[In the following essay, Carretta provides a biography of Sancho, situates his work against the social background of eighteenth-century Britain, comments on his attitudes toward race and the slave trade, and finds him to be a master of epistolary art.]

One of only two people of African descent (the other is the poet Phillis Wheatley) whose works elicited Thomas Jefferson's literary criticism, Charles Ignatius Sancho, better known simply as Ignatius Sancho, is also the only eighteenth-century Afro-Briton accorded an entry in [Britain's] Dictionary of National Biography. But almost everything that we know about Sancho, beyond what is found in his letters, we learn from Joseph Jekyll's brief biography that prefaces the first and subsequent editions of Sancho's Letters, published after Sancho's death. Jekyll later reported that Sancho was so famous that Samuel Johnson, the greatest British literary figure during the last half of the eighteenth century, had agreed to write his biography, but he never accomplished the task. Consequently, Jekyll wrote his life of Sancho “in Imitation of Dr. Johnson's Style.” Since Johnson and Sancho shared many friends, they probably knew each other, though no record of their acquaintance has been discovered.

Sancho was born around 1729 on the Middle Passage—that is, on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean enroute to the West Indies. His mother soon died of disease in the Spanish colony of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador), where the bishop had baptized her son, naming him Ignatius. Sancho's father shortly thereafter committed suicide rather than endure slavery. Barely two years old, the orphan slave was taken by his owner to England and given to three maiden sisters in Greenwich, who believed that keeping the child ignorant would render him submissive. They surnamed him Sancho because they thought he resembled the fictional Don Quixote's squire.

Fortunately for the young slave, John, second duke of Montagu, had a house in nearby Blackheath and met Sancho by accident. Montagu took an active interest in the intellectual abilities of Blacks. During the 1730s he played a major role in redeeming from slavery and repatriating to Africa Job Ben Solomon, a learned Muslim. Solomon's story became widely known through Thomas Bluett's Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who Was a Slave about Two Years in Maryland; and afterwards Being Brought to England, Was Set Free, and Sent to his Native Land in the Year 1734 (London, 1734). Montagu also conducted an educational “experiment” by bringing the free born Francis Williams from Jamaica to England to be given an education in the classics and then to study mathematics at Cambridge University. Although Williams was a published poet the quality of his work was disputed by the philosopher David Hume, as well as by Samuel Estwick and Edward Long, both apologists for slavery, in their attempts to undermine claims for African intelligence.

Montagu was so impressed by Sancho's intelligence that he frequently brought him home, encouraged him to read by giving him books, and unsuccessfully tried to get Sancho's mistresses to support his education. Shortly after the death of the duke in 1749, Sancho fled from his mistresses and sought protection from the duke's widow. When the duchess at first rejected his appeal, he considered suicide, but she soon relented and hired him as her butler, a very responsible position in a noble household: An aristocratic home usually had at least twenty servants, about equally divided between male and female; at the top of the servant hierarchy, if there was a male head of the house, was the master's valet, and just below the valet was the butler, who oversaw the pantry, dishes and silverware, and the wine cellar. After the duke's death, since there was no longer a man heading the Montagu house, Sancho as butler held the highest servant's position, probably also acting as house steward in charge of accounts and of the hiring and supervision of the other servants. Because of its combination of private and public duties, the position of butler required integrity, reliability, and an impressive appearance. A butler was also often expected to have some familiarity with the French language.

Sancho's experience in service to the Montagu family was one of the relatively rare instances in which the theory of the ideal master-servant relationship coincided with actual practice. Ideally, the relationship was one of mutual obligation and consideration, in which the servant was considered and treated as a member of the master's extended family—in effect, almost like one of his children. The ideal master was expected to supervise the education and spiritual development of the servants. In theory, the employer's solicitude for the material welfare of the servant extended beyond the period of service. Thus, at the duchess of Montagu's death in 1751, she left Sancho an annuity of thirty pounds—an ample income to support a single man—as well as a year's salary in her will. The bequeathed salary, combined with his own savings, gave Sancho a sum of seventy pounds beyond the annuity.

The unsupervised Sancho soon squandered his money on gambling, women, and the theater, where he spent his last shilling to see David Garrick play the role of Richard III. An attempt at a stage career playing Othello and Oroonoko failed because of a speech impediment.

The death of the duke without a male heir rendered the title of duke of Montagu extinct until it was recreated in 1766 and bestowed upon the late duke's son-in-law, who thus became the first duke of Montagu of the new creation. Sancho sought service in the household of this new duke of Montagu, who “soon placed him about his person,” a phrase that suggests that he was promoted to the position of valet, the duke's personal servant responsible for his appearance—his dress and hairdressing. A valet was usually expected to speak at least some French and be knowledgeable about current French customs and trends. Outside the house, the valet served as the master's almost constant companion, accompanying him in all public activities, and thus was the most visible display of his master's wealth, fashion, and social prominence. Black men were especially desired as servants in wealthy households—and particularly in the public roles of butler and valet—because they were associated with the exotic riches of the empire and thus served as the most obvious indicators of the status of their owners or employers. The desire for such display probably motivated Sancho's employer to have the portrait of Sancho, richly though pointedly not exotically dressed, painted by Thomas Gainsborough in the fashionable English resort of Bath in November 1768. The same desire is satirized in the anonymous 1746 print Taste in High Life, which includes an exotically dressed Black boy, said by some early commentators to be Sancho. In his portrait, Gainsborough's technique draws our attention to Sancho's eyes, and his pose and expression emphasize the position and tone Sancho often assumes in his letters: that of the amused observer who views his surroundings from an angle not available to the rest of us. He seems about to smile and tell us what (and how) he sees.

The new duke proved to be as good a master to Sancho as the old duchess had been. When illness and obesity rendered Sancho unfit to continue as Montagu's valet, the duke helped Sancho and his wife, Anne, whom he had married in 1758, establish a grocery shop in early 1774 at 19 Charles Street, next to their new residence at 20 Charles Street in Westminster, near Parliament. (The Sancho marriage was one of only two known all-Black marriages recorded during the century.) Sancho's duties as butler and valet and the contacts he had made up and down the social scale prepared him for his success as a grocer—particularly one who would eventually have a large family to support. In fact, Sancho's growing family probably accounts for the financial difficulties he continued to have.

The loss of physical mobility that cost him his position with the Montagu family may help explain why he wrote so many letters to friends who lived nearby in Westminster. Most of Sancho's extant letters date from the time he opened his shop, but a few were written while he was still in Montagu's service, including the earliest, his 21 July 1766 letter to Laurence Sterne, the famous author of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767).

In his letter, Sancho tells Sterne that “My chief pleasure has been books,” and his correspondence reveals a man who was an avid reader of eighteenth-century literature and who had enough education to be able to imitate Sterne's prose style, punctuation, Shandean multilingual jokes, and wordplay. Before and after he became a grocer, according to Jekyll, Sancho was in fact a published author, producing musical compositions, a now-lost work, Theory of Music, and two plays (also lost), as well as essays in newspapers. The positions of butler and valet would have given Sancho access to the knowledge found in the books in the Montagu library and to the practical knowledge gained from encounters with the world outside the house. As his friend William Stevenson observed of him after his death, Sancho “had seen more of human life, in all its varieties, from the Prince to the Beggar; and no one … ever made a better use than he did, of the knowledge resulting from his observations.” The great range of his social circle is reflected in the subscription list for the first edition of Letters, which includes men and women, aristocrats, servants, artists, businessmen, country squires, and prominent politicians. The ease and respect with which he communicates with his correspondents, no matter how much they differ from him in age or social status, account for much of the appeal of the tone of Sancho's letters.

His friends included the duchesses of Queensberry and Northumberland; artists John James Barralet, Henry William Bunbury, Matthew and Mary Darly, Daniel Gardner, John Hamilton Mortimer, Joseph Nollekens, and Stevenson; actors Garrick and John Henderson; banker John Spink; and booksellers John Ireland and John Wingrave. Mortimer, the painter, frequently consulted Sancho about his paintings. Others sought his literary advice. For example, the aspiring author George Cumberland read some of his works to Sancho because “he is said to be a great Judge of literary performances.”

But even though Sancho's own status rose, he never lost contact with those who had been his fellow servants: Charles Browne, Mrs. H———, James Kisbee, and Roger Rush. He treated as protégés the much younger John Meheux, an amateur writer and artist, and Julius Soubise, servant of the duchess of Queensberry and man-about-town. Sancho's relationship with Meheux makes him the only known Black patron of an aspiring White artist during the century, and he took an active interest in the welfare of fellow Afro-Britons Soubise and Charles Lincoln. He also took an active interest in national affairs, and his financial independence as a male householder in Westminster qualified him to become the only eighteenth-century Afro-Briton known to have voted in parliamentary elections—in 1774 and 1780, for the representatives of Westminster. Sancho's constant concern for his friends and his country enabled him to keep his own problems in perspective, using humor to avoid sounding self-indulgent even when talking of discrimination, illness, political disappointment, and death.

The first African to be given an obituary in the British press, Sancho died on 14 December 1780 as a result of “a series of complicated disorders” probably associated with the gout that caused him to retire from Montagu's service. The eighteenth-century association of gout with wealth and obesity was well founded because the condition is aggravated by the consumption of alcohol and red meat. A butler, valet, or grocer had many opportunities to overindulge in both. Because gout could not be effectively treated during the eighteenth century, it could lead to death from kidney failure or the consequences of high blood pressure.

Less than two years after his death, motivated by “the desire of shewing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European,” Frances Crewe, one of Sancho's younger correspondents, edited and published the letters she had collected from Sancho's friends. Sancho had first gained celebrity when one of his letters appeared in Sterne's posthumously published Letters (1775). The Gentleman's Magazine (January 1776), for example, had reprinted the letter to Sterne from “honest Sancho,” “his sooty correspondent,” who “though black as Othello has a heart as humanized as any of the fairest about St. James's,” and the magazine predicted that publication of the letter in Sterne's collection would increase business at his Westminster shop. An anonymous correspondent, perhaps Miss Crewe, submitted a copy of Sancho's unpublished 31 August 1779 letter to William Stevenson to The Gentleman's Magazine on 5 April 1781 to advertise “that a collection of his Letters is preparing for the publick.” The two volumes of the first edition of Sancho's Letters were sold by subscription. Because publication by subscription required at least partial payment in advance for the book, the number and variety of subscribers, ranging from former fellow servants to aristocrats, demonstrated that the interest in Sancho's forthcoming correspondence was substantial. Sales were so successful that Sancho's widow received more than £500 from the over 1200 subscribers and a fee paid by the booksellers for permission to publish a second edition.

The first review of Letters appeared in the periodical A New Review; with Literary Curiosities, and Literary Intelligence (August 1782): “Sancho was a black of the Duke of Montague's. Those who love whatever comes from a warm heart, however trifling or affected it may be, will receive pleasure from these two volumes, which are not ill written.” Crewe's hopes, which Jekyll shared, that Sancho's Letters would be received as representative of Black literary abilities were quickly realized in the reviews. Even The Gentleman's Magazine (September 1782), which was quite dismissive, allowed that: “with all [the letters'] philanthropy, for which we give the author due credit, few of them are little more than commonplace effusions, such as many other Negroes, we suppose, could, with the same advantages, have written.” The review in The European Magazine and London Review (September 1782) was more favorable:

The volumes here presented to the public, will be read with avidity and pleasure by those who desire to promote the common elevation of the human race. To those who wish to degrade the species, and to set limits to the kindness of the Deity, these letters will be no welcome repast; for they will shew them the error of that ill opinion. … These letters may bear to be examined with severe criticism. 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. At the same time it must not be expected that these letters are to be taken as models of this species of writing. They have more warmth than elegance of diction, and more feeling than correctness.

Ralph Griffiths, founder and editor of The Monthly Review, had to wait to review the second edition in December 1783 because “[t]he first edition, which came out about a year ago, was sold with such rapidity that we could not procure a copy of [it]”:

In our 53rd volume, p. 409 [the November 1775 review of Sterne's Letters], we first brought our readers acquainted with this very honest and very ingenious African. The occasion which then offered for introducing his name into the Review, was his correspondence with the celebrated Sterne; whose Letters were the subject of the article to which we refer. The genius, and good character of this amiable Black, procured him the acquaintance and esteem of several persons of eminence in the literary world; among others Mr. Garrick, of whose good nature and benevolence he makes honourable and grateful mention in these letters.

Although Griffiths praises Sancho's “merry vein” and “pleasantry,” he also observes that “[a]s to his epistolary style, it bears in general, some resemblance to that of his admired Sterne—with his breaks—and dashes—which, by the way, are, in this wild, indiscriminate use of them, an abomination to all accurate writers, and friends to sober punctuation.” After quoting lengthy passages from Sancho's letters I and L (Vol. I), Griffiths continues, “[l]et it no longer be said, by half-informed philosophers, and superficial investigators of human nature, that Nēgers, as they are vulgarly called, are inferior to any white nation in mental abilities. … We must not neglect to inform the connoisseurs, that a bust of the Author is given as a frontispiece to the first of these volumes, engraved by [Francesco] Bartolozzi, from a painting by Gainsborough.” Griffiths concludes that “Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters.” The Critical Review (January 1784) and Town and Country Magazine (February 1784) also reviewed the 1783 edition of Letters. All the reviews made much of Sancho's correspondence with Sterne, printing lengthy excerpts.

The immediate attraction of Sancho's Letters may have been largely due to the novelty of reading the correspondence of a Black former butler and the expression of and appeal to feeling found in the letters. This interest in the evidence of a Black man of feeling was very great at a time when advocates of slavery often contended that Blacks were incapable of the moral refinement allegedly displayed by Whites. For example, in the second edition of his Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield. … By a West Indian (London, 1772; 2nd ed. 1773), Samuel Estwick asserts that

Although a Negroe is found in Jamaica, or elsewhere, ever so sensible and acute; yet, if he is incapable of moral sentiments, or perceives them only as beasts do simple ideas, without the power of combination, in order to use; it is a mark that distinguishes him from the man who feels, and is capable of these moral sensations, who knows their application, and the purposes of them, as sufficiently, as he himself is distinguished from the highest species of brute.

In addition to the value placed on sentiment, the later eighteenth century was marked by a growing interest in literature of temporally, geographically, and socially exotic origins, such as James Macpherson's Ossianic forgeries of ancient Gaelic epics (published in 1762), or the poems of the Afro-Briton Phillis Wheatley (published in 1773), the Scot Robert Burns (published in 1786), and the milkwoman Ann Yearsley (published in 1785). The concurrently growing conviction that the feelings or sentiments of humankind were uniform and naturally good and thus transcended the divisions of time, space, and status helped to explain and justify the appeal of the exotic. Sancho's Letters, however, was not simply a short-lived success. Sancho's posthumous fame was great enough that Olaudah Equiano identifies one of the subscribers to his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) as “William, the Son of Ignatius Sancho,” even though William was then only thirteen years old. Ignatius Sancho was also the model for positively depicted characters in two novels published anonymously in London: Shirna Cambo in Memoirs and Opinions of Mr. Blenfield (1790), who offers wisdom as well as groceries at his shop; and the slave Sancho, grandson of a king of Angola, in Berkeley Hall: or, The Pupil of Experience (1796), who is a man of feeling for whom “[t]here was no danger or difficulty which he would not cheerfully encounter to serve [his masters]; no drudgery he would not undergo, no expedient devise, to gratify and entertain his young massa, as he called our hero.” And in the appendix to Weeden Butler the younger's novel Zimao, the African (1800), “the late celebrated Ignatius Sancho” is quoted, “on behalf of sable humanity.”

The literary quality of Sancho's Letters, usually in combination with that of Wheatley's poetry, was frequently cited by opponents of slavery as evidence of the humanity and inherent equality of Africans. Such citations began the development of the canon of authors of African descent writing in the English language. For example, in his Essays Historical and Moral (1785), George Gregory sees Wheatley's poems and Sancho's letters as “striking instances of genius contending against every disadvantage, resulting from want of encouragement, and of early cultivation.” Thomas Clarkson, a leading abolitionist, says of Sancho, in An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (1786), “[h]is letters are too well known, to make any extract, or indeed any farther mention of him, necessary.” Not only abolitionists acknowledged the merit of some Black writers, as John Gabriel Stedman demonstrates in his Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796):

That these people are neither divested of a good ear, nor poetical genius, has been frequently proved, when they had the advantage of a good education. Amongst others, Phillis Wheatley, who was a slave at Boston in New England, learned the Latin language, and wrote thirty-eight elegant pieces of poetry on different subjects, which were published in 1773. …

Ignatius Sancho, a negro, many years servant to the Duke of Montagu, whose sentimental letters, so generally known, would not disgrace the pen of an European, may also be mentioned on this occasion.

Even those who denied the achievement of Black writers implicitly acknowledged the developing Black canon by disputing the quality of the authors' literary productions. This sort of negative recognition is most notoriously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Query XIV:

Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum [inspiration] of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phillis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. … Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong religious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he offers 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. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column. This criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy investigation.

The reviewers and commentators judged Sancho's Letters by the traditional standards of what Jefferson calls “the epistolary class”—the genre of published collected correspondence whose roots can be traced back to the three famous Roman models: Cicero, Pliny, and Seneca. Since the nineteenth century, the genre of letter writing has been undervalued as an art form largely for two reasons: (1) letters came to be considered more authentic and sincere if unrevised and written with no thought of possible subsequent publication and if they exposed the private rather than the public self or addressed personal rather than public issues, and (2) writing was increasingly valued as literature to the extent to which it could be seen as organic, that is, conceived as a unified whole, rather than the thematically discontinuous and disorganized gathering of parts that a collected correspondence often appears to be, especially when, as in Sancho's case, only one side of the correspondence is represented.

But through the eighteenth century, letter writing was still recognized as no less a rhetorical art than writing poetry or giving a speech. Guidebooks, often containing model letters by ancient and modern masters, were published to enable readers to teach themselves the art: for example, the epistolary novelist Samuel Richardson produced Letters to and for Particular Friends (1741); Robert Dodsley, with Samuel Johnson's help, compiled The Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education (1748; 6th ed., 1775), which includes a section “on the subject of Writing Letters”; and The Art of Letter-Writing was published anonymously in 1762. Critics accepted the letter writer as a performer whose immediate audience is the correspondent and who chooses roles and adapts performances with that audience in mind, since the primary purpose of the letter is to make the physically separated correspondents verbally united—to make the absent present through language. Richardson remarks in a letter to Sophia Westcomb,

I make no scruple to aver, that a correspondence by letters, written on occasions of necessary absence, and which leaves a higher joy still in hope, which presence takes away, gives the most desirable opportunities of displaying the force of friendship, that can be wished for by a friendly heart. This correspondence is, indeed, the cement of friendship. … The pen … makes distance, presence; and brings back to sweet remembrance all the delights of presence; which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul. …

(1746?)

The Preceptor uses visual imagery to make a similar point about the social function of an epistle:

Set Discourses require a Dignity or Formality of Stile suitable to the Subject; whereas Letter-writing rejects all Pomp of Words, and is most agreeable when most familiar … an easy Complaisance, an open Sincerity, and unaffected Good-nature, should appear in every place. A Letter should wear an honest, chearful Countenance, like one who truly esteems, and is glad to see his Friend; and not look like a Fop admiring his own Dress, and seemingly pleased with nothing but himself.

Like other rhetorical arts, the epistolary genre had rules and conventions, but the nature of this genre, which was private in origin but ultimately public in dissemination, meant that wide latitude existed between its liberal theory and practice. Samuel Johnson's comments in Rambler 152 (31 August 1751) are representative:

“It was the wisdom,” says Seneca, “of antient times, to consider what is most useful as most illustrious.” If this rule be applied to works of genius, scarcely any species of composition deserves more to be cultivated than the epistolary stile, since none is of more various or frequent use, through the whole subordination of human life. …

Precept has generally been posterior to performance. The art of composing works of genius has never been taught but by the example of those who performed it by natural vigour of imagination, and rectitude of judgment. …

As letters are written on all subjects, in all states of mind, they cannot be properly reduced to settled rules, or described by any single characteristic; and we may safely disentangle our minds from critical embarrassments, by determining that a letter has no peculiarity but its form, and that nothing is to be refused admission which would be proper in any other method of treating the same subject. The qualities of the epistolary stile most frequently required are ease and simplicity, an even flow of unlaboured diction, and an artless arrangement of obvious sentiments. But these directions are no sooner applied to use, than their scantiness and imperfection become evident. …

That letters should be written with strict conformity to nature is true, because nothing but conformity to nature can make any composition beautiful or just. But it is natural to depart from familiarity of language upon occasions not familiar. … Wherever we are studious to please, we are afraid of trusting our first thoughts, and endeavour to recommend our opinion by studied ornaments, accuracy of method, and elegance of stile.

Like most commentators, Johnson believed that what he calls “epistolary integrity” in his “Pope” (1781) (from his Lives of the Poets) results from the considered overflow of feelings, a kind of studied naturalness. The writing of a letter, which Alexander Pope calls “talking on paper,” should be no less thoughtful than proper conversation, another art frequently discussed during the century. What Johnson said on 21 March 1783 to James Boswell about conversation applies as well to the epistolary art: “There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials;—in the second place, there must be a command of words;—in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in;—and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures. …”

That Sancho recognized and approved the conventions and rules of “the epistolary class” is evident in comments he makes in his own letters. Sancho, too, believed that skillfully written letters deserve serious study because they, like other forms of literature, reveal universal truths about humankind, rather than simply the idiosyncracies of the author. Thus he advises Jack Wingrave in 1778 to “[m]ake human nature thy study—wherever thou residest—whatever the religion—or the complexion—study their hearts.” Sancho judges his correspondents by the rules outlined by the critics and applied to his Letters by the reviewers. On 29 November 1778, he tells Soubise, “[y]our letters from the Cape, and one from Madeira's, I received; they were both good letters—and descriptions of things and places.” And on 7 August 1775, he jokingly chastises Lydia Leach for having flouted the rules of the genre: “I can never excuse intolerable scrawls—and I do tell you that for writing conversable letters you are wholly unfit—no talent—no nature—no style—stiff—formal—and unintelligible—take that—for your apology—and learn to be honest to yourself.”

Of course, attempts to make prose sound informal and more “conversable” could draw complaints from more formally inclined critics, like those who criticized Sancho's lack of “correctness,” especially his imitation of Sterne's frequent use of the dash, presumably to reflect the natural cadence of the spoken voice. Eighteenth-century grammarians did not recognize the dash as a legitimate mark of punctuation. Sancho admonishes Miss Leach that a good letter should provide, in Pope's words, “a window in the bosom,” which reveals the writer's true self. This desire for revelation of the authentic self led to the frequent and usually disingenuous disclaimer by editors of posthumously published correspondence that the letters had not been written with an eye toward future publication. Hence Sancho's editor assures her readers that his letters “were [not] originally written with a view to publication.” Similarly, in the Preface to Letters and Poems, By the Late Mr. John Henderson. With Anecdotes of His Life, By John Ireland (1786), Ireland, one of Sancho's correspondents, says of Henderson's letters, “[i]t is scarce necessary to premise that they were not intended for the press, and therefore exhibit, not the writer and his labours, but the man in his natural character.”

In an age when posthumous publication of the private correspondences of anyone with a possible claim to public attention was so common, only naive or malignly inclined readers believed that a correspondent would be unaware of the likelihood that his or her letters would eventually find their way into print. Everyone knew, for example, that Pope had manipulated the publication of his own letters during his lifetime. In his “Pope,” Johnson reminds us that even at the time of writing, a correspondent is creating a controlled image of himself:

It has been so long said as to be commonly believed, that the true characters of men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to his friend lays his heart open before him. But the truth is that such were the simple friendships of the Golden Age, and are now the friendships only of children. Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view; and certainly what we hide from ourselves we do not show to our friends. There is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse. In the eagerness of conversation the first emotions of the mind often burst out before they are considered; in the tumult of business, interest and passion have their genuine effect; but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate by design his own character.

In a 27 October 1777 letter to Hester Thrale, Johnson mockingly acknowledges the conventional fiction of the “window in the bosom”:

Some when they write to their friends are all affection, some are wise and sententious, some strain their powers for efforts of gayety, some write news, and some write secrets, but to make a letter without affection, without wisdom, without gayety, without news, and without a secret is, doub[t]less, the great epistolick art.

In a Man's Letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirrour of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.

Of this great truth sounded by the knowing to the ignorant, and so echoed by the ignorant to the knowing, what evidence have you now before you. Is not my soul laid open in these veracious pages? do not you see me reduced to my first principles? This is the pleasure of corresponding with a friend, where doubt and distrust have no place, and everything is said as it is thought.

Sancho invokes the same convention when he writes to John Spink on 21 November 1779, “I write first, and think afterwards. …” Sancho certainly knew that there would be public interest in his letters: his fame during his own lifetime was largely due to his published correspondence with Sterne, and his response in April 1779 to Edmund Rack's request to publish one of his letters indicates his awareness of the already proven interest, his willingness to have his letters reproduced, and his familiarity with “books in the epistolary way.” Sancho's Letters demonstrates that he was a student of the genre: he quotes more than once from Sterne's Letters (1775); he twice appropriates an anecdote from the late Earl of Chesterfield's letters (1774); he probably alludes to Pope's; and he mentions buying and reading the correspondence of Pope Clement XIV (1777) and an unidentified Freeman. Furthermore, the inclusion of letters Sancho sent to Soubise, who died in India, suggests that Sancho made copies of the letters he wrote, a common practice.

The liberal precepts underlying “the epistolary class” of literature reflect the wide boundaries of the art. At one extreme is the confession, with its autobiographical preoccupation with the writer's self, and at the other is the outer-directed essay, where that self is subordinated to the subject at hand, and the reader's needs and desires are of primary importance. Sancho's own practice tends more to the essay form than the confession, blurring the line between private and public audience because his published essays are included alongside, even wrapped within, his private letters collected in Miss Crewe's edition. What we know he intended for publication in the newspapers was often first “published” by being distributed in private letters. Many of his letters open with a quoted epigraph that introduces the theme or subject of the letter, following a standard form of the published essay found in, for example, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's Spectator or Johnson's Rambler.

Sancho's interest in the theater suited him for playing the roles demanded of a correspondent who at appropriate times assumes the voice of the sober, older sage advising the young Jack Wingrave or the irresponsible Julius Soubise; the flirtatious married voice addressing the unmarried Margaret Cocksedge; the voice of the loving and affectionate father relating the joys and sorrows of family life; the official voice of the representative of the Montagu family announcing the death of its heir, or of the humble supplicant acknowledging Daniel Braithwaite's rejection of his petition to allow him to open a post office; the playful voice swapping literary jokes and Shandean imitations with John Meheux; the serious reportorial voice telling John Spink of the Gordon Riots; or the stoical voice in the later letters facing approaching death.

Sancho's manipulation of his voice is perhaps most interesting to twentieth-century readers when he discusses politics or race. In both cases, he often exploits his position as a Black man in a White land to assume the position of the outsider commenting on sensitive subjects. In his 4 May 1778 letter to Jack Wingrave he asserts, “I say nothing of politics—I hate such subjects,” and on 7 September 1779 he says to John Rush, immediately after a very circumstantial account of recent military events and their likely political consequences, “[f]or my part, it's nothing to me—as I am only a lodger—and hardly that.” The context belies the comment, virtually rendering it ironic.

As the reviewer in The European Magazine and London Review rightly observes, Sancho's Letters as a whole displays “the ardour of genuine patriotism” in Sancho's support of Britain in the war with the rebellious colonies. Though he becomes increasingly pessimistic about the course of the war, he supports the ministry of Lord North. His wish that the mother country and her colonies reunite is even expressed on an advertisement for his shop, perhaps a tobacco wrapper. His conservatism and patriotism are most obvious in his reaction to the Gordon Riots.

Sancho also used his publications in the newspapers and his support for the publications of friends to comment publicly on political and religious matters. Sancho's rare expressions of political alienation are probably intended to convey a stance of disinterest rather than uninterest. The man who elsewhere glories in exercising his right as a male householder in Westminster to vote probably seeks to suggest that his is an objective rather than partisan perspective, reliably concerned for the good of the country and not just the interest of a narrow faction.

Similarly, when in a 1778 letter (Vol. II, “Letter I”) to Jack Wingrave he wants to criticize British imperialism and slavery in India, Africa, and the West Indies, Sancho positions himself as simply “a resident” judging the sins of “your country”:

I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love—and for its freedom—and for the many blessings I enjoy in it—shall ever have my warmest wishes—prayers—and blessings); I say it is with reluctance, that I must observe your country's conduct has been uniformly wicked in the East—West-Indies—and even on the coast of Guinea.—The grand object of English navigators—indeed of all christian navigators—is money—money—money—for which I do not pretend to blame them—Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part—to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love—society—and mutual dependence:—the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace—with the commodities of his respective land—Commerce attended with strict honesty—and with Religion for its companion—would be a blessing to every shore it touched at.

Sancho's stance of objectivity enables him to criticize as well the complicity of some Africans in the slave trade, though the objective voice is effectively replaced at the end of the passage by his emotional response to the subject:

In Africa, the poor wretched natives—blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil—are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing:—the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves—and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings—encouraged by their Christian customers—who carry them strong liquors—to enflame their national madness—and powder—and bad fire-arms—to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping.—But enough.—it is a subject that sours my blood. …

In this letter to the young Wingrave, Sancho embraces a dual identity as a Black in Britain. On occasion, Sancho chooses to embrace his African identity fully to enable himself rhetorically to judge the corruption of England from a more innocent point of view. For example, in a letter to John Spink dated 6 June 1780 describing the destruction of property and loss of lives during the Gordon Riots, Sancho says, “I am not sorry I was born in Afric.”

Several of Sancho's strongest responses to slavery and his own experiences of prejudice are expressed indirectly, through the voices of his friends Stevenson and Meheux, outside the Letters. Although Stevenson tells us that he had “often witnessed [Sancho's] patient forebearance, when the passing vulgar have given vent to their prejudices against his ebon complexion, his African features, and his corpulent person” (Volume I, letter XVII, note 1), he recounts an incident in which Sancho demonstrated “his manly resentment” in the face of such prejudice. Insulted by a young White “fashionable” man in the street with the shout, “Smoke Othello!” Sancho, “immediately placing himself across the path, before him, exclaimed with a thundering voice, and a countenance which awed the delinquent, ‘Aye, Sir, such Othellos you meet with but once in a century,’ clapping his hand upon his goodly round paunch. ‘Such Iagos as you, we meet with in every dirty passage. Proceed, Sir!’” Identification of Meheux's newspaper articles referred to in letters II and L in Volume I enables us to see that Sancho was certainly aware of the nastiest variety of racial discrimination being discussed in print and to recognize the role that his correspondence with Sterne played in that discussion. Meheux invoked the example of Sancho's obvious humanity in his argument against a published call for the castration of Blacks who had fathered children with White women.

Sancho's comments in his letters on slavery and race may strike some twentieth-century readers as too infrequent and mild, and his self-deprecating humour about his color and appearance may make them uncomfortable. In his 11 October 1772 letter to Soubise, Sancho writes, “Happy, happy lad! what a fortune is thine!—Look round upon the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour—superadded to ignorance,—see slavery, and the contempt of those very 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.” Sancho expresses a double consciousness of Soubise's personal luck and the general misfortune of Blacks, a term used during the eighteenth century to refer to all dark-skinned people, including Asians. As Sancho and Soubise knew, after the June 1772 decision by Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, in the case of James Somerset, Black Britons were arguably the freest people of their color in the world: Mansfield ruled that slaves like Somerset who had been brought to England by their owners could not be forced to return to the colonies. Mansfield's judgment was received as an emancipation proclamation, widely accepted to mean that a slave was free as soon as he or she set foot on English soil. Yet millions of Blacks in the British empire remained enslaved outside of England, and even in England, although free, approximately 15,000 Blacks still faced prejudice. Sancho saw himself, and Soubise, as both British and Black, free and yet still subject to discrimination.

Perhaps Sancho's references to discrimination are sardonic, serving to expose the stereotyping he experienced by simply acknowledging it. Miss Crewe may have censored some passages or letters that she thought would offend the public's sensibilities. The possibility of editorial censorship also applies to Sancho's rare and brief attacks on slavery in letters to Sterne, Soubise, and Jack Wingrave. But even if we do not have all that Sancho said on the subject, what remains are the first published challenges to slavery and the slave trade by a person of African descent. They are as direct as almost any made during the century by Black or White writers and are especially noteworthy because they were made before sustained opposition to the African slave trade began in the late 1780s. One of his comments on the injustice and “wanton power” of slave owners comes in his letter to Jabez Fisher, in which Sancho is the first known Afro-British critic of Wheatley's poetry and the first to recognize the existence of an Afro-British literary tradition. Wheatley, like Sancho, Equiano, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, gained an education and the patronage of Whites through her position as a domestic servant. The vast majority of eighteenth-century Blacks, however, lacked the access to learning shared by Wheatley, Equiano, Cugoano, and Sancho, as well as the social mobility and economic security Sancho enjoyed.

The eighteenth century has been rightly called the golden age of letter writing because the masters of the art combine concern with the self—“epistolary integrity”—with something exterior to write about, or what Johnson calls “material” and Sancho “things and places.” Sancho's choice of language in the phrase “conversable letters” is highly significant, because a conversation requires dialogue rather than the monologue of merely self-expressive talk. Like the earlier great examples of “the epistolary class” published during the century—Madame de Sévigné's letters, published in 1726, Pope's, Mary Wortley Montagu's, published in 1763, and Chesterfield's, among others—Sancho's correspondence reveals his character through his reactions to his “material” and his concern for his audience, both immediate and future. Through his art, he appeals to the hearts and heads of those audiences. At the close of the twentieth century, as the appreciation for nonorganic, discontinuous literary forms grows and the pioneering works of literature by people of African descent are recovered, the value of the genre of letter writing is increasingly recognized, and Ignatius Sancho should regain his status in “the great epistolick art.”