SOURCE: Sandhu, Sukhdev. “Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters.” In Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, edited by Reyahn King and others, pp. 45-73. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

[In the following essay, Sandhu situates Sancho's letters in the context of writing by and about Black people in eighteenth-century England, analyzes the style and content of the letters in detail, considers Sancho's relationship to and supposed emulation of Laurence Sterne, examines Sancho's fluctuating reputation since the eighteenth century, and discusses the style of the Letters in relation to Sancho's purpose, personality, and experiences.]

Sale of a Negro Boy.—In the account of the trial of John Rice, who was hanged for forgery at Tyburn, May 4, 1763, it is said, ‘A commission of bankruptcy having been taken out against Rice, his effects were sold by auction, and among the rest his negro boy.’ I could not have believed such a thing could have taken place so lately; there is little doubt it was the last of the kind.

(Letter from A. A. to Notes and Queries, 1858)

A. A. was wrong. In the years following his letter of baffled disgust to Notes and Queries, many of the antiquarians, genealogists and men of letters who made up the readership of that journal, wrote in to provide subsequent examples of African men and women being parcelled off to the highest bidder at public auctions held in the centre of the English capital. A. A.'s question, the ensuing lost-and-found advertisements, and the details of slave auctions which were reprinted in Notes and Queries, point to the speed and ease with which London's malodorous past had been forgotten even in some of the most learned quarters within English society. Although slavery had been finally abolished in the West Indies barely twenty years before, it required archivists and antiquarians to fill in the large chinks that were already emerging in the public memory.

The black presence in England did not, as is popularly imagined, begin with the arrival of the 492 Jamaican passengers (and eight stowaways) on the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948. Evidence of black people at work and play during the 18th century is not confined to the realm of the visual arts; blacks are also commonly to be found fleet-footing their ways through the metropolitan literature of that period. In Thomas Brown's Amusement Serious and Comical (1702) the narrator is accompanied on his ambles through the byways and slyways of the capital by a quizzical Indian. One of the first people they see is another ‘sooty Dog’ who ‘could do nothing but Grin, and shew his Teeth, and cry, Coffee, Sir, Tea, will you please to walk in, Sir, a fresh Pot upon my word.’ (Brown, 1702, p. 27).

Over the following decades an increasing number of black people were brought over to London as servants by planters, naval officers and Government officials returning from the Caribbean. So many arrived that it comes as no surprise that when, nearly a century after Thomas Brown's comic rambles through the metropolis, William Wordsworth sat down to compose the ‘Residence in London’ section of his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he recalled the exotic cosmopolitanism he had found thronging the streets of the capital after the three years of blanched provincialism spent at Cambridge:

Now homeward through the thickening hubbub …
The Hunter-indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.

(Wordsworth, [1850] 1985, p. 143)

African characters were also commonly found on the London stage. Thomas Southerne's adaptation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1696) was extremely popular and was performed at least once a season throughout the century until 1808. The type of black most often portrayed was the noble savage: eloquent, regal in appearance and birthright, he inevitably ended the play committing suicide rather than be taken into captivity. His language was Latinate, his demeanour dignified, his character entirely humourless. Only in the final three decades of the century did a more vibrant form of characterisation emerge—that of the comic negro. This stock character—often named Mungo, Marianne or Sambo—was a ridiculous but usually affectionate version of those black servants so commonly found in 18th-century aristocratic households. In Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love In The City (1767) and The Padlock (1768) the blacks are portrayed as earthy and good-natured. They speak in mongrel idioms very different from the high-flown grandiloquence of Oroonoko or Inkle and Yarico.

As the abolitionist movement began to flourish in the 1770s and 1780s, it became almost impossible to avoid the constant flow of anti-slavery poems, tracts and broadsides issuing forth from the printing presses. While of importance to historians, very little of this material possesses literary merit. The negro became a sentimental trope: he was usually shown as helpless, abased, solely reliant on the Christian goodwill of the European to rescue him from his miserable plight. He was rarely given dialogue to speak, the individual details of his abduction and transportation were omitted. Such texts completely lack grit and bite.

The first book by an African to be published in England was A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, Written by Himself (1772). Dictated to ‘a young Lady of the town of Leominster’, it tells of the author's capture in Borno, Nigeria, and his subsequent travails in the Americas, Holland and England. Crammed with religious interjections and parables of dubious value, Gronniosaw's is an interesting start to the history of black British literature, but one that is rather didactic and over-determined by the Quaker beliefs of both the author and its intended audience.

Other black texts to emerge in the final decades of the century include Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and a report of a speech attacking the slave trade delivered in London during 1791 by Prince Naimbanna of Sierra Leone. Most celebrated is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself (1789). It went through nine editions in five years and sold thousands of copies as a result of the author's extensive reading tours throughout the United Kingdom. The book is in equal parts ethnographic treatise, travel narrative, spiritual autobiography and, perhaps most importantly, abolitionist polemic. Before he died in 1797, Equiano spent the last decade of his life firing off missives to metropolitan newspapers, helping with schemes to resettle the capital's black poor in Sierra Leone and, in effect, serving as the first black politician in England.

Sancho's name has come down to us through the centuries chiefly on account of his friendship with the writer, Laurence Sterne. As well as being a country pastor, Sterne was the author of Tristram Shandy, one of the most celebrated novels of the 18th century. Published in five parts between 1759 and 1767, it consists of nine volumes and well over 500 pages. It is narrated by the eponymous Tristram who tries to tell the story of his life from conception to adulthood. But, in a parody of the sequential, linear plots of many novels written during the century, the narrator's attempts to provide a lucid account of his life are constantly interrupted by digressions on topics such as the importance of knots or long noses. The tale is studded with lists and inventories of diseases, philosophers and even literary devices. Marbled pages, blank spaces, various squiggles and illustrative diagrams break up the flow of words. Even normal grammar is eschewed with dashes replacing full stops to lend the novel even more of a hustling, dizzying quality.

However, it was a passage in Sterne's sermon, ‘Job's Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life’ (1760) about ‘how bitter a draught’ slavery was, that initially inspired Sancho to write to the celebrated author. Why not, he asked, ‘give one half-hour's attention to slavery, as it is this day practised in our West Indies.—That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many—but if only of one—Gracious God!—what a feast to a benevolent heart!’ (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, p. 86).

Sterne—whose own father had died of a fever in 1731 after his regiment had been sent by the Duke of Newcastle to Jamaica to put down a slave uprising—was understandably delighted to receive this letter. Most black people in England were negligibly educated. They certainly did not read the work of learned authors such as Sterne. In his reply to Sancho, he promised to weave a tale ‘of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ into his narrative (Curtis, 1935, p. 286). The ninth, and final, book of Shandy also included an argument for the humanity of negroes that earned Sterne posthumous acclaim from English and French abolitionists.

Sancho's published letters reveal a heavy stylistic debt to Sterne. His use of dashes as the chief form of punctuation rather than stops or commas has the effect of hobbling the reader. These dashes look like splinters strewn across the page. It is not always easy to glean immediately the sense of many of the passages: we are forced to pay particular scrutiny to each fragment of prose that is squeezed between the dashes. Instead of hurtling through each letter, each narrative, we are constantly forced to slow down, to accustom ourselves to this very individual authorial voice.

There are a number of reasons why Sancho, who was both widely and deeply read in the classic works of English literature, should feel compelled to adapt Sterne's style for his own letters. One is that he identified closely with many of the characters and their mishaps in Tristram Shandy.

Almost all of the characters in Sterne's novel are ravaged by illness. Tristram's father has sciatica; Tristram himself is asthmatic and had the bridge of his nose permanently damaged by the improper use of forceps by the midwife. Indeed, Tristram's nose was as flat as that of Sancho. Like Uncle Toby, and like Sterne himself whose bout of tuberculosis damaged his vocal chords and left him with a weak, cracked voice, Sancho had some problems when it came to talking. His biographer, Jekyll, tells us that he had an ambition to perform on the stage but ‘a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive’ (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, p. 23). It was ill-health that cut short Sancho's service with the Montagu family and led him to open his grocery. As the years passed he was increasingly wracked by gout, dropsy, corpulency and asthma. Yet, just as the characters in Sterne's novel maintain their humour and their defiance despite their ailments, Sancho's letters rarely show him succumbing to self-pity or defeatism.

One of the key themes of Sterne's novel is that of naming. Tristram's father believes that particular names determine the behaviour, conduct and the success that individuals may achieve during their lives. He had gone to the length of writing a dissertation on the fact that, in his expert opinion, Tristram was the very worst name imaginable. He intends to call his son Trismegistus and is mortified when he learns that his servant, Susannah, had garbled the child's name to the vicar at the baptising ceremony. Sancho, like many of his fellow blacks in England at this time, owed his name to the mixture of contempt and condescension with which many aristocrats viewed slaves. The Greenwich sisters gave Sancho his surname on a whim, on the strength of a comic resemblance to a fictional character. They could do this because no one believed blacks would—or could—ever attain such status in society that their names would come to embarrass them. But, through the patronage of successive members of the Montagu family and his own intellectual graft, Sancho evaded the fate that the slave trade and the condescension of the sisters had intended for him. Like Tristram, Sancho exhibits such fortitude and warm humanity as to discredit any theory that would claim an individual's life trajectory is determined from the time he or she is named.

However, the main reason for Sancho's emulation of Sterne's style is not merely aesthetic, but because he believes the dashes, digressions and textual games serve a deeply moral purpose. In his sermon, ‘Philanthropy Recommended’ (1760), Sterne recounts the parable of the Good Samaritan, who, unlike the wealthier travellers who had preceded him on that route, had been prepared to turn his attention and compassion towards the stricken victim lying by the roadside. Discussing his own narrative methods in the first volume of Tristram Shandy, he draws a parallel with historiographers who might consider writing their books in a straightforward, sequential style. Such a technique is plausible, Sterne argues, but ‘morally speaking, impossible’ (Sterne, [1759] 1983, p. 32).

Linearity, we learn, is tantamount to selfishness. We must be prepared always to look around us, be prepared to halt, to be diverted by what is going on in the corners, the crevices, the byways of life. These side routes are full of value, pleasure and goodness. This amounts to a doctrine which urges us to be concerned for the defective, the maimed, those who are unable to hasten along the straight paths of economic or social success. It is hardly surprising that Sancho, who often found difficulty in feeding and clothing his family, and who required a gift of old quills in order even to be able to write, should praise Sterne for being ‘truly a noble philanthropist’ in his work.

By using dashes to break up his prose, Sancho also sought to ironise 18th-century racial theorists such as Edward Long and Samuel Estwick who equated linearity with the ability both to think straight and to be capable of rational thought. Africans, they argued, could not deal with linearity. Therefore blacks were not truly human and enslaving them was neither immoral nor against nature. So common was the stress on linearity in anti-abolitionist literature that William Dickson decided to mount a counter-attack in Letters on Slavery (1789):

The streets of many towns in this kingdom, and even of this metropolis, are crooked. If our ancestors, who laid out those streets were to be half as much calumniated as the negroes have been, it would probably be asserted, that they could not draw a straight line, between two given points, in the same plane.

(p. 82)

One has always to remember that Sancho's life lacked fluidity, causality, organic progression. From the time he was born aboard a slave ship he had suffered discontinuity, upheaval, at best only a stuttering momentum. His parents could hardly have expected that they themselves would be sold into captivity and that their child would be born into bondage. Nor could it have been anticipated that he would somehow elude a short, brutish life toiling under the Caribbean sun by being shipped to Greenwich. How many imported slaves had the good fortune to attract mentors in the form of the 2nd Duke of Montagu? Or to end their lives circulating amongst actors, writers and art connoisseurs while owning their own business a stone's throw away from the Houses of Parliament? Looked at in the context of the poverty and the continual disruptions he faced throughout his life, Sancho's responsiveness towards Sterne's writings, which advocated Samaritanism, practical virtue, and good humour as aids towards a good life, appears all too understandable.

Sancho's studious creolisation of Sterne's aesthetic should remind us forcibly that he was a man of letters. For all the skill and canniness with which Equiano imbued his polemical memoirs, he still used prose instrumentally, tactically, in a manner that is largely absent from Sancho's Letters. This is not a criticism for Equiano was writing in 1789, at the height of abolitionist fervour, and his book was specifically intended to contribute to the Anti-Slavery Society campaign.

Sancho, in contrast, wrote his letters, at least initially, with little regard for publication. For him, writing was a way of temporarily escaping the routines and stresses of running a grocery. This does not mean that his letters were not crammed with details of his daily retailing existence. They were. But, at the same time, Sancho toyed, he frolicked with metaphors and words to such an extent that we feel that it is only in these letters to his friends that he could fully give vent to his imagination. He himself was aware of this and ended one note, ‘Is not that—a good one?’

Humour is perhaps the dominant tone of these letters. Sancho loved to create comic neologisms: he described a friend, John Ireland, as an ‘eccentric phizpoop’; elsewhere he exclaimed ‘alas! an unlucky parciplepliviaplemontis seizes my imagination’. At one level, these examples show the influence of Sterne—another inveterate coiner of words—on Sancho's writing. But, as well as impress upon his readers his facility with the English language, something his comparative vocal difficulties prevented him from doing upon the stage, one senses that Sancho wants to replenish the stocks of the national language. One could see this as a lexical version of the many acts of charity which he undertook in the metropolic on behalf of strangers and friends alike. Perhaps it is also a case of the ex-slave wanting to shake off any vestiges of social and intellectual passivity, and, instead, to be a creator, a free manufacturer of words and concepts.

Sancho's playful approach was confined not just to language, but to the very grammar and appearance of his letters. In a note to John Meheux, First Clerk in the Board of Control, he wrote:

I hope confound the ink!—what a blot! Now don't you dare suppose I was in fault—No Sir, the pen was diabled—the paper worse,—there was a concatenation of ill-sorted chances—all—all—coincided to contribute to that fatal blot—which has so disarranged my ideas, that I must perforce finish before I had half disburthened my head and heart.

At this point, the first edition reproduces the author's original black blot.

Sancho is sometimes erroneously thought of as a rather stuffy, pompous writer. Much of his humour is actually rather lewd and earthy. In one letter he provides a gruesomely vivid description of a journey he had made with his friend, William Stevenson, on a sweaty, cramped and ill-tempered stage coach. The driver tried to palm Sancho off with ‘a bad shilling’, cursing him when he pointed this out. Sancho's breathing space was further restricted by the arrival of an obese couple:

after keeping us half an hour in sweet converse of the—of the blasting kind—how that fat woman waxed wrath with her plump master, for his being serene— … how he ventured his head out of the coach-door, and swore liberally—whilst his———, in direct line with poor Stevenson's nose, entertained him with sound and sweetest of exhalations.

There was further misery to come. Before the journey was over Stevenson had been sick and the fat couple's child had pissed on his legs.

Sancho was not averse to a dash of sauciness. ‘[W]hat books have you read?’; he asked John Meheux, ‘—what lasses gallanted?’; he mocked Stevenson for sending him a gloomy letter, ‘thou hast only one mouth to feed—one back to clothe—and one wicked member to indulge’. Such passages remind us that Sancho was reputed to have spent much of the 1750s living a life of excess and dissipation in the metropolis.

Yet the shadow of illness, poverty and bereavement is never too far away from Sancho's correspondence. Perhaps it was only through a certain ebullience and forced jocularity that he could hope to fend off gloomier thoughts. Much of this humour was self-reflexive: ‘The gout seized me yesterday morning … I looked rather black all day.’

Such remarks should not be taken as examples of self-loathing or of a pitiable eagerness to amuse his correspondents. In a letter to John Meheux, he observed that his pen

sucks up more liquor than it can carry, and so of course disgorges it at random.—I will that ye observe the above simile to be a good one—not the cleanliest in nature, I own—but as pat to the purpose as dram-drinking to a bawd—or oaths to a sergeant of the guards—or—or—dullness to a Black-a-moor—Good—excessive good!

It is a passage worthy of some attention. At one level, it demonstrates amply Sancho's love of literary play. The tone is sly, ironic, mock-heroic; it is as far removed from the strait-laced polemic of other black writers during this period—Ottobah Cugoano and Naimbanna for example—as can be imagined.

The second half of the sentence, however, dispels any fancy we might have that Sancho was apolitical or, as Norma Meyers has alleged, a Sambo figure. As with Sterne, the teasing and joking in this letter had a strong moral underpinning. Sancho rarely indulged in writing for writing's sake. After his allusions to the alcohol-guzzling prostitute and the foul-mouthed sergeant, Sancho was keen to show himself as stuttering, desperately g(r)asping for a third analogy to give balance to the sentence. The dashes, the repetition of ‘or’ show that time was running out. He would cleave to a simile, any simile, that would shore up this sentence in which he found himself drowning. Which cliché did he resort to? That of blacks being stupid. Sancho was well aware of how common such beliefs were and frequently challenged them in his letters. Here the clear implication is that such noxious utterances can only stem from writers seeking to lend their prose a sheen, a rhetorical (both in its literal and pejorative sense) sonority. It is a subtle and witty demolition of racist discourse, as befitted a man of Sancho's learning and eloquence.

Having led such a vagarious and unpredictable life, Sancho was understandably keen to dispense the benefits of his accumulated wisdom. The many years he had spent as a senior servant in the Montagu household gave him a degree of confidence and convincing gravitas when it came to imparting advice to his correspondents. His conversion ‘for my sins’ to Methodism in 1769 encouraged him to believe in the moral, reformatory role of literature. What is more, his letter-writing itself can be regarded as a means of charting and plotting the trajectory of his life in order to discern its providential structure more clearly. Given the enforced dislocation and peripateia for millions of Africans during the 18th century, the need for some vertebration—both literary and theological—became highly important. In letters to two black friends, Julius Soubise and Charles Lincoln, Sancho detailed the importance of ignoring the derision and ‘frothy gibes’ of others in order to write and read sensibly: ‘note down the occurrences of every day—to which add your own observation of men and things—The more you habituate yourself to minute investigation, the stronger you will make your mind—ever taking along with you in all your researches the word of God’.

It is clear that many of Sancho's correspondents enjoyed being hectored and chided by him. He told his friend Lydia Leach that ‘for writing conversable letters you are wholly unfit—no talent—no nature—no style—stiff—formal—and unintelligible’. The tone is mock furious—Sancho gums rather than bites his epistolatory ‘victim’. Nevertheless he was often anxious that his constant imparting of advice might appear presumptuous and over-intrusive. He constantly peppered his letters with apologies for becoming too pietistic: ‘thou smilest at my futile notions—Why preach to thee?’; ‘I have done preaching.—Old folks love to seem wise.’ One may debate the extent to which these statements express genuine contrition. Even so, in his wariness of preaching we may detect a certain timidity about overstepping the thresholds of politeness and decorum. In a letter to Jack Wingrave, Sancho defended the honour and morality of Indian natives before going on to denounce the ‘uniformly wicked’ conduct of the English in their colonies abroad. He stops abruptly: ‘But enough—it is a subject that sours my blood—and I am sure will not please the friendly bent of your social affections.’

In comparison to other black writers such as Equiano and Cugoano, some have felt that Sancho's style is too florid and overwrought. There is certainly some truth in this charge. Sancho, in common with many senior servants who had worked in aristocratic households during the 18th century, was keen to appear cultured and genteel. Both this and his belief in the importance of self-improvement account for the occasional stuffiness of tone in the letters. At the same time, one can exaggerate the extent of Sancho's orotundity. It is worth emphasising how often he used metaphors involving everyday foodstuffs and domestic items with which to lard his prose: ‘man is an absurd animal— … friendship without reason—hate without reflection—knowledge (like Ashley's punch in small quantities) without judgment’. In one of his many excursions into literary criticism, Sancho regretted the commonplace insipidity of much of Voltaire's Semiramis, but adds ‘from dress—scenery—action—and the rest of playhouse garniture—it may show well and go down—like insipid fish with good sauce’. It is particularly ironic that Sancho criticised Voltaire since his son, Billy, went on to become the first black publisher in the Western world, and issued, among other titles, that author's La Henriade.

Standing at the shop counter every day, gossiping, joking, often griping about his ailing profits with customers for hours on end, Sancho's vocation supplied him with a ready stock of gags. Some are excruciating. He recounted one exasperating conversation with a customer thus: ‘what?—what!—Dates! Dates!—Am not I a grocer?—pun the second.’ On another occasion, Sancho made satiric use of the tea that he sold in his shop. Enthusing about the poetry of the black American, Phillis Wheatley, he wished ‘that every member of each house of parliament had one of these books.—And if his Majesty perused one through before breakfast—though it might spoil his appetite—yet the consciousness of having it in his power to facilitate the great work—would give an additional sweetness to his tea.’

Clothing also supplied Sancho with many sartorial turns of phrase. He complained to one correspondent that ‘I could really write as long a letter on a taylor's measure, as your last hurry-begotten note.’ He considered patience as basic a virtue as ‘coat and lining’. Similarly, ‘Humility should be the poor man's shirt—and thankfulness his girdle’.

These metaphors are especially poignant when one considers that all his life Sancho was forced by poverty to scrimp and save for such necessities as food and clothing. Many of Sancho's letters were written to thank the friends who had sent his family gifts of venison, pork chops, boxes of fruit, and even currant jelly. Like other servants in the Montagu household, most of Sancho's clothes were cast-offs. Only very occasionally did his master buy him new suits. During his dissolute period in the 1750s he is reputed to have gambled away his own clothes in a game of cribbage with a Jewish gentleman. In 1768 he was forced to beg John Meheux for cast-offs for his family who are ‘very nearly in a state of nature in the article of covering … Mind, we ask no money—only rags—mere literal rags’.

Such passages embody the tension between art and commerce throughout Sancho's later years. He may have conversed with writers and painters, published musical compositions and dined with dramatists, but nothing would gloss over the fact that he was an impoverished and socially vulnerable negro living in a foreign land. It is interesting that one of Sancho's most emotional letters was his note of thanks to Meheux who, as requested, had sent his family various garments by return of post. Sancho trembled with happiness and gratitude. Claiming to be on the verge of tears, he quoted Othello, the fictional Moor whose life was wrecked by a planted handkerchief, and who, although ‘unused to the melting mood’, wept at the sight of Desdemona's corpse. It is the shared experience of being black, socially buffeted and on the verge of ruination because of (a lack of) cloth that connects these two characters across the centuries.

One of the most appealing aspects of Sancho's letters is his depiction of the comforts and tribulations of domestic life in the metropolis. We commonly read accounts of black people inhabiting the public sphere during the 18th century. On the one hand, they were used to adorn the arms and embody the wealth of aristocratic families. At another level, we regard the likes of Equiano and Naimbanna as very public performers. Their roles were political: they inveighed large audiences with accounts of the daily tortures wreaked on their black brethren toiling on the plantations. The tone of their books was often exhortatory, steeped in the codes of the public soapbox. Sancho himself, as we shall see later, was not afraid to make loud proclamations on social and political issues. Yet there is another equally important side to him. His letters often speak of his wife, his young children, leisurely family trips, a world beyond work and the selling of groceries and packets of tea.

Considering that women made up less than 20٪ of London's black population, Sancho's marriage to a West Indian, Anne Osborne, was most unusual. Even more uncommon was her literacy: we hear of her reading the newspaper or the letters that her husband was busy composing and which, on occasion, were signed on both their behalfs. Her brother, John, lived in Bond Street throughout the 1770s and the families clearly got on well with each other. In a bleak letter written after the death of his daughter, Kitty, Sancho told William Stevenson of how he hoped to come to terms with his grief: ‘To-morrow night I shall have a few friends to meet brother Osborne, we intend to be merry’.

But such bleakness was the exception rather than the rule. Sancho's wife brought him great succour and joy. He referred to her jocularly as ‘old Duchess’, ‘hen’, and, together with their children, as ‘My best half and Sanchonetta's’. Such affectionate pet names indicate a great sense of familial strength and unity. Life in London became unbearable without Anne. In a letter from Richmond, Sancho admitted to Meheux that ‘I am heartily tired of the country;—the truth is—Mrs. Sancho and the girls are in town:—I am not ashamed to own that I love my wife—I hope to see you married, and as foolish.’

One might think such statements unworthy of comment. After all, they are the kind of amatory, affectionate phrases that are often found in love letters. Yet from Gronniosaw to Jean Rhys, Equiano to Hanif Kureishi, in two centuries of writing about London by African and South Asian writers, there are almost no other accounts of quiet, domestic contentment. This makes the Sanchos' married life in Westminster during the height of the Atlantic slave trade (a traffic which cleft African families so wickedly), and when slavery was still legal in England, all the more unusual. The fact that Ignatius led quite a public life—chatting with customers at his counter or the shop door, discoursing on cultural issues with contemporary artists, writing letters to newspapers—makes the unguarded, homely episodes in his letters all the more endearing.

There is a dazed intoxication in his letter of Friday 20 October 1775 to a Miss Leach for that very afternoon Anne had given birth: ‘she has been very unwell for this month past—I feel myself a ton lighter:—In the morning I was crazy with apprehension—and now I talk nonsense tho' joy.’ Avoiding pomposity, Sancho takes delight in the progress of this, his only son, William: ‘he is the type of his father—fat—heavy—sleepy’. Later we learn of Billy's teething and his first few steps. But there is also a pensivity here. Sancho was in his late forties and appreciated how quickly he himself was declining in health. He seems to fear that he would not be around for much longer and this made him even more apprehensive than most parents are for their children: ‘The girls are rampant well—and Bill gains something every day.—The rogue is to excess fond of me—for which I pity him—and myself more.’ In the earlier letter recounting Billy's first steps, Sancho wondered if he should ‘live to see him at man's estate’ and prayed that ‘God's grace should … ably support him through the quicksands, rocks, and shoals of life’.

According to Jekyll, Sancho's mother fell prey to a ‘disease of the new climate’ shortly after Ignatius had been baptised in Cartagena in Spanish America. Shortly afterwards his father committed suicide to avoid a life of servitude. Given the appalling circumstance of his parents' deaths, Sancho's assertions of domestic duty become all the more poignant: ‘Say much for me to your good father and mother—in the article of respect thou canst not exaggerate—Excepting conjugal, there are no attentions so tenderly heart-soothing as the parental.’

Sancho certainly showered attention on his children. He took his daughters, Marianne and Betsy, to see John Henderson play Falstaff which they enjoyed greatly. On Marianne's sixteenth birthday her family feasted on goose and apple pie (the former donated by a friend). Ignatius both proudly and wistfully observed ‘Her breast filled with delight unmixed with cares—her heart danced in her eyes—and she looked the happy mortal.’ It is occasions such as these which justify Sancho's description of his home as a ‘castle of peace and innocence’. The phrase suggests that 20 Charles Street was something of a retreat, a fortress to ward off the confusion and hardship outside.

It is gladdening to read of Sancho's efforts to ignore the threat of racial contumely and treat his children to the sights and smells of London. One evening ‘three great girls—a boy—and a fat old fellow’ eschewed travelling over Westminster Bridge in order to go, less prosaically, by boat to New Spring Gardens, near Lambeth Palace. Temporarily liberated from the anxieties of commerce, far away from the stench, ordure, fogs and clatter that filled the capital's busy streets, they luxuriated in this August idyll: ‘[they were] as happy and pleas'd as a fine evening—fine places—good songs—much company—and good music could make them.—Heaven and Earth!—how happy, how delighted were the girls!’ It must have been rare for the family to enjoy such simple pleasures as these. No fee was charged for entering the Gardens, but Sancho lacked both the time and the money for transport that regular excursions such as this required. In any case, did his family always want to be objects of scrutiny for passers-by? The London mob often treated foreigners with contempt. On their way home from the Gardens, the Sanchos ‘were gazed at—followed, &c. &c.—but not much abused.’

The note of incipient gloom that emerged when Sancho gazed affectionately at his children dangling at his knees and playing besides his puffed-up ankles was also never far away when he talked of ‘Dame’ Anne: ‘If a sigh escapes me, it is answered by a tear in her eye.—I oft assume a gaiety to illume her dear sensibility with a smile—which twenty years ago almost bewitched me’. Their love never dwindled. It intensified in the face of Sancho's increasing enfeeblement. The last few letters he wrote are impossibly moving: ‘I am now (bating the swelling of my legs and ancles) much mended—air and exercise is all I want—but the fogs and damps are woefully against me.—Mrs. Sancho … reads, weeps, and wonders, as the various passions impel’. A week before his death we read, ‘Mrs. Sancho, who speaks by her tears, says what I will not pretend to decypher’. It is an exhilarating moment in the history of black British literature: here is a rare assertion of passion, mutual dependency, the hard-won intimacy between a formerly enslaved husband and his wife. It is also a chastening, grievous moment: Sancho is about to die; his children will lack a father and be further steeped in poverty. The domestic joy which these letters reveal was rare in 18th-century London. Nor did it abound during the next 200 years.

After Gronniosaw, Sancho was the second black cartographer of London, and stands at the head of a literary tradition that encompasses the likes of Equiano, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Many of his letters show his keenness for staying abreast of topical issues and contemporary metropolitan news. He wrote letters to the press; discoursed on painting and sculpture with artist friends; Gainsborough's friend, John Henderson, pressed Sancho to see him perform as Falstaff; Garrick dined with him; the composer and violinist, Felice Giardini, sent him tickets which Sancho passed onto a friend so that he might ‘judge of fiddlers' taste and fiddlers' consequence in our grand metropolis’.

In December 1779 Sancho unsuccessfully applied to have his grocery serve as a post office: ‘it would emancipate me from the fear of serving the parish offices—for which I am utterly unqualified through infirmities—as well as complexion’. It is those last four words which give this sentence such a sting in the tail. Sancho goes on to couch his proposal in a tone of comic amiability, and, in doing so, reveals a keen sense of how he might appear to his fellow Londoners. Yet there is no disguising the very real terror of having what little savings and social status he had accrued over the years suddenly snatched away from him by penury:

Figure to yourself, my dear Sir, a man of a convexity of belly exceeding Falstaff—and a black face into the bargain—waddling in the van of poor thieves and pennyless prostitutes—with all the supercilious mock dignity of little office—what a banquet for wicked jest and wanton wit.

Some critics have cited such comments as proof that Sancho was embarrassed by his colour. On another occasion, Sancho bade a correspondent ‘the prayers—not of a raving mad whig, nor fawning deceitful tory—but of a coal-black, jolly African’. In a fine letter condemning the mass dissipation and lawlessness of the 1780 Gordon Riots Sancho lambasted the ‘worse than Negro barbarity of the populace’ before concluding ‘I am not sorry I was born in Afric’. But the point of all these examples is to show that they are attacks on failings in English social and political life. Sancho invoked his colour deliberately to satirise aspects of English society all the more devastatingly considering that it was him who was supposed to be a member of the immoral, savage and stupid negro race. The idea that Sancho sought to appease his correspondents is untenable. He exasperatedly lampooned common stereotypes about the black intellect: ‘from Othello to Sancho the big—we are either foolish—or mulish—all—all without a single exception.’ In a letter to Stevenson, he claimed that someone for whom he had performed many acts of charity may be wary of accepting such kindness ‘from the hands of a poor negroe—(Pooh, I do not care for your prancings, I can see you at this distance)’. The parenthesis shows that Sancho had no time for any liberal reticence about admitting to and confronting the awkward exigencies of racial prejudice. The fact that he could call himself ‘Sancho the big’ or talk of the ‘warm ebullitions of African sensibility’ reveals again not only the playfulness that we saw earlier when exploring the literary texture of his writings but his relatively self-assured acceptance both of his colour and his anomalous position within English society.

During these latter years of economic insecurity, Sancho's mood was not helped by the fact that he felt himself to be surrounded by undeserved affluence and casual amorality. ‘Trade is duller than ever I knew it—and money scarcer;—foppery runs higher—and vanity stronger;—extravagance is the adored idol of this sweet town.’ He asked a friend in India to write to him of the ‘customs—prejudices—fashions—and follies’ of the people there—‘Alas! we have plenty of the two last here’. As we read through the Letters, there is a growing sense of the moral dissolution which was corroding the capital's soul. As a shopkeeper, Sancho had daily contact with many of the fops that he later criticised. He certainly felt that there had been a recent coarsening, a strident moral laxity amongst the people of London. In one of his bleakest and most vituperative letters, Sancho mourned that ‘Trade is at so low an ebb … we are a ruined people’.

Sancho was an ardent royalist who lamented that ‘it is too much the fashion to treat the Royal Family with disrespect.’ He was further bruised by the economic and territorial wars that raged throughout the empire during the second half of the 1770s. At such times of flux Sancho often took refuge in his blackness; invoking his African birthright gave him a kind of spiritual and intellectual space in which to divorce himself from his awful surroundings:

Ireland almost in as true a state of rebellion as America.—Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies—and at home Admirals that do not choose to fight.—The British empire mouldering away in the West—annihilated in the North—Gibraltar going—and England fast asleep … For my part, it's nothing to me—as I am only a lodger—and hardly that.

Sancho may claim he is only a lodger but the mass of political details that he supplies in this last letter reveals someone who keeps scrupulously up-to-date with contemporary affairs. It is not the blasé or wilfully ignorant response of the genuinely detached lodger. After all, on another occasion ‘Actuated by zeal to my prince, and love to my country’ he wrote to The General Advertiser with a plan for reducing the national debt. Elsewhere, he referred to ‘our righteous metropolis’. More likely, Sancho's exasperated outcry was borne of a desperation for quietude. Sancho's life had rarely been free from disruption and upheaval. Now, at the end of his days, all he wanted to do was to maintain his family and consolidate his grocery's finances. If he could also indulge in gossipation, or take some time to browse through the Gazette whilst reclining in his easy chair, occasionally gazing fondly at both his wife while she chopped sugar at a table and at his children playing near that fireplace over which stood a portrait of his friend, Mrs Cocksedge, then that would be as close to happiness in London as he could hope to achieve.

Sancho's reputation has flourished, dipped and risen again since the publication of the Letters in 1782. The first edition was a huge success: it attracted an almost unprecedented 1,181 subscribers including the Prime Minister, Lord North, and sold out within six months. The press reaction was largely favourable. The European Magazine claimed in 1782 that the book ‘presents to us the naked effusions of a negroe's heart, and shews it glowing with the finest philanthropy, and the purest affections. … They have more warmth than elegance of diction, and more feeling than correctness’.

By the second half of the 1780s Sancho's Letters was cited by the abolitionist movement as an outstanding refutation of the idea that black people lacked souls, intellects or rational faculties. Over the next couple of decades Sancho was profiled and his correspondence reprinted in various anthologies of negro biography and literature compiled by English, French and American abolitionists.

By the early 19th century Sancho had begun to seem a rather mythical character, whose girth, learning and social rank all exceeded the bounds of probability. The few references to him usually speak of an ‘extraordinary literary character’. Slowly over the course of the next few decades, Sancho became relegated to the status of a fascinating footnote, an antiquarian's delight. In the course of an 1888 article on antique tobacco labels, Tobacco reproduced one of Sancho's trading cards. Reader response must have been favourable for three months later the magazine profiled Sancho as part of its ‘Some Old Tobacconists’ series. Commending ‘this very lovable man’ and ‘the true nobility of his mind’, the author of the article compares Sancho to Johnson:

Physically, they were both corpulent and unwieldy in their persons; intellectually, they were giants, their minds ranging over a large area, and easily assimilating, and quick to appreciate the characters and facts which surround them. Socially, they were in their habits domestic, and in their aspirations noble. Johnson, however, had his biographer; it is regrettable that Ignatius Sancho did not meet with his Boswell.

(‘Gillespie’, 1888b, p. 157)

This article raised the hackles of some readers. A certain John Pickford wrote to Notes and Queries the following year to complain that Tobacco's reproduction of Bartolozzi's engraving of Sancho ‘represents a hideously ugly black man … it certainly seems remarkable that an eminent painter and engraver should have exercised their talents upon him.’

Despite the occasional references to him in history books and works of literary criticism in the first half of this century, Sancho was largely forgotten until the end of the 1960s. Then, in the wake of decolonisation, there began to emerge an increasing interest in the literary and cultural achievements of African people throughout history. New editions of Sancho's letters were published in London and Ethiopia. However, as both English and African academics carried out groundbreaking research into the black presence in England before the 20th century, a rather skewed picture of Sancho developed. Perhaps it was his jowly face, perhaps the comedy that peppered his work, but Sancho seemed too well-fed, too affluent and self-assured to serve as an early dissident prophet. Equiano's stridency was believed to be more likely to strike a chord with black youths who, throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, felt especially embattled and buffeted by unemployment, overzealous policing and a lack of social services. To this day it is Equiano who is most likely to appear in television series about black anti-imperialists, in hip hop magazines, or on the cover of sociology journals (although, as Reyahn King has shown, the portrait used on these occasions is of somebody else altogether). It seems that a subtle critical orthodoxy has developed about Sancho. Unlike Equiano, he is not seen as an activist, a militant, someone battling away on the frontline. Instead, he is felt to be obsequious, assimilationist, an interesting historical character but hardly a black forefather that one can be proud of.

In the light of such a widespread but, as I hope to have demonstrated, fundamentally erroneous perception, it is especially pleasing to read the interesting interpretations of Sancho's life and work by contemporary British writers. The novelist, Caryl Phillips, for instance, has sought to locate Sancho, together with the likes of T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Doris Lessing, in a grand tradition of ‘outsider’ authors who have come to England over the centuries and who, exploiting the fresh perspectives that their cultural backgrounds permit them, have embarked on major experiments with literary form.

Phillips is not the only writer intrigued and beguiled by Sancho. In ‘A City Visible But Unseen’, a section of The Satanic Verses (1988), Salman Rushdie, who has always been fascinated in the subversive potential of storytelling, exhumes a number of narratives, historiographies and buried accounts about the black presence in London. Sancho's intelligence, his unexpected stature in the Georgian metropolis, his friendship with Sterne (one of Rushdie's favourite writers), his poisonous barbs against foppery and prejudice—make him an integral part of black London's long history. Together with dummies of the black Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, a wax model of Sancho seems to swerve and undulate amongst the sweaty, hyper, multiracial ravers giving it up at Club Hot Wax. Rushdie believes that Sancho and those other ‘migrants of the past’ are ‘as much the living dancers' ancestors as their own flesh and blood’. In contrast, across the dance hall and ‘bathed in evil green light, wax villains cower and grimace: Mosley, Powell, Edward Long’. Some critics may deem Sancho, like Saladin Chamcha, the horn-spouting protagonist of The Satanic Verses, a self-hating assimilationist, but, for Rushdie, he is as deserving and vital a forebear as today's urban youth could hope for.

Sancho's literary, as opposed to historical, significance is threefold. Firstly, unlike some black writers of the 18th century, Sancho did not require a helping hand to compose his work. The literary criticism and philosophical passages with which he striated his letters demonstrate that he was no slavish parroter of the English language. This fact, over and above the very existence of his book, forced proponents of negro inferiority such as Thomas Jefferson, who later became President of America, to reframe their arguments that blacks lacked the ability to intellectualise or write creatively.

Sancho was also the first black writer to appreciate how important form and structure are in contributing to the meaning of a literary work. Centuries before the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris, Sancho saw that the way an author organises his text—in his case, strewing the page with dashes and uneven punctuation—has certain social and philosophical implications. Sancho realised that it was not enough to hold radical views about the creative abilities of black people—one also had to express them in a novel and radical form. In doing so he emphasised the break he was making with conventional ways of seeing and thinking about the moral and intellectual status of the African.

Finally, it is the tone of Sancho's letters that makes them unique in the early history of black British literature. They are teasing, jokey, playful. They are often gentle and domestic. But they are also sententious, exclamatory and didactic. All in all, there is a richness of tone and register here which is far removed from the rather drier polemics of other slave writers. It is little wonder that one of Sancho's correspondents wrote to him to say how much warmer she felt after reading his letters to her. For all his tetchy conservatism, his textual antics, and his accounts of illness, domestic bereavements and penny-pinching poverty, people reading Sancho for the first time today will find his letters an equally gladdening and heart-swelling experience.

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