly European.

This ironic strategy is much closer to Ignatius Sancho's psychology than it is to a writer like Olaudah Equiano. In cultural terms, Equiano is a genuine hybrid, whose incisive criticism of European civilization is frequently based on standards derived from his African past. On the other hand, Sancho's frame of reference is completely European. Consequently, his role and experiences as a black man in a hostile society are analogous to the British ironists' alienation-as-satire: eighteenth-century England represents the only cultural tradition that he can call his own, but his racial experiences have endowed him with the “outsider's” insights, with a sense of alienation from a society to which he is inextricably bound. As a black man, then, Sancho is simultaneously divorced from, and faithful to, his non-African milieu. His ironic insights are rooted in a sense of detachment, but his moral and social criteria are inherently European. And whenever the subject is Africa itself, his familiarity with these standards can be an additional asset. Thus immediately after deploring the depredations of Christian traders in Africa, he ironically echoes the mercantilist's usual apology for Commerce in general, and the slave trade in particular: “The grand object of English navigators—indeed of all Christian navigators—is money—money—money—money—for which I do not pretend to blame them—Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part—to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love, society, and mutual dependence. … In Africa, the poor, wretched natives—blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil—are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing” (p. 149). It is clear that “the blessed chains of brotherly love” are not the only kinds of bonds with which Sancho is preoccupied here. He is not being the unquestioning disciple of mercantilism which Paul Edwards supposes him to be in this letter. Indeed, Sancho's ironic insinuations are so effective because his intimate knowledge of his society enables him to subvert its prejudices and ambiguous values from within. The personality of the assimilated African has incarnated one of the basic strategies of the eighteenth-century satirist.