[In the following essay, Ellis reviews the debate among critics regarding Sancho's “assimilation” into white English culture and his “mimicry” of his famous correspondent, Laurence Sterne, and shows that Sancho reworked conventions of spontaneity, sincerity, and naturalness to argue for the Black capacity for enlightened manners.]

Over nearly two years between July 1766 and March 1768, a correspondence, and subsequently a friendship, blossomed between Ignatius Sancho—“a Negro, a Butler, and a Grocer”—and Laurence Sterne, a clergyman, a novelist, and a literary celebrity.¹ To their contemporaries, such a connection was unusual enough to appear a kind of wonder of the age, not only crossing firmly demarcated boundaries of status, education and race, but also revealing what they shared: an enthusiasm for, and ambition within, the cultural elite of London society. The fame of their association, feted and analyzed both by contemporaries and twentieth-century historians and critics, has however served to occlude the exceptional qualities of Sancho's writing. Sancho's contemporaries understood that the conception, publication and reception of his posthumous collection, entitled The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, in 1782 was determined by Sterne's writings: a form of imitation that verged on mimicry. However, while much has been made of Sancho's debt to Sterne, recent work has lost sight of what Sterne meant to Sancho's contemporaries, and in so doing, has overlooked the dangerous and subversive aspects of Sancho's deployment (or appropriation) of the Shandean method and its associated discourses of sensibility and libertinism. By re-examining the politics of Shandean form, modern readers of Sancho can recover the radicalism of Sancho's writing, and as such, revise the critical assumption first offered in the 1960s that amongst all the African writers in English of the late eighteenth century, he represents the most complete example of “assimilation” to English culture.

The approach by historians and literary scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s to eighteenth-century African writing in English was not simply a rediscovery of a forgotten body of writing, but also rightly perceived as an opportunity to host debates about race and culture in the modern era. To these scholars of literature and history, with their own intellectual allegiances and debts, Sancho's Shandean and sentimental epistolary strategies were difficult to reconcile with the period's rapidly changing and radicalizing black politics (both in Britain and America). The confessional strategies and explicit arguments of slave narratives such as those of Olaudah Equiano, written against the controversialist politics of the Abolition movement, seemed a more eloquent contribution to the modern debate. In his introduction to the first modern edition of Sancho's Letters, published in 1968, Paul Edwards described the letters as “those of a man thoroughly assimilated into the middle-class English society of his day.”² James Walvin remarked in 1973 that Sancho was “one of the most obsequious of eighteenth-century Blacks,”³ and in 1985 Paul Edwards restated his opinion that Sancho was “a man largely assimilated to English middle-class society, good-natured, easy-going, patriotic, liberal and devouté both attached to, and detached from, the English values of his time.”⁴ The question of Sancho's “assimilation” has an analogy in the debate within literary studies on how much Sancho “owed” to Sterne, and whether Sterne had been influenced by Sancho's plea for the novelist to address the topic of slavery in his letter of 21 July 1766. Most Sterne scholars, determining this question through an examination of Sterne's works, plumb for the novelist's genius as the origin of his subsequent interest in the theme of slavery.⁵

Subsequent interdisciplinary critical approaches have continued to examine Sancho's deployment of sensibility. In 1988, Keith Sandiford argued that Sancho's sentimentalism allowed 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 antislavery position.⁶ Paul Edwards's “Introduction” to his edition in 1994 described his “sentimentality of expression” as a fashionable and “self-indulgent” weakness that palliates the “impassioned voice of angry and outraged feeling.” It is this literary failing, the resource to “sentimentality,” that “gives the impression” that Sancho was “almost wholly assimilated into the lifestyle and values of polite eighteenth-century English society.”⁷ In recent years the status of sensibility has remained at the heart of the central critical (and historiographical) debate about Sancho, not only in my own The Politics of Sensibility (1996), but also in essays by James Walvin, Vincent Carretta and Sukhdev Sandhu.⁸

The terms sensibility and sentimentalism are notoriously difficult for modern readers to measure. There is a long tradition amongst scholars of sentimentalism that sentimental means “‘engaged in moral reflections,’ ‘moralising,’ ‘sententious.’”⁹ But the term, which enjoyed an astonishing vogue in the literature and thought of the mid-eighteenth century, more often has another connotation, suggesting a mode of writing that engages the sympathies or affections of the reader, advertising virtuous and benevolent conduct by repeatedly displaying scenes of feeling and distress. These scenes engage the emotions of the reader by exhibiting the work of emotions in the characters, who often make a luxurious display of their tears, blushes and faintings. These scenes had an instructive, moral dimension, by disseminating the theory of benevolent action and thought. In the period of Sancho's first recorded writings, the mid-1760s, the most notorious exponent of this oft-derided literary mode was Laurence Sterne, despite the eccentricity of his sentimentalism. In Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), four volumes of sermons (1760-1766) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), he established a name for himself and his distinctive prose and idiosyncratic narrative strategies. The Shandean or Shandyism, as it was often called, offers the reader a complex and sophisticated version of the sentimental, freely mixing the sincerity of emotional spectacle with a different strain of writing, somewhere between satirical irony and desiring libertinism.

Sancho's writings first found a public through Sterne's literary fame. After Sterne's death in 1768 a large number of supplementary publications satiated a continued demand for the Shandean. Amongst these works were legitimate editions and collections of his letters, but also spurious continuations, imitations and parodies, and ‘beauty-book’ collections of excerpts from his work. The publication of Sancho's work can be located against this shoal of secondary Shandean texts. The first work of Sancho's to appear in print was his correspondence with Sterne, comprising his letter to Sterne, and three letters in reply, which appeared in the Letters of the Late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne, To his most intimate Friends, published posthumously in 1775 by Sterne's daughter, Lydia de Medalle.¹⁰ The correspondence between Sancho and Sterne was greatly admired: it would not be unfair to say that Sterne's correspondence with Sancho was Sterne's (rather than Sancho's) most celebrated exchange of letters. The Sancho exchange showed the celebrated writer in a better light than many of his other letters, confirming him as a benevolent philanthropist rather than a rakish libertine, whose “delicate sensibility,” in the words of William Wilberforce, was “applied to the pernicious purposes of corrupting the national taste, and lowering the standard of manners and morals.”¹¹ The review of Medalle's edition of Sterne's Letters, in The Gentleman's Magazine (January 1776), even reprinted the letter to Sterne from “honest Sancho,” describing him as a “sooty correspondent” of “sensibility and delicacy” who “though black as Othello has a heart as humanized as any of the fairest about St. James's.”¹²

Sancho's own publication waited until early 1782, more than a year after his death on 14 December 1780. To advertise “that a collection of his Letters is preparing for the publick,” an anonymous correspondent sent a copy of one of “the same “good-hearted” Negro'[s]” letters to The Gentleman's Magazine on 5 April 1781.¹³ The collection was published in 1782 as The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, in two volumes, with a brief biography by Joseph Jekyll, published by a prestigious group of booksellers under John Nicholls. It was the first substantial volume published in English by a man of African descent. As well as a splendid portrait frontispiece engraved by Bartolozzi from a Gainsborough oil sketch, the book had a remarkable subscription list comprising 1,216 names, including a parade of nobility. In her prefatory introduction, the supposed editor, Frances Crew, stated that the letters were not “originally written with a view to publication.”¹⁴The Gentleman's Magazine of August 1782 found Crew's humility risible, 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.’”¹⁵ Although the sequence of events is unclear, the letters were presumably gathered from friends, although Sancho may have kept copies of some or all of them. The tenor of the prefatory material implies that the project of publishing the letters should be located within the emergent agitation against the slave trade, through the volume's eloquent contribution to the contested question of African “arts and learning” in contemporary discourse. Crew stated her motive for publishing the Letters as “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.”¹⁶ Jekyll 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 color of a common integument.”¹⁷ Nonetheless, amongst the most controversial aspects of Sancho's Letters to contemporary readers was the nature of Sancho's imitation of Sterne.

Sancho's imitation of Sterne was not a matter of slavish copying. The stress on spontaneous originality in the post-Romantic period has lent a pejorative sense to the term imitation that it may not have had for Sancho. In neo-classical aesthetics, by contrast, imitation (derived from Latin imitatio and Greek mimesis) was an elevated ambition for writers: not merely copying the style and devices of a great writer, but emulating their project (or spirit). Rather than a falling away from his own voice, imitation is a kind of inspiration, the mask that allows Sancho's voice to be heard. Given the forces ranged against his utterance, contesting the ability of the African Englishman to write, imitation here can be seen to be a powerful force. In the critical terms of his own period, then, the issue around Sancho was not that he imitated, but whether what he imitated was appropriate. In Sancho's case, the choice of Sterne as his literary model was little less than scandalous, and, in its own way, a disturbing, even subversive gesture.

Sancho's Shandean manner aroused the censure of his first critics, who questioned the propriety of Sterne's mode to Sancho's condition and status. An early review of Sancho in The European Magazine (September, 1782) noted that these letters were written by a “self-tutored” “negroe.” Their publication countermanded those philosophers (such as David Hume) who claimed that Africans were not capable of “arts and letters.” Nonetheless, the pleasure granted to readers by the confirmation of “the common elevation of the human race,” gave way to anxieties about the form of the letters, which it characterises as “the naked effusions of a negroes heart … glowing with the finest philanthropy, and the purest affections.” The reviewer, swinging between a language of sensibility and libertinism, categorizes Sancho's correspondence as a kind of familiar letter: “They have the ease of epistles written in the openness of nature, and in the playful familiarity of friendship. They breathe unaffected piety—and have the ardour of genuine patriotism.” But the reviewer warns that “it must not be expected that these letters are taken as models of this species of writing. They have more warmth than elegance of diction, and more feeling than correctness.”¹⁸ He hints that this dangerous warmth and feeling (again a libertine language) is related to Sterne, who is the subject of a warm encomium in the letter quoted in the review (“Letter LIII” to Mr. S———[Stevenson], dated October 24, 1777).¹⁹ Indeed, the reviewer suggests that the “stile in which he chiefly indulged himself” gave him “a licence for expressions light and frivolous.”²⁰ That the Shandean mode was contentious was reiterated in Ralph Griffiths's review in The Monthly Review (1783). He praised Sancho's “merry vein” of “pleasantry” but rejected the appropriateness of the Shandean model. As to Sancho's “epistolary style,” Griffiths says, “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, and abomination to all accurate writers and friends to sober punctuation.”²¹ Griffiths (himself a practised Shandean imitator) notes with concern that the looseness of Sterne's punctuation seemed irrevocably connected to the looseness of his morals. The Shandean signalled its libertinism in its liberty with dashes: it is, according to Griffiths, “a vicious practice.”²² The American Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), argued that Sancho's Letters had some “merit in composition,” as they “breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy.” But his Shandean style was a matter for concern: “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 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.”²³ These reviewers, then, express unease when Sterne's dashing manner, tolerable in his own hands, is deployed by Sancho.²⁴ Sukhdev Sandhu has argued that the relation between the writing of Sancho and Sterne is identifiable in a verbal manner given to puns, word play, and double entendre, and a typographical eccentricity, given to dashes, digression and hesitancy.²⁵ Sancho's imitation of Sterne's variety of sentimentalism is also a matter of content, of thematic and ethical parallels. Sancho finds creative potential in Sterne's mode of the gentle Horatian satire against the follies of learned society—as is seen in Sancho's squib on hairdressers for the General Advertiser of April 29, 1780.²⁶ Furthermore, Sancho also pursues a Shandean mode of sentimental libertinism.

One of the signature strategies of Sterne's novels is to interweave a layer of licentious innuendo within the detailed physiological description congenital to the mode of sensibility. This strategy is endemic to both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, and had long attracted the attention of the critics, who felt that Sterne's writing contained a vein of indecency and licentiousness that was potentially obscene, and certainly inappropriate in a clergyman. Even John Cleland, author of The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) thought Sterne's bawdy was “too plain” or explicit.²⁷ In short, in the 1770s and 1780s, while the term sentimental had come to represent a dangerously immoral quality, the notion of Shandy and the Shandean signalled this libertine mode in its vicious extreme. An example here, typical if obscure, is the anonymous two-volume collection of short fictions attributed to William Russell, called Sentimental Tales, published in 1771, which asserts its allegiance to Sterne on its title-page by quoting the defense of the passions from A Sentimental Journey: “Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down, or mask your passions—tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them?—”²⁸ These short tales, which occasionally allude to Sterne and Yorick, are explicitly libertine. In “The Progress of Love, or, The Effects of Familiarity: a sentimental tale,” the characters Sophia and Modestus fall in love, despite the fact that Sophia is promised to Sir Thomas Goodville. Their uncontrollable passion leads them to secret assignations, at which kissing turns to lubricious fondling (and a long section admiring her breasts), and finally to sexual intercourse. After luxuriating in passion for a period, Modestus grows tired of Sophia and they break off their amour. The story is framed and expressed as a moral lesson on the effect of familiarity and the transience of passion, in the orthodox language of virtuous sentimentalism, but simultaneously it positions the reader as a voyeur, in a manner which is clearly libertine.

The unease of Sancho's first critics about his Shandean imitation also reflected contemporary notions of the elevation of the familiar letter, to which Sancho's low status—as an African, an uneducated man, and a man of trade—was incommensurate. A form of writing that was traced back to classical precedents, the familiar letter implied and nurtured a practice of sociability, manners and politeness that embedded it within the new sentimental and domestic ideology of the mid-century. The classical sources of the theory of the familiar letter were the examples of Cicero, Pliny and Seneca. Despite their disparate interests, these writers were understood by their eighteenth-century readers to have found in the letter form “an escape from formality, a release from the sort of rules associated with higher kinds of literature.”²⁹ In the informal structure of the letter, writers might give loose to informal thoughts in informal diction, while still aiming at a lucid and organized disposition of material. To the eighteenth century, then, the familiar letter was a form in which the writer expressed thoughts with candor and spontaneity (the one guaranteed by the other). Pope, whom Sancho invokes in his first letter, claimed that his letters conveyed “thoughts just warm from the brain without any polishing or dress.” Although the quest for a natural and artless mode of expression was pursued by writers throughout the period, polish was nonetheless also valued. The requisite civility of the familiar letter was a balance between “freedom” and “ceremony.” Techniques of letter-writing proliferated: writers were advised to make rough drafts in a letter-book, before revising and copying out the letter in their best hand. George Seymour argued that “A fine letter does not consist in saying fine things, but expressing ordinary ones in an uncommon manner. It is the propria communia dicere, the art of giving grace and elegance to familiar occurrences that constitutes the merit of this kind of writing.”³⁰ As many writers noticed, the familiar letter was allied on one side to the occasional essay, and on the other, to polite conversation. The essay, as modelled on the example of The Spectator, contributed an urbane and congenial approach to issues of philosophical, cultural and social note (ideas, sentiment and gossip). Conversation contributed its anecdotal strategies and the easy immediacy of spoken discourse, although in the letter (where only one voice speaks) this conversation becomes a kind of conversation with one's self. The implied conversational model here was an informed and mannered colloquy between acquaintances who share a common view of culture and society.

From the middle of the eighteenth century there was a significant increase in the number of texts offering practical guidance for letter-writing. Works such as the anonymous Complete Letter-Writer: or, New and Polite English Secretary. Containing Directions for writing Letters on all Occasions, in a polite, easy, and proper Manner (1755) ran to more than forty editions by the end of the century. Letter-writing instruction manuals offered practical advice about the epistolary method, providing examples upon which the student might model his or her own correspondence, concerning topics that might be raised in everyday life, such as “Business, Duty, Amusement, Affection, Courtship, Love, Marriage, Friendship, &c.”³¹ The desired effect of such letter-writing manuals was to render the correspondence of the reader into, as the title page has it, a “polite, easy, and proper manner.” This project of mannered reform allies the letter-writing manual with the kinds of practical advice about social life and manners contained in contemporary conduct books. Considered in this light, the letter-writing manuals of the latter half of the century increasingly offer themselves as part of a much wider discourse on the reform of manners. As such, they shift away from merely offering directions or instructions for secretaries and clerks (servants), towards the zone occupied by the conduct books, which aim to mould the manners and conduct of young women and men in the middle station of life (or rather, those who would fashion themselves as such). Like the conduct books then, the letter-writing manuals establish a set of desirable characteristics which are identified as natural or innate, and then detail the way in which they might be acquired or affected. The letter-books, like the conduct books, encode both a stable set of rules, and a mode of cultural dynamism.

Reviews of Sterne's correspondence suggest that it was not clear to contemporaries that his eccentric letters adequately conformed to the model of polite propriety associated with the letter-writing manuals. His letters lacked the requisite signs of organization and seemed to scorn notions of finish and polish. Moreover, the vein of libertine obscenity encountered in Sterne's letters (even those addressed to married women) signalled, if not depravity, then at least that he had invested insufficient reflection on his topics.³² But defenders of Sterne, of course, could counter that all these attributes only underlined the manner in which Sterne had managed to catch the evanescent and fleeting character of thought: that these were the spontaneous outpourings of his mind, delivered both with candor and a just quality of benevolent sentiment (especially, for example, in the case of his letters to Sancho). Once identified as eccentricities allowable to a writer of “greatness,” the irregularity of Sterne's letters could be described as a kind of epistolary accomplishment. Although many readers continued to execrate his formal and moral reversions, Sterne's letters were offered as a model in their own right—and so were Sancho's. The sixteenth edition of the enormously popular letter-writing manual The Complete Letter-Writer: or, Polite English Secretary, published in 1778, offered amongst its range of model letters drawn from the best practitioners, a selection of Sterne's correspondence. Responding to the vogue for Sterne's letters, these were inserted into the section called “Elegant Letters on Various Subjects, to improve the Style and Entertain the Mind, from eminent authors.”³³ As well as two letters to his daughter, the editor included the entirety of the Sancho-Sterne correspondence: not only Sancho's letter of 1766 and its reply of 1766, but also the two subsequent letters sent by Sterne to Sancho on more prosaic matters of business.³⁴ To this letter-writing manual, then, not only Sterne's but also Sancho's epistles are exemplary as “Elegant Letters.”

Sterne's eccentricities as a correspondent, of course, further demonstrated the unique and original quality of his creative genius. The signal attributes of Sterne's letters—their spontaneity, sincerity, and naturalness—were of course the product of much art: Sterne used the letter-book technique to draft and plan his letters (as is testified by the differences between the several transcribed and sent versions of his own, and indeed Sancho's letters). He advised his daughter Lydia, “never let your letters be studied ones—write naturally, and then you will write well.”³⁵ The danger was that the artlessness of Sterne's letters might appear as a genuine lack of art rather than the appearance of its lack. Though his manner was easy to imitate and parody (as evidenced by the flood of such imitations), his epistolary style could only be earned by careful endeavor, by demonstration of ability in other areas, by being an established figure. The content of Sterne's letters accrued further symbolic capital: the heady mixture of sentimental effusions and exemplary benevolence together with his amiable and ingratiating letters to the great and good accumulated a specially innovative kind of status. Even the libertine turn of Sterne's letters marked their location in the culture of an exclusive group of urban rakes such as John Hamilton Mortimer, John Hall Stevenson, and John Wilkes. In short, Sterne's letters, and his manner of writing in general, possessed a particular kind of high status: urban and urbane, Whiggish and libertine, fashionable and exclusive.

Sancho's imitation of Sterne approaches both his sentimentalism and his libertinism through the mode of the familiar letter. It might seem to modern readers that benevolent and virtuous sentimentalism was the more natural ally of the emergent discourse of antislavery, and as such ought to have attracted Sancho. Certainly, sensibility and abolition have long been considered fellow travellers.³⁶ Nonetheless, there are compelling reasons why the politics of libertinism were attractive to Sancho too, especially in the 1760s and 1770s. In assessing Sancho's Letters, critics and historians have debated extensively the nature of his comments on slavery, race and cultural allegiance: it has been noted above that Walvin concluded that he was “obsequious,” and Edwards that he was “almost wholly assimilated” to polite English society. A comprehensive assessment of Sancho's politics may be impossible now, and the Letters, the primary record, is a slippery medium upon which to base speculations. In large measure it does not always help to gauge Sancho against the self-consciously abolitionist politics of later writers such as Equiano or Cugoano, not simply because of Sancho's personal eccentricities, nor because his work is written prior to the emergence of a public antislavery discourse in the 1780s debate on abolition, but rather, because of this question of form. Sancho's politics are articulated most clearly in his chosen mode of address, the Shandean familiar letter, and in particular his peculiar interpolation of the sentimental-libertine discourse. In this way it is not rewarding to ask how much Sancho was an abolitionist: rather, the early history of public discourse against slavery might be revealed by an enquiry into the kinds of politics to which Sancho bears allegiance.

As Vincent Carretta has shown, Sancho was the only man of African descent known to have voted in a British parliamentary election in the eighteenth century. Sancho's right to vote depended on the unusual franchise governing the Westminster electorate where he lived. Open to all inhabitants paying “scot and lot,” the franchise was essentially open to all male property-owning residents required to pay the poor-rate. With over twelve thousand electors, it was by far the largest electorate in the country. It was also a highly active electorate, whose elections after 1769 were influenced by the volatile radicalism of the nearby electorates of the City of London and Middlesex. In 1774, Sancho voted for Hugh Percy (Earl Percy) and Lord Thomas Pelham Clinton, the candidates of the North administration (thus opposing the radical interest backed by Wilkes). In 1780, however, Sancho supported the radical ticket, voting for George Brydges Rodney (Admiral Rodney) and Charles James Fox—who, Sancho remarks, gave him the honor of thanking him personally.³⁷ Sancho's inconsistent voting pattern indicates that he was unwilling to be cast as an orthodox member of any particular party faction (and may reflect no more than a mercenary attitude to electoral allegiance). In a letter dated 4 May 1778, to Jack Wingrave, he disingenuously remarks that “I say nothing of politics—I hate such subjects;—the public papers will inform you of mistakes—blood—taxes—misery—murder—the obstinacy of a few—and the murder and villainy of a many.”³⁸ His distrust of faction, however, should not obscure his enduring concern with the politics of language and the languages of politics.

Sancho's letters on the Gordon Riots of 1780 to John Spink (Volume II, “Letter LXVII” to “LXXI”) serve as a case in point.³⁹ In themselves, his letters are an historically important description of events: as an eye-witness account they have a charming immediacy, and written by a man of property, they are ideologically invested in the outcome. Sancho's self-ironizing horror at the destructions of the mob—“worse than Negro barbarity”—and approving description of efforts to restore order have usually been read as conservative and patriotic. However, the crowd of the Gordon Riots, animated by anti-Catholic sentiment and violent xenophobia (if not racism), was no friend of an African chandler, even if trial records indicate that there were several black participants in the riots.⁴⁰ He describes his justifiable fear at the appearance of “two thousand liberty boys swearing and swaggering by with large sticks—thus armed in hope of meeting with the Irish chairmen and laborers.” The vengeful blood-thirsty mob, he concludes ironically, articulate their sectarian bigotry in the loyalist discourse of liberty: “This—this—is liberty! genuine British liberty!”⁴¹ His letters approvingly relate the measures taken by authority against the “anarchy”: after noting that “martial law is this night to be declared,” he expects the soldiers to do “terrible work,” before noting that the “tumult begins to subside.”⁴² Here, as elsewhere, Sancho explores the parameters of the common-law notion of personal liberty so deeply ingrained in the English constitution. In doing so, he demonstrates that there is no easy way to map the popular politics of liberty in the mid-eighteenth century onto the concerns of liberation and emancipation in the late twentieth century.

The libertine turn in Sancho's Letters thus rounds out, and subverts, the picture of Sancho as a conservative and patriotic Whig. As a political language, libertinism was particularly associated with the Whig faction led in turn by Wilkes and Fox. As Kathleen Wilson has argued, libertine masculinity offered a mode of personal behavior as a radical political expression.⁴³ The libertine Whigs like Fox and Wilkes made extensive claims for the liberty of the English subject, a liberty which they defended from encroachment by both royal corruption and executive tyranny. This Wilkes-ite defense of the liberty of the English subject, in Wilson's construction, combined natural rights language with notions of historical resistance (celebrated in appeals to the “people's” actions in 1648 and the events of 1688). Sancho's patriotism establishes and elaborates his status as an English subject, to whom liberty is not accidental but essential. In this way Sancho's patriotism, often derided by recent observers who argue he ought to be more critical of nation and empire, is arguably a canny reading of the political field. In the period before abolition, the Whiggish notion of English liberty was the only viable political defense of his freedom (and indeed, it played an important role in the Mansfield decision in 1772 that restricted the rights of slave-owners). Libertine personal politics manifests this platform in a “manly patriotism” of which Wilkes was the prime example—a gendered self-fashioning in the libertine mode that Wilson argues was used “to naturalise claims to political subjectivity.” “The model of manly patriotism simultaneously defined and solicited a particular version of masculinity to be put at the call of patriotism that marginalized and opposed non-resisting and hence ‘effeminate’ others. It defined the true patriot as the austere, forceful, and independent masculine subject who would resist, often at considerable personal cost, the illegitimate powers that threatened to overtake the polity.”⁴⁴ Political liberty could thus be manifested in the “phallic adventuring” of libertine rakes. As Wilkes understood, his political cause was complicit with his performance as a rake: seen clearly in his production of pornography (the notorious An Essay on Woman (1762-1763),⁴⁵ a fondness for liaisons with women (affairs and mistresses), a perverse pride in personal indebtedness and high-stakes gambling, and excessive consumption of alcohol and food.

Sancho's reading of Sterne does not, of course, have recourse to the vulgar licentiousness (and libidinal coarseness) of libertine writings like those of Wilkes, Cleland or the Sentimental Tales of William Russell. Equally, there is no evidence that Sancho was a Wilkes-ite, nor was he a debauched libertine: indeed, he seems unusually faithful to his wife, his family and the cozy scene of domesticity in Charles Street. His letters are not sprinkled with “warm scenes,” and he wasn't a member of a Hell-Fire Club.⁴⁶ Nonetheless, the quality of Sancho's friendships with men, his jokey masculine dilettantism, his predilection to excessive consumption, his love of luxury foods, his ironic respect for his gout and obesity, even his propensity to indulge the pathetic scene, might be called a kind of libertine masculinity. Perhaps this is no more than a stylistic turn: occasionally but repeatedly, Sancho allows his language to become libertine in this Wilkes-ite manner, without of course producing the explicitly rakish behaviour associated with and described by it.

Striving, like Sterne, for a lithe and fluid miscellaneity, Sancho's engagement with libertine discourse in the Letters is pervasive but inconsistent. With the appropriately named Mrs Cocksedge (perhaps the governess of Frances Crew),⁴⁷ Sancho adopts a playful mode of teasing flirtation. In “Letter XXV” (August 14, 1775), commenting on her excursion to the fashionable spa Bath, Sancho coquettishly imagines himself as her lover: “I imagine I see you rise out of the waves another Venus—and could wish myself Neptune, to have the honour of escorting you to land.”⁴⁸ With John Meheux, a clerk or public official in the India Board, Sancho affects the swaggering brand of rakish masculinity, associating himself with excess drinking, the company of lewd women, and gout. Sancho was happy to appear the reformed rake too. Sancho's biographer, Joseph Jekyll, suggests that Sancho had enjoyed the dissipated life of the libertine following his receipt of the Duchess of Montagu's bequest in 1751. “Freedom, riches, and leisure, naturally led a disposition of African texture into indulgences; and that which dissipated the mind of Ignatius completely drained the purse. In his attachment to women, he displayed a profuseness which not unusually characterises the excess of the passion.”⁴⁹

A model for Sancho's libertine years is perhaps provided by the experiences of another Black servant in London in the 1770s, Julius Soubise, to whom Sancho addressed a number of concerned letters.⁵⁰ Brought to London from the West Indian colony of St Kitt's as a slave aged 10, Soubise had, like Sancho, attracted the benevolent attention of a noble patron, in his case the Duchess of Queensberry. The main record of Soubise's exploits are from a distinctly unreliable “whores biography” entitled Nocturnal Revels (1779), anonymously published by a minor pornographer, M. Goadby, and pretending to be by a “Monk of the Order of St. Francis,” which is to say, a member of the burlesque Order of St. Francis assembled by the notorious libertine Sir Francis Dashwood at Medmenham Priory.⁵¹ Two chapters of this miscellaneous work are devoted to the Soubise scandal, offering a “Sketch of an extraordinary Black Character” and a survey of “His good fortune in England” and “His Success with the Fair Sex.”⁵² Having been educated by the Duchess in fencing and riding (high-status pursuits traditionally associated with the education of noblemen), Soubise became known as “The Mungo Macaroni”: in short, a fop.⁵³ The generosity of the Duchess also allowed him to fashion himself the personal identity of a nobleman: he styled himself “Prince Ana—Ana—maboe” and was noted as “a very extraordinary personage parading the streets of the Town, in an elegant equipage, servants in superb liveries, and drawn by fine dun horses.”⁵⁴ To the status of fop (with its connotations of fashionable effeminacy), Soubise added fame as a rake and a libertine (which carried connotations of fashionable masculinity):

Mungo indulged in all the gaiety and extravagance of the Town. His face was very well known in the Fleshmarket at the Play-houses; he constantly frequented the Masquerades at the Pantheon and Cornelys,' where he has very naturally, and much in character, played the part of Mungo, by which name he was afterwards called. He was soon initiated at all the Nunneries in King's Place and the New Buildings; and the Nuns have frequently done the honour of taking an airing in his carriage in Hyde-Park and elsewhere. Mrs L—w—gt—n, Miss B—t—n, Miss K——g, Miss H—ph—ys, Miss K——y, and even Miss Emily C—lth—st herself, thought it no dishonour to have yielded to the intreaties of his Highness. His pocket was always well replenished; his carriage was always at their service; and the Ladies gave him the best of characters for his manly parts and abilities.⁵⁵

Soubise's masculinity, the proper expression of his performative libertinism, gave him the freedom of the town, measured in his attendance at fashionable resorts and brothels. In society he was free to be a rake, as long as his sexual virility gave him access to the ladies and prostitutes. But for contemporaries, Soubise's liberty was troubling, an illusory freedom dependent upon the financial resources of his female patron, with whom he was accused of sexual complicity. Indeed, like Jekyll's description of Sancho's libertinism, Soubise's rakish exploits were made the occasion of further physiological stereotyping: as “his constitution was as warm as his complexion,” it is the vaunted virility of black masculinity that ensures his popular “freedom,” which has no foundation outside female concupiscence.⁵⁶

But although Soubise's life might give us a sense of Sancho's libertine past, Sancho's letters to Soubise deploy a tone of pious morality more akin to conduct-book discourse and the reforming language of the sermon. Sancho's first letter to Soubise, written in 1772 when Soubise still enjoyed the benefits of his noble patron's benevolence, cautions him to follow the path of virtue, a lesson Sancho underlines by inviting Soubise to compare his station in life with that of his enslaved fellow countrymen:

Look round upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour—superadded to ignorance,—see slavery, and the contempt of those wretches who roll in affluence from our labours superadded to this woeful catalogue—hear the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar.—You, S[oubise], tread as cautiously as the strictest rectitude can guide ye—yet must you suffer from this—but armed with truth—honesty—and conscious integrity—you will be sure of the plaudit and countenance of the good.⁵⁷

The second letter was written after a space of six years, in the course of which Soubise had gained his considerable notoriety in the lists of fashionable debauch, and so dissipated his good fortune and name. His fall was complete. After years of consorting with known courtesans and prostitutes, Soubise had been accused of raping one of the maids of the Duchess of Queensberry. He departed for Calcutta as a riding instructor on 15 July 1777, a week before a report of the rape was published in The Morning Post on 22 July.⁵⁸ Soubise was aware of his precarious position, as signalled by “a very penitential letter” that Sancho received from Soubise, probably sent from Portsmouth (noted in a letter to Mr Meheux, “Letter XLIII” July 23, 1777). But Sancho continued to worry about the quality of Soubise's reformed “sensibility.”⁵⁹ Sancho's second letter to Soubise offered sterner counsel. Sancho advised him to use his East Indian exile to embark on a course of moral and commercial penitence:

It has pleased God to take your props to himself—teaching you a lesson at the same time, to depend upon an honest exertion of your own industry—and humbly to trust in the Almighty.

You may safely conclude now, that you have not many friends in England—be it your study, with attention, kindness, humility, and industry, to make friends where you are—industry with good-nature and honesty is the road to wealth.—A wise oeconomy—without avaricious meanness—or dirty rapacity will in a few years render you decently independent.⁶⁰

Sancho proposes that Soubise should endeavour to repay his outstanding debts to London tradesmen, so that on his return Soubise may “create” a “better name.” This conversion is expressed as a spiritual transformation, but it also proposes to reform Soubise from the excesses of libertinage towards a more homely domestic virtue clearly associated with the honest poverty of the tradesman, a man who stands independently on his own credit and name (Sancho remarks on his poverty, “'tis an honest poverty—and I need not blush or conceal it”).⁶¹ Ironically Soubise's libertine freedom, Sancho proposes, is revealed as a kind of slavery (slave to fashion and sexual intrigue, or more teasingly, a sexual slave of his white female mistresses). Disturbingly, then, Soubise's libertine slavery exposes the insecurities of Sancho's own freedom, especially as it is asserted through the same libertine language of liberty.

By rendering distinctions between high and low culture unstable and unclear, Sancho's Letters possess within their mode of address a dangerous subversive quality. In this way, Sancho's Letters are arguably more adventurous than Equiano's slave narrative, whose allegiance to low prose genres ironically serves to confirm, for resistant readers such as Jefferson, Equiano's place, status and subjectivity. Sancho's deployment of Sterne's style translates a literary infelicity into a political scandal, because Sterne's style celebrates Sancho's exceptional status. Sancho's Letters are a species of category error that confirms Sancho's own confusion of hierarchy and order. The Shandean and sentimental form of his letters exposes to Jefferson and others the irredeemable incongruity between Sancho the Anglo-African man (racially different) and his status in life (enfranchised, property-owning and fêted in elite circles). By delicately and elegantly elaborating a digressive biography of Sancho's London life, locating him at the centre rather than the margin of webs of culture and commerce, patronage and gossip, Sancho invites speculation on matters of status and subjectivity, toying with his self-representation, and invoking inconsistency. Rather than being an example of assimilation, obsequiousness or mimicry, as many of Sancho's recent critics have contended, the form and substance of Sancho's Letters repeatedly declare a culturally combative exceptionalism that makes his book both transgressive and radical.

Notes

1. Ignatius Sancho, The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), 7. All references to this edition unless otherwise specified.

2. Ignatius Sancho, The Letters of the late Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), i.

3. James Walvin, Black and White: The Negro and English Society, 1555-1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 61.

4. Paul Edwards, “Black writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” in David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 52, 53.

5. See for example David Thomson, Wild Excursions: The Life and Fiction of Laurence Sterne (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), 252; Melvyn New, Notes, in Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 3 vols (Gainesville, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1978-84), 532, n. 747.1ff; and Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 255.

6. Keith Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988), 75-76.

7. Paul Edwards, “Introduction,” in Ignatius Sancho, Letters, ed. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 6-7, 3. See also Paul Edwards, “Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three Afro-British Authors of the Georgian Era; Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn,” Occasional Papers, No. 34 (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, Edinburgh University, 1992), unpaginated.

8. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57-64, 79-86; James Walvin, “Ignatius Sancho: The Man and his Times” in Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, ed. Reyahn King (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997); Sukhdev Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters,” in Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, ed. Reyahn King (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997); Vincent Carretta, “Introduction” in The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta (London: Penguin, 1998), ix-xxxii; Vincent Carretta, “Three West Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised,” Research in African Literatures, Special Issue “The African Diaspora and its Origins,” 29, 4 (1998), 73-77; Sukhdev Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” Research in African Literatures, Special Issue “The African Diaspora and its Origins,” 29, 4 (1998), 88-106.

9. Eric Erämetsä, A Study of the Word “Sentimental” and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of the Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series 13, No. 74 (Helsinki: Helsingen Liike Kinjapaino Oy, 1951), 29. See also Edith Birkhead, “Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” Essays and Studies, 11 (1925), 92-116.

10. Lydia de Medalle (ed.), Letters of the Late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne, To his most intimate Friends. With a Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais. To which are prefix'd, Memoirs of his Life and Family. Written by Himself. And Published by his Daughter, Mrs. Medalle, 3 vols (London: T. Becket, 1775), 22-36.

11. William Wilberforce, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, Contrasted with Real Christianity (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1797), p. 203.

12. The Gentleman's Magazine, XLVI (January 1776), 27, 29.

13. The Gentleman's Magazine, LI, (April 1781), 162. Carretta suggests the letter (to William Stevenson, dated August 31, 1779) was sent by Frances Crew, in Sancho, Letters, xv.

14. Sancho, Letters, 4.

15. [Review of Sancho's Letters], Gentleman's Magazine, LII, (August 1782), 437-439, 437.

16. Sancho, Letters, 4.

17. Ibid., 9.

18. “[Review of Sancho's Letters],” The European Magazine, II (September, 1782), 199-201, 199.

19. Sancho, Letters, Carretta ed., 101-4.

20. European Magazine, II (September, 1782), 199.

21. Ralph Griffiths, “Art. X [Review of Sancho's Letters],” The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal, LXIX, (December, 1783), 492-97, 493.

22. Griffiths, Monthly Review, LXIX, 1783, 493.

23. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: J. Stockdale, 1787); repr. ed. William Peden (New York: Norton, 1954), 140-141.

24. Sancho, Letters, 214-15.

25. Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” 96-97.

26. James Boswell, conversation with Cleland in his journal entry for 13 April 1779, in Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle, xiii ([New York: W. E. Rudge], 1932), 220.

27. [William Russell], Sentimental Tales, in two volumes, 2 vols bound and paginated as one (Dublin: James Williams, 1771); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, 2 vols (London: T. Becket and P. A. DeHondt, 1768), II, 100.

28. Russell, Sentimental Tales, 7-79.

29. Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Some Generalisations,” in Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (eds), The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966), 271.

30. George Seymour, The Instructive Letter-Writer, and Entertaining Companion: containing Letters On the Most Interesting Subjects, In an Elegant and Easy Style; Most of which are wrote by the following Royal and Eminent Personages, and the Best Authors, Antient and Modern, viz. Cicero, Brutus, Trajan, Pliny, Plutarch […] Locke, Addison, Steele, Pope, Gay, Atterbury, Mr. & Mrs. Rowe, Richardson, Coleman, Murphy &c. With Forms of Messages for Cards (London: G. Kearsley, 1763), 8.

31. The Complete Letter-Writer: or, New and Polite English Secretary. Containing Directions for writing Letters on all Occasions, in a polite, easy, and proper Manner; with a great Variety of Examples, from the best Authors, on Business, Duty, Amusement, Affection, Courtship, Love, Marriage, Friendship, &c. And at the End some elegant Poetical Epistles. To which is prefix'd, an easy and compendious Grammar of the English Tongue. With Instructions how to address Persons of all ranks, 2nd ed. (1755, London: S. Crowder and H. Woodgate, 1756).

32. The publication of Sterne's Letters (1775) by his daughter Lydia Medalle in 1775 reconfirmed his allegiance to a peculiar brand of English libertine sentimental writers. Like the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (London: W. Johnston, 1773, reprinted 1775), the Letters (1775) hinted that Sterne's ambiguous affairs with women in the 1760s had a passionate and physical dimension.

33. The Complete Letter-Writer: or, Polite English Secretary. Containing Familiar Letters on the most common Occasions in Life. 16th edition (first ed. 1755; London: S. Crowder and Benj. Cha. Collins, 1778), 167-256.

34. Complete Letter-Writer (16th ed., 1778) No. XLVII. “From Ignatius Sancho (a Black) to Mr. Sterne” [u.d.], 249-250; No. XLVIII. “From Mr. Sterne, to Ignatius Sancho,” [u.d.], 251-52; No. XLIX. “To the same,” [u.d.], 252; No. L. “To the same,” [u.d.], 252-53.

35. Laurence Sterne, Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), 302.

36. See for example Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part I,” American Historical Review, 90, 2 (April 1985), 339-361; and “Part II,” 90, 3 (June 1985), 547-66; and by contrast Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 87-128; and George E. Boulukos, “Maria Edgeworth's ‘Grateful Negro’ and the Sentimental Argument for Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 23, 1 (1999), 12-29.

37. Carretta, in Sancho, Letters, 321-22. Carretta's source is the published poll-books for the Westminster elections of that year. The 1776 election was unopposed.

38. Sancho, Letters, 116.

39. Ibid., 217-26.

40. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 336.

41. Sancho, Letters, 217-18.

42. Ibid., 220, 221, 222.

43. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also John Sainsbury, “John Wilkes, Debt, and Patriotism,” Journal of British Studies, 34 (April 1995), 165-96; James G. Turner, “The Properties Of Libertinism,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 9, no. 3 (1985), 75-87; Brian Cowan, “Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism,” Journal of British Studies, 37 (April 1998), 111-38; Randolph Trumbach, “Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 253-82.

44. Wilson, Sense of the People, 219.

45. Adrian Hamilton, The Infamous ‘Essay on Woman’ (London: Deutch, 1972).

46. Betty Kemp, Sir Francis Dashwood (London: Macmillan, 1967), 101-57; D. P. Mannix, The Hell-Fire Club (New York: Ballantine, 1959).

47. Carretta, in Sancho, Letters, 255n.

48. Sancho, Letters, 61.

49. Jekyll in ibid., 6.

50. Sancho's letters to Soubise: (i) Richmond, Oct. 11, 1772, I, Letter XIII, 46-47; (ii) Charles Street, Westm., Nov. 29, 1778, II, Letter XIII, 147-49. Another letter (I, Letter I, 27-28), to Mr. Jack Wingrave in Bengal, India, Charles Street, Feb. 14 1768 [actually 1778], relates Soubise's departure to India to seek his fortune (and escape public scandal); about which see also Carretta note p. 258. Sancho also comments on how to advise Soubise in a letter to Meheux (II, Letter II, July 26, 1778, 134).

51. Nocturnal Revels: or, The History of King's Place, and other Modern Nunneries. Containing their Mysteries, Devotions, and Sacrifices. Comprising also, The Ancient and Present State of Promiscuous Gallantry: with their Portraits of the most Celebrated Demireps and Courtezans of this Period: as well as Sketches of their Professional and Occasional Admirers. By a Monk of the Order of St. Francis, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (London: M. Goadby, 1779).

52. Ibid., 210.

53. Soubise was so named in the caricature A Mungo Macaroni, a visual satire published by Matthew and/or Mary Darly on 10 September 1772. Mungo was a commonplace name for a black slave, from Isaac Bickerstaffe's comic opera The Padlock (1769), in which Mungo was a ridiculous and officious servant who was willing to undertake any service for his employers. A macaroni was a fashionable fop.

54. Nocturnal Revels, 210-11.

55. Ibid., 216-17. The women are all courtesans or prostitutes.

56. Ibid., 216.

57. Sancho, Letters, 46.

58. Carretta, in Ibid., 257. Soubise died in India after a fall from a horse on 25 August 1798.

59. Ibid., 85.

60. Ibid., 147-48.

61. Ibid., 148.

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