[In the following essay, Ellis offers a reading of Sancho in the context of the sentimental novel and his correspondence with the novelist Laurence Sterne.]

Although the book called the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African has mostly been considered a historical document since its first posthumous publication in 1782, the text is also a literary production. In this way the letters mentioned in the title refer not so much to a collection of correspondence as an exhibition of Sancho's learning and sentiments. Written in the self-conscious and refined mode of sentimentalism, Sancho's Letters are distinctly unlike other African writings of the period. Although they share some affinity with other high-cultural African writing in English of the period, such as the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley or Francis Williams, the prose form and sentimentalism of the Letters makes them quite unlike those as well.¹ As noted above, many readers have worked to transform the sophisticated literariness of Sancho's text into a kind of biography. As such, the Letters become similar to the genre of the slave narrative championed by the abolition movement in the late eighteenth century, such as the autobiographies of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw or Olaudah Equiano.² Although his life story conforms to the pattern of the slave narrative (born into slavery, he achieves literacy and consequently manumission), the Letters constitute an unconventional slave narrative. The moment of manumission is hazy and gradual: as he moves through slavery, servitude and service to become first a wage earner and then finally a merchant, it is unclear precisely when he achieves freedom. His story seems to confirm Peter Fryer's formulation of a ‘self-emancipation’ where the state of slavery ‘withers away’.³ The second notable point about Sancho's history is perhaps more significant: his refusal to unambiguously celebrate either freedom or Britain.

In the first edition, the editor, Frances Crew, stated that the letters were not ‘originally written with a view to publication,’⁴ a claim a reviewer in The Gentleman's Magazine of August 1782 found risibly obvious, complaining that few of the letters were ‘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”’.⁵ The project of publishing the letters, then, appeals to the ideological problem the letters raise: the contested question of African ‘arts and learning’ in the emergent abolition movement. Crew stated her motives for publishing the Letters was ‘the desire of shewing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European; and the still superior motive, of wishing to serve his worthy family’.⁶ Joseph Jekyll, Sancho's biographer, added that the reader will perceive that ‘the perfection of the reasoning faculties does not depend on a peculiar conformation of the skull or the colour of a common integument’.⁷ This reading of the letters focusses not upon what they say, but the fact of their existence; effectively translating attention from the letters to Sancho, from the literary to the biographical. The anonymous reviewer in Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review aligned himself with the abolition movement (entering its most strident and active phase at this time), and concluded: ‘Let it be no longer said, by half-informed philosophers, and superficial investigators of human nature, that Negers, as they are vulgarly called, are inferior to any white nation in mental abilities.’⁸

Despite Crew's declaration that the letters were not written for publication, internal evidence suggests they were, like Sterne's correspondence, deliberately recorded in some form of letter book, and even perhaps revised for publication.⁹ The Letters have a consciously literary frame of reference, and a deliberate display of Shandean prose and sentimentalism. This literary aspect of Sancho's Letters suggests that the book asks to be read as a kind of Shandean epistolary novel, rather than as a biography in letters. Indeed, without Jekyll's intervention, it is a poor biography: chronologically incoherent and incomplete, and polemically weak. These points, though they are faults in a biography, are decorous in a novel. Sancho's Letters is, of course, a problematic novel, but in its defence, it is Shandean in inspiration, sentimentalist in opinion, consciously artless, miscellaneously eclectic and liberally autobiographical. Sancho's most celebrated correspondence was with Sterne (first published in Sterne's correspondence in 1775 and widely circulated in the magazines). Sancho, in other words, was a literary writer unambiguously in dialogue with Sterne's work. ‘If I am an enthusiast in any thing’, writes Sancho, ‘it is in favour of my Sterne.’¹⁰ Sterne is mentioned or discussed in twelve of the 158 letters: a not inconsiderable number.¹¹ As well as the famous exchange described earlier in this chapter, Sancho also offers an extended defence and analysis of Sterne in ‘Letter 67’, in a comparison between the comedy of Sterne, Fielding and Swift. Sancho remarks ‘Swift excels in grave-faced irony—whilst Sterne lashes his whips with jolly laughter—’ and then continues in a generalised Shandean defence of humorous melancholy: ‘Swift and Sterne were different in this—Sterne was truly a noble philanthropist—Swift was rather cynical. What Swift would fret and fume at—such as the petty accidental sourings and bitters in life's cup—you plainly may see, Sterne would laugh at—and parry off by a larger humanity, and regular good will to man.’¹² Several comic set-pieces display a kind of Sternean narrative interest in the absurd, such as the comic scene in ‘Letter 51’ involving a pig and a letter from Mortimer, in which the consumption of the latter is somewhat curtailed by the consumption of the former; or the section on haircuts and wigs in ‘Letter 2’.¹³ The latter theme is taken up again later in the work, in a satirical submission to the General Advertiser suggesting the draft of a new army from the ranks of an overlooked resource of manpower: ‘a resource which would greatly benefit the people at large (by being more usefully employed), and which are happily half-trained already for the service of their country by being—powder proof—light, active, young fellows:—I dare say you have anticipated my scheme, which is to form ten companies at least, out of the very numerous body of hair-dressers.’¹⁴

As can be seen here, Sancho's Letters are a canny recapitulation of Sterne's prose style. This is especially evident in Sancho's emulation of Sterne's characteristic use of the dash to produce a hesitatingly fluid style, where the long dash, in several variant forms, virtually replaces all other marks of punctuation. Sterne's dash is a remarkably expressive device, allowing the narrator to mimic or reproduce the kind of free-flowing rhythm of the human mind, as Sterne scholars have been so keen to note,¹⁵ but giving the work the amateurish appearance associated with epistolary productions.¹⁶ Sancho's adoption of the dashing style then is felicitous for his epistolic vehicle, even if the critical reception of his chosen style was mixed. The Gentleman's Magazine complained ‘—Among other imitations of Sterne … we wish that honest Ignatius had not followed him in his blanks or dashes—’ while The Monthly Review added ‘As to his literary style, it bears in general, some resemblance to that of his admired Sterne—with his breaks—and dashes—which, by the way, are, in this wild, indiscriminate use of them, an abomination to all accurate writers, and friends of sober punctuation.’¹⁷ Sancho's prose, like Sterne's, works by a punning association of ideas, somewhat ribald and ironic but fundamentally good-hearted and benevolent.

That the sentimentalism of Sancho's Letters attracted critical notice demonstrates in part that the form of Sancho's writing, as much as his arguments, was a political gesture. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (written 1781-4, published 1787), Thomas Jefferson argued for the abolition of slavery, but protested that there were ‘physical and moral’ objections to African enfranchisement. ‘Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.’ Reading Sancho's Letters, Jefferson admired his sentimental mode:

his letters are more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words.

But Jefferson also found this sentimentalism subverted the sense and merit of his writing:

his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration.

Furthermore, Jefferson could use this anti-sentimental argument to denigrate Sancho personally. He described Sancho as in ‘the first place among those of his own colour’, but in comparison to the ‘epistolary … writers of the race among whom he lived … we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column’.¹⁸ Jefferson was resistant to African writing (he also attacked Wheatley's poetry), but what he found particularly objectionable was Sancho's sentimentalism, because it was the most sophisticated and fashionable literary mode of the period, and therefore an indecorous mode of discourse from an African. For Jefferson, Sancho's sentimentalism was the ideological issue raised by the Letters. Recent critics also profess a problem with Sancho's deployment of sensibility. Paul Edwards describes this ‘sentimentality of expression’ as a fashionable and ‘self-indulgent’ weakness that palliates the ‘impassioned voice of angry and outraged feeling’ in which Sancho should have written.¹⁹ Keith Sandiford argues that Sancho's sentimentalism allows him to adopt ‘the language of the heart, identifying himself passionately with the cult of benevolism and religious enthusiasm’; yet he sees this sentimentalism as a ‘weak-spirited, temporising rhetoric’ that subverts Sancho's development of a rigorous anti-slavery position.²⁰ While Sancho's sensibility is something of a double bind, repeatedly subverting analysis, Edwards's and Sandiford's assessment overlooks the power of the sentimental in his contemporary culture.

There is also a considerable body of material in Sancho's Letters that reflects or reports matters of serious political import. Sancho offers commentaries on current events such as the Anglo-French naval war associated with the American Revolution. In a letter dated 7 September 1779, after the receipt of the news of several set-backs and defeats in the fighting both in Ireland and in the West Indies and America, and the culpable corruption and incompetence of the responsible admirals and ministers, Sancho first signals his disappointment, but later remarks ‘—For my part it's nothing to me—as I am only a lodger—and hardly that.’²¹ Sancho witnessed the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, the most serious civil disturbance of the period, and wrote a series of letters describing them to John Spink, a banker. He has spent some time outlining the background to the appearance of the mob on the streets of London, when he suddenly interrupts himself ‘—Gracious God! what's the matter now? I was obliged to leave off—the shouts of the mob—the horrible clashing of swords—and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion—drew me to the door—when everyone in the street was employed in shutting up shop.’ Later, after relating more news of the actions of the mob, he exclaims ‘—I am not sorry I was born in Afric.’²² Sancho's perception of his intrinsic otherness to metropolitan Britain figures his duality as a colonial subject, displaying the logic of Bhabha's ‘mimic-man’. Edwards's assessment of Sancho is that he is ‘a man largely assimilated to English middle-class society, good-natured, easy-going, patriotic, liberal and devout … both attached to, and detached from, the English values of his time’.²³ Sancho's simultaneous sense of cultural identification and alienation, Sandiford argues, is developed through the Letters into a ‘a pattern of dissociation and retreat’; a structure of ambivalence on the one side ‘intended to appease the myths of his white audience, on the other a structure of sarcasm intended to resist them’.²⁴

These ambiguities and anxieties about his political identity as an African in England are articulated in his problematic deployment of sentimentalism. A series of letters addresses other Africans in positions similar to his own. Sancho wrote two letters of advice to Julius Soubise, the elegant, talented favourite (and, perhaps, lover) of the Duchess of Queensberry, forced into exile in India to avoid a scandal. Sancho urged him to ‘tread as cautiously as the strictest rectitude can guide ye’, reminding him of the situation of most Africans in Britain and its empire: ‘—Look round upon the miserable fate of all of our unfortunate colour—superadded to ignorance,—see slavery, and the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours.’²⁵ To another correspondent (Jabez Fisher of Philadelphia) Sancho wrote an assessment of the poems of Phyllis Wheatley. Her difficult, neo-classical verse was published with a certificate signed by the ‘most respectable characters in Boston’ attesting that it was her own work. ‘Phyllis's poems’, Sancho remarks acerbically, ‘do credit to nature—and put art—merely as art—to the blush.—It reflects nothing either to the glory or generosity of her master—if she is still his slave—except he glories in the low vanity of having in his wanton power a mind animated by heaven—a genius superior to himself—.’²⁶ Sancho's argument recalls Sterne's starling/slave, in that the power of speech (or hyperbolically, poetry), reveals the scandal of chattel slavery. In the manner of the sentimental novel, Sancho's critique of slavery is not conducted as a polemic tract, but rather, by a digressive and allusive discursive strategy, effected by a light-hearted, repetitive return to the topic, an attitudinal pattern of benevolent, virtuous friendship, and, in a characteristically Sternean manoeuvre, the sudden condensation of the narrative into a darker and more meditative species of cynical and melancholic declamation.

Sancho's Letters do offer an analysis of slavery, organised by its opposition of virtue and commerce. Writing to Fisher, Sancho reflects on ‘the unchristian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes—the illegality—the horrid wickedness of the traffic—the cruel carnage and depopulation of the human species’.²⁷ To a Quaker called Mr Browne, active amongst the abolitionists, Sancho wrote

I thank you for your kindness to my poor black brethren—I flatter myself you will find them not ungrateful—they act commonly from their feelings:—I have observed a dog will love those who use him kindly—and surely, if so, negroes, in their state of ignorance and bondage, will not act less generously, if I may judge them by myself—I should suppose kindness would do any thing with them;—my soul melts at kindness—but the contrary—I own with shame—makes me almost a savage.²⁸

To those whom he hears have not acted with kindness he is capable of sterner stuff. John Wingrave, the young merchant colonist of Madras to whom he had written in recommendation of Soubise, attracts Sancho's ire when he reads of Wingrave's indignation at ‘the treachery and chicanery of the Natives’ in letters to his father (thoughtfully excerpted in a footnote by the editor). Sancho's point is that Wingrave ‘should remember from whom they learnt those vices’, that is to say, the Christian colonists. He goes on to lay the blame on the hypocritical ideology of Western commerce and religion, advancing a broadly sentimental account of the power of commerce in establishing sociable relations of virtue:

The grand object of English navigators—indeed of all Christian navigators—is 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:—the enlightened Christian should diffuse the Riches of the Gospel of peace, with the commodities of his respective land—Commerce attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched at.—

As a man of commerce, he posits trade as a sentimental reformation that unites men in bonds of trust and mutual dependence. Allied with Christian precepts, or at least honesty, and the natural fertility of Africa this commercial spirit should ‘be a blessing to all’. Instead it is the other side of commerce that Sancho observes: a mercantilist vision of self-interest pursued to the detriment of the African nations and the benefit of Britain. This obsessive desire for ‘money-money-money’ degrades and corrupts the colonies, where Sancho observes that

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:—the Christians' abominable Traffic for slaves—and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings—encouraged by their Christian customers—who carry them strong liquors, to enflame the national madness—and powder and bad fire-arms, to furnish them with hellish means of killing and kidnapping.²⁹

The problem of slavery, ‘a subject that sours my blood’, exerts intense ideological pressure on Sancho—stretching his sentimental poise to its breaking point. Sancho is torn between his allegiance and his understanding: he writes as a chandler and a Christian, yet he realises that the institution of slavery was erected on the same twin pillars of commerce and religion.

Notes

1. Phyllis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, and Boston: Cox and Berry, 1773); Francis Williams, ‘Latin Ode to the Governor of Jamaica’, in Long, History of Jamaica, Book 111, iv, pp. 475-85.

2. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (Bath, for W. Gye, n.d. [1770? or 1780?]); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), ed. Paul Edwards (London: Longman, 1989).

3. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), pp. 132, 203.

4. Ignatius Sancho, Letters, eds. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) p. 278.

5. The Gentleman's Magazine, 52 (August 1782), pp. 437-9, esp. p. 437.

6. Sancho, Letters, p. 278.

7. Ibid., p. 25.

8. The Monthly Review, 69 (July-December 1783), pp. 492-7, esp. p. 497.

9. Edwards, ‘Appendix 1’, in Sancho, Letters, pp. 262-5.

10. Sancho, Letters, Letter 67, p. 136.

11. Ibid., Letters 10, 18, 36, 48, 53, 54, 67, 83a, 96, 100, 107, 124.

12. Ibid., Letter 67, p. 136.

13. Ibid., Letter 51, pp. 106-8; 2, pp. 36-8.

14. Ibid., Letter 132, pp. 265-6.

15. William Holtz, Image and Immortality: A Study of Tristram Shandy (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press, 1970), p. 84. See also Henry Fluchiere, Laurence Sterne: From Tristram to Yorick, An Interpretation of ‘Tristram Shandy’, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 422.

16. Ian Watt, ‘The Comic Syntax of Tristram Shandy’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics 1660-1800: Essays in Honour of Samuel Holt Monk, eds. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 1967), pp. 315-31, esp. p. 320; and Roger B. Moss, ‘Sterne's Punctuation’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (1981) pp. 197-8.

17. The Gentleman's Magazine, 52 (1782), p. 438; The Monthly Review, 69 (1783), p. 493.

18. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, (London: J. Stockdale, 1787) pp. 139, 140-1.

19. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in Sancho, Letters, pp. 6-7.

20. Keith Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988), pp. 75-6.

21. Sancho, Letters, Letter 105, p. 186. See also Letters 111 and 112, pp. 196-9, where Sancho shows his anxiety about empire is partly a concern about the effect on the market and his grocery business.

22. Ibid., Letter 134, pp. 231-2.

23. Paul Edwards, ‘Black Writers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,’ in Dabydeen, Black Presence, pp. 50-67, esp. pp. 52, 53.

24. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment, pp. 83, 84.

25. Sancho, Letters Letter 14, pp. 56-7.

26. Ibid., Letter 58, pp. 121-22.

27. Ibid., p. 121.

28. Ibid., Letter 13, p. 55.

29. Ibid., Letter 68, pp. 137-9.