Читать книгу London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City - Sukhdev Sandhu - Страница 6

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.

Poet’s Corner A.A.

(Letter to Notes and Queries, 1858)¹

it is wrong for 20th-century multi-culturalists to invent a spurious history for black settlement in Britain before the Fifties and Sixties.

(Geoffrey Littlejohns, letter to The Independent, 1995)²

A.A. WAS WRONG. In the years following his letter of baffled disgust, many of the antiquarians, genealogists and men of letters who made up the readership of Notes and Queries 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 the journal, are evidence of the speed and ease with which London’s malodorous past had been forgotten in some of the most learned quarters of English society. Although slavery had only been fully abolished as recently as 1838, it required archivists and antiquarians to fill in the large chinks that were already emerging in the public memory.

The most cursory glance at the paintings, the prints and the literature will prove how myopic it is to insist on a culturally homogeneous conception of the eighteenth century. Empire not only underpinned the swelling British economy during this period, but was crucial to the capital’s well-being. The Thames allowed London to become one of the world’s leading trading centres. Tea, sugar, cotton, cloth, spices, coffee, rum, fruit, wine, tobacco, rice, corn, oil were just some of the products ferried into London from India, Africa and the Americas. Nearly all of these goods depended on slave labour. Not for nothing did a coin – the guinea – derive its etymology from the West African region of that name, the area from which hundreds of thousands of natives were seized in order to work on plantations across the Atlantic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African became literally a unit of currency.

By 1750 London was the second most important slaving port in the country. Alderman Newnham, one of the capital’s MPs, and a partner in a banking firm who had formerly worked as a sugar merchant, as well as the head of a grocery business, claimed Abolition ‘would render the city of London one scene of bankruptcy and ruin’.³ Between 1660 and 1690 fifteen Lord Mayors, twenty-five sheriffs and thirty-eight aldermen of the City of London were shareholders in the Royal African Company, the trading operation that held a monopoly on shipping Africans to the colonies. Many MPs were either West India planters or their descendants. Sir Richard Neave, a director of the Bank of England for forty-eight years, was also Chairman of the Society of West India Merchants.⁴

One consequence of this transatlantic trade was the rising number of black Africans who began to enter the capital. They were brought over as servants by planters, returning Government officials, and military and naval officers.⁵ They were used as reassuring companions to comfort their masters on their long voyages back to an island from which some had been absent for decades. Other blacks had been offered as perks for the commanders of slaving vessels:

The post of captain of such a craft was a lucrative one, and those who gained it were prone to make display of their good fortune by the use of gaudily-laced coats and cocked hats, and large silver or sometimes gold buttons on their coats. A special mark of distinction was the black slave attending them in the streets.⁶

These naval captains were allowed to sell their slaves in the capital. Auctions were by no means secret affairs: slaves ‘were sold on the Exchange and other places of public resort by parties themselves resident in London’.⁷ That this was possible, despite the longstanding belief that the air of England was too pure for slaves to breathe, and the assertion in 1728 by Lord Chief Justice Holt that, ‘As soon as a negro comes to England he becomes free’, was confirmed by two legal rulings. The first, in 1729, was issued by the attorney-general Sir Philip Yorke and the solicitor-general Charles Talbot; their counter-opinion was that the mere fact of a slave coming from the West Indies to Great Britain or Ireland did not render him free, and that he could be compelled to return again to the plantations. The second, in 1749, was a judgement by Lord Hardwicke, that runaway slaves could legally be recovered.⁸

Many Africans found themselves working as butlers and attendants in aristocratic households. Their duties were rarely onerous and their chief function seems to have been decorative and ornamental. They served as human equivalents of the porcelain, textiles, wallpapers, and lacquered pieces that the English nobility was increasingly buying from the East.⁹ These slaves were often dressed in fancy garb, their heads wrapped in bright turbans. Owners selected them on the basis of their looks and the lustre of their young skin much as dog fanciers today might coo and trill over a cute poodle.

Oil paintings of aristocratic families from this period make the point clearly: artists such as John Wootton, Peter Lely and Bartholomew Dandridge positioned negroes on the edges or the rear of their canvases from where they gaze wonderingly at their masters and mistresses. In order to reveal a ‘hierarchy of power relationships’, they were often placed next to dogs and other domestic animals with whom they shared, according to the art critic David Dabydeen, ‘more or less the same status’.¹⁰ Their humanity effaced, they exist in these pictures as solitary mutes, aesthetic foils to their owners’ economic fortunes.

Yet, on the whole, black people were well-treated by the nobility. Relationships flourished, not only in the kitchens and the pantries where blacks and working-class maids flirted and fondled, but between black servants and the aristocracy itself. Owners often took it upon themselves to educate their possessions and gave them lessons in prosody, drawing, musical composition. Dr Johnson famously left his Jamaica-born employee Francis Barber a seventy-pound annuity and, much to the disgust of his biographer Sir John Hawkins, made him his residuary legatee.¹¹ Johnson was happy to pray together with Barber and refused to let him go and buy food for his cat as he felt that ‘it was not good to employ human beings in the service of animals’. His politics both shaped and were shaped by this friendship: ‘How is it’, he once roared about America, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’¹² Over two hundred years on, Barber’s descendants still live in the Lichfield area where he moved after Johnson’s death. They are all white now, and the name will die out with this generation: the last male descendant’s children are all daughters.

Less well-known than Barber is Julius Soubise who was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts in 1754. Brought to England as a ten-year-old, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of Kitty, Duchess of Queensberry. She tried to bribe one Dominico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo, an Italian fencing master based in Windsor, to teach him to fence and ride. Reluctantly he agreed but refused to take her money. Soubise was an adept student and soon became an accomplished equestrian and fencer. He also learned to play the violin, compose musical pieces and, with the help of the elder Sheridan, improve his elocution.

Soubise’s self-regard burgeoned dramatically and he began to claim to all and sundry that he was an African Prince. Never shy of an audience, he sang comic songs and delighted in amateur dramatics. According to Henry Angelo, ‘his favourite exhibition was Romeo in the garden scene. When he came to that part, “O that I was a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek,” the black face, the contrast of his teeth, turning up the white of his eyes as he mouthed, a general laugh always ensued, which indeed was not discouraging to his vanity, and did not prevent him pursuing his rhetorical opinions of himself.’¹³ He goes on:

I remember seeing him, when presenting a chair to a lady, if from some distance, make three pauses, pushing it along some feet each time, skipping with an entre-chat en avant, then a pirouette when placed. One of his songs, truly ridiculous, his black face and powdered woolly head not suitable to the words, was a Vauxhall song then, ‘As now my bloom comes on a-pace, the girls begin to tease me’; when he came to tease, making a curtsey to the ground, and affecting to blush, placing his hands before his face, an encore was sure to follow.¹⁴

Soubise excelled as a fop and doused himself with such powerful perfumes that members of the audience attending the same theatrical performance as him had been known to exclaim, ‘I scent Soubise!’¹⁵ He was also a serial philanderer and was often spotted at the opera surrounded by aristocratic women. Even during the time he worked as an usher to Dominico Angelo at Eton he often drove up to Windsor ‘with his chère amie, in a post-chaise and four. There, Madame, waiting his return from the college, he would meet her, dine in style at the Castle-inn, take his champagne and claret, entertain half a dozen hangers on, and return to town by the same conveyance.’¹⁶

A member of fashionable London clubs, and accustomed to riding fine horses in Hyde Park, the increasingly cocky Soubise also fancied himself not only as a poet – composing chiefly romantic sonnets – but as an accomplished letter-writer. His notoriety flourished, no doubt to his satisfaction, and it was rumoured that the Duchess of Queensberry was besotted – and possibly sexually involved – with him. In 1773 William Austin produced an engraving that showed her and a dandified Soubise fencing.

His fall from grace, though it had been long forecast, was sudden. The Duchess, upon learning that one of her maids had been raped by Soubise, tried to dissuade her from going to court. The young woman was adamant, and in July 1777 the Duchess paid for Soubise to flee the country. Two days later she died. Soubise sailed to Calcutta where he established a riding and fencing academy and trained Arab horses. He died in August 1798 after falling from a horse and damaging his skull.

The following letter originally appeared in the anonymous Nocturnal Revels (1779). Lascivious and strategically self-abasing, it is unfortunately the only piece of Soubise’s writing known to have survived:

Dear Miss,

I have often beheld you in public with rapture; indeed it is impossible to view you without such emotions as must animate every man of sentiment. In a word, Madam, you have seized my heart, and I dare tell you I am your Negro Slave. You startle at this expression, Madam; but I love to be sincere. I am of that swarthy race of Adam, whom some despise on account of their complexion; but I begin to find from experience, that even this trial of our patience may last for a time, as Providence has given such knowledge to man, as to remedy all the evils of this life. There is not a disorder under the sun which may not, by the skill and industry of the learned, be removed: so do I find, that similar applications in the researches of medicine, have brought to bear such discoveries, as to remove the tawny hue of any complexion, if applied with skill and perseverance. In this pursuit, my dear Miss, I am resolutely engaged, and hope, in a few weeks, I may be able to throw myself at your feet, in as agreeable a form as you can desire; in the mean time, believe me with the greatest sincerity,

Your’s most devotedly,

My Lovely Angel,

Soubise.¹⁷

Soubise’s letter did not elicit quite the response he hoped for. The recipient, a wealthy young lady known to us as ‘Miss G—’, broke into hysterical laughter before writing back sarcastically:

I acknowledge a Black man was always the favourite of my affections; and that I never yet saw either OROONOKO or othello without rapture. But lest you could imagine I have not in every respect your warmest wishes at heart, I have inclosed a little packet [a parcel of carmine and pearl powders] (some of which I use myself when I go to a Masquerade), which will have the desired effect, in case your nostrums should fail. Apply it, I beseech you, instantly, that I may have the pleasure of seeing you as soon as possible.¹⁸

It’s not hard to see how, educated and smothered with the kind of love that Soubise was, blacks might identify with their masters and begin to assume their airs and graces. Some even adopted their methods of conflict resolution. In 1780 Lloyd’s Evening Post lamented that

The absurd custom of duelling is become so prevalent that two Negroe Servants in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly, in consequence of a trifling dispute, went into the Long-Fields, behind Montagu-house, on Thursday morning, attended by two party-coloured Gentlemen, as their seconds, when on the discharge of the first case of pistols, one of the combatants received a shot in the cheek, which beat on some of his teeth, and the affair was settled.¹⁹

Good treatment was no substitute for liberty. To be treated as a clever pet was not much of an existence. Many wore metal collars, inscribed with the owner’s name and coat of arms, riveted round their necks. The numerous ‘lost-and-found’ advertisements in London newspapers during this period attest to the high incidence of slaves running away:

a Negro boy by name Guy, about 14 years old, very black, with a cinnamon colour’d serge coat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a silver lace’d black hat, speaks English very well, hath absented himself from his master (Major Robert Walker) ever since the 4th instant. Whoever shall bring the above said Negro boy into Mr Lloyd’s Coffee-house in Lombard-street London, shall receive a guinea reward, with reasonable charges.²⁰

Highly visible on account of their colour and their loud dress, it wasn’t easy for runaway blacks to escape detection and capture:

Mary Harris, a black-woman of the parish of St Giles in the Fields, was indicted for feloniously stealing a pair of Holland sheets, three smocks, and other goods of Nicholas Laws, gent, on the 30th November last. It appeared that she was a servant in the house, and took the goods, which were afterwards pawned by the prisoner; she had little to say for herself and it being her first offence, the jury considering the matter, found her guilty to the value of 10d. To be whipt.²¹

Runaways tended to flee in the direction of St Dunstan’s, Ratcliff and St George’s-in-the-East, areas blighted by poverty which had comparatively large black populations.²² Here, amongst overcrowded and unhygienic houses located in stenchy, ill-paved alleys full of brothels, rundown lodging houses and dens for thieves, sailors and the dregs of society, they eked out illicit, subterranean livings. They had to. Few of them had marketable skills. Nor did they have contacts in the provinces or in the countryside to whom they could turn. They scraped together piecemeal lives – begging, stealing, doing odd jobs, going to sea – alongside the white underclasses of the East End who extended the hand of friendship to them. So much so, in fact, that Sir John Fielding, a magistrate, and brother of the novelist Henry, complained that when black domestic servants ran away and, as they often did, found ‘the Mob on their Side, it makes it not only difficult but dangerous to the Proprietor of these Slaves to recover the Possession of them, when once they are sported away’.²³

Africans and English sang and danced together at mixed-race hops. Inevitably they also slept with each other – much to the disgust of the literate middle classes: the narrator of Defoe’s Serious Reflections (1720) spots a black mulatto-looking man in a London public house speaking eloquently and intelligently. During their conversation, the mulatto, whose colour had precluded him from entering the kind of respectable profession his education merited, curses, to the obvious approval of the narrator, his father who ‘has twice ruin’d me; first with getting me with a frightful Face, and rhen [sic] going to paint a Gentleman upon me’.²⁴ Over half a century later in 1788, Philip Thicknesse bemoaned that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men [ … ] in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkies and infinitely more dangerous’.²⁵

Demographics, as much as the easy-going tolerance of the proletariat, shaped the high levels of intermarriage. Throughout the eighteenth century barely twenty per cent of the black population was female. Most men – including the likes of Francis Barber and the writer Olaudah Equiano – married white women. This challenges the common assumption that the high percentage of black-white relationships in Britain today is a recent phenomenon, one that is a by-product of multiculturalism or increased social liberalism.

It also shows how misleading is talk of ‘the black community’ in eighteenth-century London. Certainly slaves did meet up whenever possible to gossip, reminisce and exchange vital information. When two of them were imprisoned in Bridewell for begging they were visited by more than 300 fellow blacks. And in 1764 a newspaper reported that

no less than 57 of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No whites were allowed to be present for all the performers were Black.²⁶

But such occasions seem to have been exceptional. The black population, even in big cities such as Liverpool and London, was simply too small for its members to try to isolate themselves from the white English majority. Of course, it was itself racially diverse: black Londoners hailed from different tribes and regions of Africa. Some had been born or spent long stretches in the Caribbean or in North America; others had spent most of their lives in the United Kingdom. They spoke different Englishes: some, brought up by their aristocrat owners, used language that was refined and decorous; others, educated at sea, preferred jack tar lingo, a stew of Cockney, Creole, Irish, Spanish and low-grade American. Class mattered at least as much as colour in how they dealt with day-to-day vicissitudes.

Recent studies indicate that there were probably never more than about 10,000 blacks in eighteenth-century England at any one time.²⁷ This out of a population that had swollen rapidly to over nine million by 1800. Even in London, where swarthy men and women were most commonly found, they made up less than one per cent of the citizenry. Numbers did rise, however, in the early 1780s when, following the War of Independence, hundreds of black Americans who had been promised their liberty in return for supporting the Loyalist cause fled to London. Lacking money and education, many starved or froze to death on the city’s streets. Their plight attracted widespread public sympathy. Money for food and relief was contributed by all sections of society. The philanthropists and Abolitionist Evangelicals who sat on the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor decided that the best long-term solution for their charges was to offer them assisted passages out of England.

Influenced by the naturalist Henry Smeathman’s arguments that Sierra Leone offered warmth, a fertile climate and a fine harbour, the Committee arranged for the blacks to be shipped there. Many members were keen for the black settlers to have an opportunity to run their own community. This, they believed, would be an effective rejoinder to the anti-Abolitionists who claimed Africans were incapable of self-government. After months of delay and prevarication, in April 1787 a small fleet of ships carrying 459 passengers finally set sail as part of the first ‘Back To Africa’ repatriation scheme in history. Unfortunately they had the misfortune to arrive at the start of the rainy season; about a third died, and the rest quarrelled with their African neighbours who, refusing to see them as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, burned down their settlement.

In the eighteenth century, as has been the case since the Second World War, the notion (however insecurely founded in reality) that too many black people were entering the country animated a number of critics. In 1723 the Daily Journal wrote, ‘’Tis said there is a great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that ‘tis thought in a short time, if they be not suppress’d the city will swarm with them’.²⁸ And in 1731, long before the build-up of a sizeable African presence in the metropolis, the Lord Mayor of London issued a proclamation decreeing that blacks could no longer hold company apprenticeships.

Foreign travellers were startled (and Americans appalled) by how cosmopolitan the streets of London appeared. As early as 1710 one German visitor noted that, ‘there are, in fact, such a quantity of Moors of both sexes in England that I have not seen before’.²⁹ In a city whose increasing prosperity meant its streets were awash with noble women wrapped in costly shawls and dazzling pearls and shops which displayed exquisite jewellery and exotic fruit, black people embodied a new kind of globalism. Sitting down to compose the ‘Residence in London’ section of The Prelude (1805), William Wordsworth recalled his thrill upon emerging from three years of blanched provincialism 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.³⁰

Black faces could be seen, if only in isolation, in most quarters of London society. Many turned to music: black bandsmen – particularly trumpeters, drummers and horn players – served with army regiments; others mustered meagre livings by fiddling on street corners and around taverns. Non-melodians begged, swept crossings, or turned to prostitution. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, even recorded the existence of a black brothel in London in 1774.

Black Londoners had a visibility far in excess of their small numbers. Images of them cropped up everywhere. They often featured in the prints of Hogarth, Cruikshank, Gillray and Rowlandson, as well as on countless tradesmen’s cards – particularly those of tobacconists. They were used to advertise products such as razors: ‘Ah Massa, if I am continued in your service, dat will be ample reward for Scipio bring good news to you of Packwood’s new invention that will move tings with a touch.’³¹ Huge pictures of negro heads or black boys were ostentatiously displayed on the signs outside taverns, shops and coffeehouses. Attractively painted and gilded, these extruded on to the streets, cutting out daylight on account of their size and, occasionally, falling and killing those people unfortunate enough to be passing below.

Swarthy Londoners also fleet-foot their way through much of the century’s metropolitan literature. In Thomas Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1702), a quizzical Indian accompanies the narrator on his ambles through the city’s byways and sly-ways. 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’.³² African characters were familiar to theatre-goers, with Southerne’s adaptation of Oroonoko (1696) being performed at least once a season until 1808. Stock characters with names like Mungo, Marianne or Sambo were especially popular; they functioned as comic and mangled-English-speaking versions of the black servants found in aristocratic households.

After the Abolitionist movement began to flourish in the 1770s and 1780s, it became difficult to avoid the constant gush of anti-slavery poems, songs and broadsheets flooding from the printing presses. Black men and women were cast as heroic leviathans, their teeth of finest ivory, their brows set most nobly, their souls full of pride and vigour. Yet, despite such epic stature, they rarely spoke. Their enslavement and death were drawn out with the maximum of Latinate polysyllables and pathos. It’s no surprise that almost all of these poems – florid, well-intentioned, and crammed with formulaic pieties – have been long forgotten. They deserve the scorn cast upon them by the literary historian Wylie Sypher: ‘The slave and his wretched lot were a poetical pons asinorum: the worse the poet, the more he felt obliged to elevate his subject by the cumbrous splendor of epithet, periphrasis, and apostrophe, even at the cost of dealing with the facts only by footnotes and appendices.’³³

Africans were represented rhetorically as well as visually. Despite being cherished by their aristocratic owners and blending relatively seamlessly into underclass society, a cluster of negative clichés about black people developed and calcified over the course of the century: they were portrayed as stupid, indolent and libidinous. Violent and untrustworthy, they were said to lack ratiocination. They were wild and emotional. Often compared to orang-utans,^* their simian propensities encouraged audiences to believe that enslaving them in no way contradicted the laws of humanity. Such tropes peppered cartoons, stage plays, private journals, plantocratic tracts, coffeehouse pontification, parliamentary invective, and the thick-skulled, blue-blooded pomposities bandied about over the clink and gleam of crystal decanters in noble dining rooms. These views were also confirmed by textbooks – the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1810 described the negro thus:

Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race; idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an aweful example of the corruption of man left to himself.³⁴

It’s clear, then, that black people were almost inescapable in eighteenth-century London. Yet though they’re often spoken about in this period, they’re rarely heard to speak for themselves. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, or James Albert as he was christened, is an exception to this rule. His memoirs, ghost-written by Hannah More ‘for her own private Satisfaction’, were published in Bath in 1772.³⁵

Gronniosaw, whose grandfather was the King of Baurnou in the north-eastern corner of what is now Nigeria, was sold on the Gold Coast to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. After a long sea journey to Barbados, he eventually found himself in New York serving a young man called Vanhorn. He was soon sold again, this time to Theodore Frelinghuysen, an evangelical Dutch Reformed pastor who tried to educate him.³⁶ Mental collapse ensued: having been introduced to Bunyan’s writings, Gronniosaw became so convinced of his own wickedness that he tried to kill himself with a large case-knife. His master died, forcing him to become a cook on board a privateer’s ship in order to pay off his outstanding debts which an unscrupulous friend of Frelinghuysen had promised to clear. He came through countless adventures at sea before arriving in England where he was immediately robbed of his savings by a corrupt landlady. Eager to visit the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, whose sermons he’d been enthralled by in New York, he headed for London where the minister greeted him warmly before directing him to a lodging house in Petticoat Lane. While eating breakfast the next morning, Gronniosaw heard a clatter coming from above his head. Curious, he climbed upstairs to discover a loft full of women crouched over their looms weaving silk. One of them (never named) besotted him instantly. Despite learning that her errant husband had died, leaving her in debt and with a child to raise on her own, he decided to marry her.

Difficulties soon arose when Gronniosaw left London to earn money for his new family. Following a brief spell as a servant in Holland, he and his wife settled in a small cottage near Colchester. It was a hideously bleak winter. Gronniosaw had been discharged from work, his wife was sick and bedridden, they had no money. At one stage, they had only four carrots (given to them as a gift) to last them four days. As there was no fire the carrots had to be eaten raw. To make them digestible for her infant child, Gronniosaw’s wife chewed them before passing on the mulch to her baby. Gronniosaw himself went without.

Help arrived unexpectedly from a local attorney, and shortly afterwards they decided to move to Norwich where weaving work was easier to find. However, hours were long, wages irregular, their landlady was inflexible about rent payments, and their three children contracted smallpox. When one of the daughters later died of fever, the Baptists refused to assist with the burial. Nor did the Quakers help. The Gronniosaws had begun burying her in the garden behind their house when a parish officer relented. Even then, he declined to read a burial service for her.

The narrative ends with Gronniosaw, aged sixty, pawning his clothes to pay off his family’s debts and medical bills, and moving to Kidderminster where he tries to make a living by twisting silks and worsteds:

As Pilgrims, and very poor Pilgrims, we are travelling through many difficulties towards our HEAVENLY HOME, and waiting patiently for his gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us out of the evils of this present world and bring us to the EVER-LASTING GLORIES of the world to come. – TO HIM be PRAISE for EVER and EVER, AMEN.³⁷

Gronniosaw’s brief narrative is a depressing start to the history of black English literature. He had headed for England believing it to be a cruelty-free nation. London, in particular, appealed to him because he was ‘very desirous to get among Christians’.³⁸

In the years following his arrival in London, Gronniosaw’s life mirrored that of many of his black compatriots in a number of respects: his enduring marriage to a white woman; the poverty and bereavement which dogged them at every turn; their need to scuttle constantly between different parts of England. Scholars have tried and failed to assemble a detailed biography of Gronniosaw. This isn’t surprising. In his enforced mobility, his dependence on handouts, his inhabitation of seedy lodging houses and freezing cottages both in London and on the edges of other English towns, Gronniosaw, like so many ex-slaves in the eighteenth century, relied both on his long-suffering family and on his sorely-tested religious faith for survival. The pilgrimage motif on which the narrative ends tempers Gronniosaw’s despair with what is only a partially convincing vision of future repose. The journey across the Atlantic to America, the passages to England and, finally, to London, may have been fruitless. However, when earthly cities are so inhospitable to the transplanted African, it’s understandable if the goal of migrating to a heavenly city becomes the only redeeming alternative.

Gronniosaw is still a largely unknown figure. The same cannot be said of Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797). Born (or so he claimed) to Ibo parents in Essaka, a village in what is now Nigeria, he was the youngest son of an aristocratic, slave-owning family. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After surviving the Middle Passage, he found himself working in a plantation house in Virginia before being sold to Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal christened him Gustavus Vassa after a sixteenth-century Swedish freedom-fighter, a name which, as personal inscriptions and his letters to the press reveal, Equiano used for most of his life.

Coming to England for the first time in 1757, Equiano stayed in Falmouth and London where he slowly learned to read and write. He spent much of the next five years aboard British ships fighting the French in the Mediterranean. At the end of 1762 he was sold to Captain James Doran who, five months later, sold him on to a Quaker merchant named Robert King. Equiano worked for four years as a small goods trader in the West Indies and various North American plantations; the money he earned during this period allowed him to purchase his freedom for forty pounds in 1766. The following year he returned to London where he practised hairdressing before his maritime twitchings got the better of him and pushed him towards the oceans where he adventured away the next few years serving under various ship captains. An intensely ambitious man of ‘roving disposition’, he was the first black to explore the Arctic when he joined Lord Mulgrave’s 1773 expedition to find a passage to India, sailing on the same ship as a young Horatio Nelson.³⁹

Equiano spent much of the final two decades of his life campaigning against the slave trade. In 1783 he was responsible for notifying the social reformer Granville Sharp about the case of the 132 Africans who had been thrown overboard from the Liverpool slave ship, the Zong, for insurance purposes. The incident, though hardly unprecedented in the miserable annals of slave history, provoked mass outrage and was later the subject of one of Turner’s finest paintings, ‘Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on’ (1840). His growing status amongst London blacks was rewarded by his appointment in November 1786 as Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the 350 impoverished blacks who had decided to take up the Government’s offer of an assisted passage to Sierra Leone. It made him the first black person ever to be employed by the British Government, but the job did not last long. Angered by the embezzlement perpetrated by one of the official agents, he notified the authorities but was dismissed from his post. The affair did not curtail his political activities: he fired off letters to the press, penned caustic reviews of anti-Abolitionist propaganda, and became an increasingly effective speaker for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade as well as the more radical London Corresponding Society.

Equiano published his autobiography in 1789. Over the next five years it ran to nine editions and was translated into Dutch, Russian and German. He was a canny businessman and held on to the copyright of his book after its initial publication by subscription. This meant that he reaped all of the profits that accrued to him when he toured the United Kingdom inveighing against slavery and hawking his narrative. By the time he died in 1797, his literary success allowed him to leave an estate worth almost a thousand pounds to Susan Cullen, the white Englishwoman he’d married in 1792, and their two daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna. It was a far cry from the single half-bit with which he had bought a glass tumbler on the Dutch island of St Eustatia, a transaction that had kicked off his career as a small trader.

Over the course of the last two decades Equiano has become one of the most famous black Englishmen to have lived before World War Two. His memoirs were issued in 1995 as a Penguin Classic and have sold tens of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. Films, documentaries and cartoons have been based on his adventures. His life and travels have inspired a growing amount of academic research into eighteenth-century maritime culture. Of the millions of people who flocked during 2000 to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich a good proportion would have seen a video about him that was screened in the ‘Faith Zone’ there.

This level of fame is in part a belated – and hence amplified – recognition of his distinction in being the first African to write rather than dictate his autobiography, an achievement which confounded pro-slavery ideologies and led various newspaper critics to question the book’s authenticity. The Interesting Narrative is also one of the earliest slave narratives, a genre more normally associated with nineteenth-century American figures such as Frederick Douglass. It offers a rare – and, for a black writer, unprecedented – account of life below the deck of a slave ship. Long before the golden period of anti-imperialist activity in the metropolis – the first half of the twentieth century when Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore railed against colonialism – Equiano, in tandem with a cabal of black revolutionaries who had named themselves the ‘Sons of Africa’, fought tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. His autobiography is also, inadvertently, a fascinating account of life in black London in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

To Equiano the capital seemed a place of liberty, a shelter from the storms that slavery had rained down upon him since he was a young boy. Throughout the time he was chained below deck or toiling in plantation fields, London lingered stubbornly in his imagination as a city that, far off and possibly unreachable, might be an asylum from the immiseration in which he and his fellow blacks found themselves. It was a dream, one that inspired hope. He had seen friends dashed to pieces in battles at sea. He had seen female slaves raped, men tied to the ground and castrated before having their ears chopped off bit by bit. In Georgia he himself had been randomly bludgeoned and left for dead by one Doctor Perkins. And when he was in Montserrat he

knew a Negro man, named Emanuel Sankey, who endeavoured to escape from his miserable bondage, by concealing himself on board of a London ship: but fate did not favour the poor oppressed man; for being discovered when the vessel was under sail, he was delivered up again to his master. This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back.⁴⁰

The Interesting Narrative is invaluable as a book about witnessing. It is a record of horrible things seen, horrible events from which the author would rather have averted his gaze, which, he hopes, might be brought to an end as a result of his describing them. London, in contrast, is a place where looking is a pleasure, not a duty. A place full of entertaining spectacle, not evil: ‘Though I had desired so much to see London, when I arrived in it I was unfortunately unable to gratify my curiosity; for I had at this time the chilblains.’⁴¹ Equiano found himself unable to stand up and had to be sent to St George’s Hospital where his condition deteriorated. The doctors, fearing gangrene, wanted to chop off one of the twelve-year-old boy’s legs. He recovered just in time only to find that, on the brink of being discharged, he had contracted smallpox. By the time many months later he had regained his health he was needed to sail to Holland and then on to Canada, having seen almost nothing of the capital except the inside walls of a hospital dormitory.

Such dismal experiences didn’t turn Equiano against the city. When he returned two years later in 1759 he had a much better time. While serving three sisters in Greenwich, the Guerins, he decided to learn skills that might hasten his liberty. He attended school to improve his English and got himself baptized at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster. He watched how the nobility comported themselves and what made them tick. For a while he became rather besotted by them: ‘I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us.’⁴²

As he attended Miss Guerin around town, ‘extremely happy; as I had thus very many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’, he also saw many sights – public executions, a white negro woman – that imprinted themselves on his memory.⁴³ No doubt he would have seen other blacks, in situations not dissimilar to his own, working as coachmen and footmen for the aristocracy. Such sightings would have alerted him to the fact that some black people in London were not as blessed with good fortune as he was, and that not only could he strike up friendships with them, but he could also help to improve their lots.

On Equiano’s own daily perambulations, though, danger and delight were never far away. Once, hanging around a press-gang inn located at the foot of Westminster Bridge, he was playing with some white friends in watermen’s wherries. Along came two ‘stout boys’ in another wherry and started abusing him. When they suggested that he should cross over to their boat, Equiano, eager to placate them, tried to do so but was pushed into the Thames, ‘and not being able to swim, I should unavoidably have been drowned, but for the assistance of some watermen, who providentially came to my relief’.⁴⁴

Equiano never forgot London. Through the years he spent at sea it stuck in his memory as a brief interlude of joy. The moment he gained his freedom in 1766 his thoughts turned back to the grey, sportive city across which he had once ranged. At dances in Montserrat his freshly purchased clothes caught the attention of pretty women: ‘Some of the sable females, who formerly stood aloof, now began to relax, and appear less coy, but my heart was still fixed on London, where I hoped to be ere long.’⁴⁵ Over the course of the next fifteen years Equiano’s ‘roving disposition’, his attraction to the ‘sound of fame’, and the poor wages that domestic service offered in comparison to seafaring led him back to the ocean time and again. Yet he always returned to the capital.

Perhaps the pivotal moment in Equiano’s life came in 1773 after his return from Lord Mulgrave’s Arctic expedition. Arriving in London he went to a lodging house in the Haymarket near the Strand. He had stayed in this area before, during which time he had learned to dress hair and to play the French horn and had persuaded a neighbouring Reverend to teach him arithmetic. Now he felt much less resourceful: ‘I was continually oppressed and much concerned about the salvation of my soul, and was determined (in my own strength) to be a first-rate Christian.’⁴⁶ He began to go up and talk to anyone he thought might be able to succour him in his hour of spiritual need. When this proved to be useless he wandered dejectedly around the streets of central London. Soon he was visiting local churches, including St James’s and St Martin’s, two or three times a day, always searching for fresh answers. He approached Quakers, Catholics, Jews. Yet ‘still I came away dissatisfied: something was wanting that I could not obtain, and I really found more heart-felt relief in reading my bible at home than in attending the church’.⁴⁷ He fled to Turkey. In 1779 he resolved to become a missionary in Africa, but, despite visiting the Bishop of London to seek permission, was refused ordination.

Equiano’s memoir is couched as a spiritual autobiography, a genre that was hugely popular during the eighteenth century. It required its authors to talk at length about their sinful lives and about how, just before they decided to surrender themselves unto Christ, they experienced extreme guilt and self-abasement. The phrases they used to do so were often tired and hackneyed. In contrast, Equiano’s account of this troubled period in his life is far from formulaic. It also seems somehow implausible. Black people who roam London’s streets in this period usually do so because they’re panhandling or because they’re on the run from their masters. That they would dizzy themselves searching for faith is especially noteworthy given that throughout history most chroniclers of London have tended to dwell on its venal and secular aspects. Those who chart the immigrant experience associate faith with faith in the motherland or see it as a metaphor for resilience during hard times. In Equiano’s narrative the capital becomes a crucible for transformation, one that hoists him from servitude to freedom, from the choppy waves of agnosticism to the pure shores of Christian salvation – a double emancipation. This rebirth acted as a prelude to his decision to begin campaigning on behalf of his fellow black Londoners. The city was worth enskying – not just because as sailor, servant and activist he had flourished there – but because all those experiences had added up to make him a figure of such public importance as to merit an autobiography, one that helped accelerate the abolition of slavery, under which system he had been brought to the metropolis in the first place.

Equiano may be the most famous black writer of the eighteenth century but his is by no means the most substantial, nor the most astonishing chronicle of exilic London. That accolade belongs to Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), whose life, perhaps because it wasn’t quite as buffeted as that of Equiano or of Gronniosaw, has often been discussed in rather dismissive terms. He has been described as a Sambo figure and as ‘one of the most obsequious of eighteenth-century blacks’.⁴⁸ Yet those who compare him unfavourably to the more ‘righteous’ Equiano rarely mention the fact that not only did the latter come from a slave-owning family, but that he gained his freedom through purchase rather than escape and, in so doing, ‘implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery’.⁴⁹ Moreover, he later went on to buy slaves whom he set to work on a Central American plantation.

Sancho was born aboard a slave ship heading for the Spanish West Indies. His mother died before he was two years old; his father committed suicide. Soon after, he was brought over to England where his master gave him to three maiden ladies who lived in Greenwich. Like wicked sisters in a fairy story, they refused to educate him and bestowed, as did many wealthy families who owned blacks in the eighteenth century, a preposterous surname upon their new possession in the belief that he bore a passing likeness to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s much put-upon squire.

Fortunately, a godfather in the form of the eccentric John, second Duke of Montagu, soon emerged to offer Sancho an escape from what would have been a life of servitude and illiteracy. The Duke, who lived nearby at Montagu House in Blackheath, London, was famed for his philanthropy and had been known to rescue from penury total strangers whom he had seen wandering about in St James’s Park.⁵⁰

The Duke was passionately interested in theatre and in opera. He devoted much of his energy to promoting both arts, though the size of his financial outlay was usually in inverse proportion to the artistic success it reaped. In 1721 he even brought a company to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Sancho found in his household a refuge from the cold philistinism he faced daily at the sisters’ home. Ever the cultural evangelist, Montagu fomented and helped to feed the African teenager’s growing appetite for literature and art. The Duke, so full of humanitarian zeal in his personal behaviour, also proposed constructing a seaport and depot in Beaulieu Creek – where he owned land – in order to profit from the slave trade by means of ‘grandiose schemes of exploitation’.⁵¹

These plans were never realized. John died of pneumonia in 1749. His death panicked Sancho for he longed to leave his mistresses’ home, but Lady Mary Churchill, the Duke’s widow, ‘never associated herself with [John’s] drolleries’, and was reluctant to allow him to serve as butler in her home.⁵² Sancho threatened to commit suicide before she finally relented. She died in 1751, leaving him seventy pounds and an annuity of thirty pounds.

Flushed with his new-found fortune, Sancho felt liberated and headed for central London where, like many eighteenth-century servants who had been granted their freedom, he frittered his allowance on aping aristocratic excesses such as gambling (he once lost all his clothes playing cribbage), boozing, women, and the theatre. His money exhausted, he returned to Blackheath in 1758 with his new wife, a West Indian named Anne Osborne, who bore him seven children. In November 1768, Sancho, who had attained a degree of celebrity two years earlier after a letter he had written to Laurence Sterne had been published, became the first definitively identified African in England to have his portrait painted when, following in the footsteps of Sterne, Garrick and Dr Johnson, as well as many members of the Montagu family, he sat for Thomas Gainsborough.⁵³

Between 1767 and 1770 he had at least three pieces of music published which the musicologist Josephine Wright has described as revealing ‘the hand of a knowledgeable, capable amateur who wrote in miniature forms in an early Classic style’.⁵⁴ He also wrote an analytical work dealing with music theory, no copy of which has survived. Towards the end of 1773, having become too incapacitated to continue work at Blackheath, he moved with his family to 20 Charles Street, Westminster, which lay close to another Montagu House, built by the second Duke at Privy Gardens in Whitehall. Here he opened up a grocery selling imperial products such as sugar, tea and tobacco. The shop lay on the corner of two streets, making Sancho – almost two centuries before the retailing revolution effected during the 1960s by an array of Patels, Bharats and Norats – the first coloured cornershop proprietor in England. Parish rate books show that his premises had one of the higher rents in a street that chiefly housed tradesmen such as cheesemongers and victuallers as well as surveyors, barristers and watchmakers.

The majority of Sancho’s extant correspondence stems from this period, a busy one during which he also composed harpsichord pieces, imparted literary advice to writers such as George Cumberland, socialized with the likes of Garrick, Reynolds and Nollekens, and succeeded – albeit with difficulty – in juggling both commerce and connoisseurship. For much of the 1770s, he paid the penalty for his youthful dissolution. Racked by constant stomach pains, he was also frequently gout-ridden, and died on 14 December 1780. Two years later one of his correspondents, Frances Crewe, took advantage of the rising tide of Abolitionism and published as many of his letters as she could track down in a two-volume edition that was also prefaced by a short biography by the Tory MP Joseph Jekyll. The book was a huge success, attracting 1182 subscribers (a number apparently unheard of since the early days of The Spectator) and selling out within months. It raised more than five hundred pounds for his bereaved family and was followed by another four editions over the next two years.

The letters themselves are of variable quality. Many are homiletic and filled with social and religious advice to his correspondents. Others contain literary and art criticism, accounts of illness-torn domestic life at Charles Street, political commentary, descriptions of election hustings and London’s pleasure gardens, requests for financial aid. Some are just business chits, workaday notes dealing with grocery matters, and are accordingly rather dull. Some, too, are clotted with the rhetoric of social decorum: cordiality, cultivation, civility, sincerity and gratitude are the key – and endlessly invoked – virtues. He lauds people excessively and claims they are ‘deservedly honoured, loved, and esteemed’.⁵⁵ At his best, though Sancho can also be scatological and biting, as well as learned, tender and deeply moving. The letters brim, to an extent unparalleled for almost two centuries, with comedy, familial devotion and an unembarrassed love of London. They also display an obsession with literariness, a quality not especially prized by Equiano or Gronniosaw, or, indeed, those who would value eighteenth-century black English writing for its historical rather than its aesthetic significance.

A major reason for the success of Sancho’s book was that he was already known to a large section of the metropolitan elite. This was because of his friendship with Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), country pastor and author of Tristram Shandy, a ninevolume novel that is in equal parts philosophical treatise, family saga, shaggy-dog story, anatomy of melancholy, and proto-Modernist experimental fiction with a memorable cast of characters that includes the grandiloquent and crazed autodidact Walter Shandy, placid Uncle Toby who only ever gets animated by the thought of military fortifications, and the waspish and incompetent Dr Slop. Standing alongside Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as one of the three most important novelists of the eighteenth century, Sterne has been a major influence on twentieth-century writers such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera.

Sterne was at the height of his considerable popularity when Sancho first contacted him during the summer of 1766. He had been reading a copy of Sterne’s theological tract, Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life (1760), when he came across a passage which dealt with ‘how bitter a draught’ slavery was.⁵⁶ Wanting to thank the author for such progressive sentiments, and perhaps also to establish contact with so distinguished a man of letters, Sancho introduced himself in his note as ‘one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs”’, before going on to praise Sterne’s character Uncle Toby: ‘I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to shake hands with the honest corporal.’⁵⁷ The bulk of the letter, though, picked up on the reference to slavery in Job’s Account. 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.⁵⁸

Sterne – whose own father had died of fever in 1731 after his regiment had been sent by the Duke of Newcastle to put down a slave uprising in Jamaica – was delighted to receive this letter.⁵⁹ A benighted negro – known in the Georgian period merely as a trope of literary sentimentalism – was here communicating to him in person, confronting the author. In his reply, Sterne mused on the ‘strange coincidence’ that he had been ‘writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ at the very moment Sancho’s letter had arrived, and promised to weave the subject of slavery into his narrative if he could. Picking up on Sancho’s conceit of walking a great distance to meet Toby, he declared that he ‘would set out this hour upon a pilgrimage to Mecca’ in order to alleviate the distress of African slaves. Sterne ended his letter by congratulating Sancho on his academic diligence, and promised that, ‘believe me, I will not forget yr Letter’.⁶⁰

The ninth volume of Tristram Shandy (1767) contains Trim’s account to Toby of how he once went to visit his brother and a Jewish widow. He entered their shop only to find there a ‘poor negro girl’ whose behaviour as well as her colour captivated him. She was so sensitive to the idea of pain that she made sure never to swat flies, but instead slapped at them with a bunch of soft white feathers.⁶¹ Hearing the tale, Toby was moved that a girl who had been oppressed on account of her colour from the day she was born was, nonetheless, loth to ‘oppress’ flies. He insisted to his sceptical friend that the story proved categorically that black people, like Europeans, possessed souls. This being the case, Africans could not be the inferior, sub-human brutes that plantation owners and pseudo-scientists in the late eighteenth century claimed they were.

Sterne’s and Sancho’s friendship wasn’t confined to the epistolary sphere. In a letter from June 1767, Sterne hoped that his ‘friend Sancho’ wouldn’t forget his ‘custom of giving me a call at my lodgings’.⁶² He was writing from Coxwould near York having temporarily left the Bond Street home in London at which Sancho frequently used to call. The letter’s tone is one of intimacy, both in revelation and in register; Sterne bemoans his ailing health, his weary spirits and his equally weary body. In another letter he asked Sancho to urge the Montagus to subscribe to his book.⁶³ The idea of a successful white author in the middle of the eighteenth century asking a slave’s son for financial assistance is startling. It certainly testifies to their closeness for, as one biographer has observed, ‘A person has to be quite secure of his position to ask and receive such favours, especially from a man who could not afford a subscription himself.’⁶⁴

Sancho always loved Sterne. One of his most prized possessions in his Charles Street grocery was a cast of the novelist’s head that had been made in Rome from a bust by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. It’s unlikely that he knew much about where it had come from. The truth emerged when Lord Justice Mansfield, the man whose 1772 court ruling played an important role in outlawing slavery in England, later had an appointment to sit for Nollekens. The sculptor pointed to Sterne’s bust and confided to Mansfield that he had used plaster casts of it to smuggle silk stockings, gloves and lace from Rome to London.⁶⁵

Sancho was drawn to Sterne’s writing not because of its avantgarde trickiness, but because of the religious values it expressed. These can be found (though they are rarely emphasized) in all of the pastor’s work. For instance, in the sermon, Philanthropy Recommended (1760), Sterne recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan who, unlike the wealthier travellers who had preceded him on that route, had been prepared to deflect his attention and compassion towards the stricken victim lying at the side of the road down which he’d been travelling. Sterne used this story to attack the bogus and solipsistic theology of a certain kind of Christianity:

Take notice with what sanctity he goes to the end of his days in the same selfish track in which he first set out – turning neither to the right hand nor to the left – but plods on – pores all his life long upon the ground, as if afraid to look up, lest peradventure he should see aught which might turn him one moment out of that strait line where interest is carrying him.⁶⁶

Linearity equals selfishness. We must be prepared to look around us, to halt, to be diverted by what’s going on in the corners, the crevices, the byways of life. These side-routes are full of value, pleasure, goodness. Here, in Sterne’s work, sermons pop up in military textbooks; young negro girls are found to have souls and compassion. This is a religious doctrine that commands us to be concerned for the defective, the maimed, the incapable, those unable to hasten along the straight paths of economic or social success. Indeed, Tristram Shandy is a novel characterized by disability: Toby has a wounded groin, Trim a creaky knee, the narrator a flattened nose. Sterne allowed these characters to talk, to yarn, to smuggle their way into our affections. He achieved this by means of digressions, hobbyhorses, and by procrastinating and shilly-shallying rather than by kowtowing to the narratory imperative. Tristram, the novel’s narrator, was literally – and morally – correct when he asserted: ‘my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, – and at the same time’.⁶⁷ Sterne himself eschewed a rigidly linear, sequential unfurling of plot. In Tristram Shandy he approvingly reproduced Hogarth’s line of beauty: it dips, rises, fluctuates rather than heading straight into the future.⁶⁸ By choosing to incorporate dashes and marbled pages within his novel, Sterne requires us to read more deeply into the text, to recognize that smooth-talking eloquence is less important than empathy, solidarity.

Sterne most valued the empiric, the contingent, the immediate. He prized practical virtue over metaphysical abstraction and admired Tillotson’s Latitudinarianism. As a vicar he was known to be most fond of his humbler parishioners. He had great regard for ‘the house servants whom he portrayed so lovingly as Susannah, Obadiah, Jonathan the coachman, and the fat foolish scullion’.⁶⁹ Sancho, who had spent most of his life as a domestic servant for the Montagus, would undoubtedly have appreciated the value of such personal kindnesses in daily life. He was also stirred by Sterne’s warmness towards the socially marginal. As someone who was handicapped by both colour and class, and who had gained literacy and an education only as a result of being taken up by an eccentric aristocrat, he had to be.

Sancho, then, grew up around – and was the beneficiary of – people who espoused a social creed that stressed the importance of looking out for and helping those struck down by misfortune. He imbibed their values. Generosity, toleration and philanthropy were to become key words in his ethical lexicon. As a small-scale grocer whose business frequently suffered from downturns in trade, Sancho often relied on the kindness of friends and acquaintances to keep his ailing business afloat.

It’s hardly surprising that he distrusted merely metaphysical theology, and forms of Christianity which, he felt, were ‘so fully taken up with pious meditations [ … ] that they have little if any room for the love of man’.⁷⁰ In a letter from 1775, a depressed Sancho, writing about the poorliness of his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Lydia, claimed, ‘I am sufficiently acquainted with care – and I think I fatten upon calamity. – Philosophy is best practised, I believe, by the easy and affluent. – One ounce of practical religion is worth all that ever the Stoics wrote.’⁷¹ Lydia died six months later.

Issues of race and philanthropy come together in a letter praising the verse of the young black American poet, Phillis Wheatley, who had arrived in London in 1773 and whose first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, had created a literary and political sensation that same year:

the list of splendid – titled – learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress. – alas! shews how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are – without generosity – feeling – and humanity. – These good great folks – all know – and perhaps admired – nay, praised Genius in bondage and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by – not one good Samaritan amongst them.⁷²

Sancho’s belief that linearity and eyes-on-the-prize straight-aheadedness were morally dangerous re-emerges in a letter about his friend Highmore who, he claimed, ‘rides uneasily [ … ] he is for smoother roads – a pacing tilt – quilted saddle – snaffle bride, with silken reins, and golden stirrups. So mounted we all should like; but I query albeit, though it might be for the ease of our bodies – whether it would be for the good of our souls.’⁷³

Sancho wasn’t merely a passive recipient of acts of Christian charity; he helped others unstintingly. For instance, he played the Good Samaritan to Isaac de Groote, writing to Garrick and newspaper editors in an attempt to stoke up support for this myopic and paralysed octogenarian who was a descendant of the legal theorist Grotius. Even as he performed good deeds such as these, however, Sancho felt rather uneasy; he knew that some people would feel ashamed about relying on the beneficence of an ex-slave: ‘I have wished to do more than I ought – though at the same time too little for such a being to receive – without insult – from the hands of a poor negroe.’⁷⁴ On other occasions he wrote coyly ironic letters of introduction on behalf of his black friends: his reference for the bandsman, Charles Lincoln, pastiched the rhetoric both of contemporary pseudo-science and of newspaper lost-and-found ads: ‘a woolly pate – and face as dark as your humble; – Guiney-born, and French-bred – the sulky gloom of Africa dispelled by Gallic vivacity – and that softened again with English sedateness – a rare fellow!’⁷⁵

At least two other aspects of Sterne’s novel – naming and decrepitude – spoke directly to Sancho. Walter Shandy believed that names had a direct relationship to a child’s future success. Christening was, he felt, a form of branding and a means of determining social rank. He was understandably mortified to learn that his servant, Susannah, had been unable to get her tongue round ‘Trismegistus’, the mighty and winning name he had chosen for his son, and, instead, plumped at the baptism service for the paltry and demeaning ‘Tristram’. Sancho, like many of his fellow blacks in England at this time, was given his name because his owners believed that he would never – could never – attain sufficient status in society for his name to become a source of embarrassment to him. But Sancho far outstripped his anticipated destiny. Like Tristram, he exhibited such winning talent in both his life and his letters as to discredit theories that claimed people’s abilities could be predicted even before they were born.

Again, the preoccupation with weakness and illness in Tristram Shandy could hardly fail to resonate with the declining Sancho. As Gainsborough’s oil painting shows, his nose was as flat as that of the novel’s stricken narrator. Like Toby, and like Sterne himself whose bout of tuberculosis left him with a weak, cracked voice, Sancho had some speaking problems; Jekyll claims he harboured an ambition to perform on the stage, but ‘a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive’.⁷⁶ It was ill-health that cut short his service with the Montagu family and led him to open a grocery. As the years passed and Sancho was increasingly tortured by gout, dropsy, corpulence and asthma, he continued to draw strength from Sterne’s belief in the need to struggle on in the face of physical debility.

Contemporary criticism focused on Sterne’s peculiar style and his rather salacious humour. It took Sancho, an ex-slave, to pinpoint immediately the moral core of Sterne’s work and, more than that, to glean how his form and subject matter were so intimately connected. In a lengthy letter comparing Sterne, Fielding and Swift, Sancho explained that his criterion for greatness was the diffusion and generosity of each writer’s moral vision. So Sterne surpassed Fielding in the ‘distribution of his lights, which he has so artfully varied throughout his work, that the oftener they are examined the more beautiful they appear’.⁷⁷ Swift was a greater wit than Sterne, Sancho claimed, but Swift excelled ‘in grave-faced irony, whilst Sterne lashes his whips with jolly laughter’. He went on to argue that

Sterne was truly a noble philanthropist – Swift was rather cynical; – what Swift would fret and fume at – such as the petty accidental sourings and bitters in life’s cup – you plainly may see, Sterne would laugh at – and parry off by a larger humanity, and regular good will to man. I know you will laugh at me – do – I am content; – if I am an enthusiast in any thing, it is in favour of my Sterne.⁷⁸

It was these thematic and ethical parallels between Sterne’s work and his own life that led Sancho to use Shandean literary devices. On the most superficial level, this involved creating comic neologisms: ‘bumfiddled’ for befuddled; ‘alas! an unlucky parciplepliviaplemontis seizes my imagination’; and describing his friend John Ireland as an ‘eccentric phizpoop’.⁷⁹ Sancho clearly wanted to impress upon his correspondents his facility in the English language, something his vocal malady prevented him from doing on the stage. Born into slavery, he wished to slough off all vestiges of social and intellectual passivity by becoming a creator, an independent manufacturer of new words and concepts.

The Shandean echoes in Sancho’s letters weren’t solely verbal. He used asterisks when writing flirtatiously about rich farmers’ daughters. And in a letter to the First Clerk in the Board of Control, John Meheux, 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.⁸⁰

At this point, the original edition reproduced a black blot.

Sancho – like Sterne – loved puns. They represented fun, randomness, peculiar verbal couplings. The scholar Walter Redfern has claimed that puns are ‘bastards, immigrants, barbarians, extraterrestrials: they intrude, they infiltrate’.⁸¹ Tristram Shandy is a celebration of such whimsical contingency. No wonder that Walter, forever obsessed with daft intellectual ideas (names determine success, noses determine greatness, the need to compile a ‘Tristrapaedia’ that contains all human knowledge), hates puns. He feels threatened by the disorderliness and unpredictability they represent. That said, Sancho’s puns are almost uniformly excruciating. He wrote to one correspondent, after receiving a gift of fawn meat, ‘Some odd folks would think it would have been but good manners to have thank’d you for the fawn – but then, says the punster, that would have been so like fawn-ing.’⁸²

The most obvious sign of Sterne’s influence on the Letters is found in Sancho’s punctuation. Full stops, commas and semicolons have been largely replaced by dashes which resemble splinters strewn across a broken page. The effect is to hobble the reader who must pay particular scrutiny to each fragment of prose contained between the dashes. Instead of hurtling through each letter we’re constantly being forced to slow down, to accustom ourselves to the different, more leisurely time-scale of the writer.

These stylistic borrowings from Sterne were anathema to contemporary critics. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), his unflattering account of the mental and moral faculties of negroes, Thomas Jefferson, the future American president, denounced Sancho for affecting ‘a Shandean fabrication of words [ … ] 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’.⁸³ And in its otherwise complimentary notice of the Letters, The Monthly Review bemoaned Sterne’s and Sancho’s ‘wild, indiscriminate use’ of dashes which were ‘a most vicious practice; especially injurious to all good writing, and good reading too’.⁸⁴

Sancho used dashes for three reasons. First, as a means of sardonically critiquing contemporary racialist theory. One of the recurring themes of pro-slavery doctrine during the 1770s and 1780s was the inability of negroes to perform linear functions. Edward Long’s notoriously poisonous History of Jamaica (1774) included a discussion of common African attributes:

their corporeal sensations are in general of the grossest frame; their sight is acute, but not correct; they will rarely miss a standing object, but they have no notion of shooting birds on the wing, nor can they project a straight line, nor lay any substance square with another.⁸⁵

So common was the stress on lineality in anti-Abolition literature that William Dickson felt compelled to challenge it in his 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.⁸⁶

The likes of Edward Long and Samuel Estwick regarded lineality as a metonym for the ability to think straight, to rationalize. Ratiocination being the mark of humanity, Africans couldn’t be human. Long, in his extended discussion of the physical and intellectual similarity between negroes and orang-utans, seems to have come very near to believing this.

Sancho was well aware that Africans were meant to be innately unlinear and irrational. One of his letters begins with the kind of ironic, grandiloquent agglomeration of a sentence that’s also found in Salman Rushdie’s descriptions of London in The Satanic Verses (1988): ‘You have here a kind of medley, a hetrogeneous illspelt hetroclite, (worse) eccentric sort of a – a –; in short, it is a true Negroe calibash of ill-sorted, undigested chaotic matter.’⁸⁷ Breezily dismissive, Sancho sprays his sentences with dots and dashes to mock the idea that humanity and intelligence are dependent on smooth prosody.

Secondly, the dashes embodied the flurry and chaos Sancho faced in running an urban grocery. Neither the literary allusions nor the discussions of contemporary culture with which his Letters are studded should blind readers to the fact that he spent the last seven years of his life trying to raise a large family whilst warding off poverty. Corresponding with his friends usually required Sancho to snatch spare moments in between serving customers at the counter: ‘I have a horrid story to tell you about the – Zounds! I am interrupted. – Adieu! God keep you!’⁸⁸ In an earlier letter to Meheux, he noted: ‘Look’ye Sir I write to the ringing of the shop-door bell – I write – betwixt serving – gossiping – and lying. Alas! what cramps to poor genius!’⁸⁹

The tone of this last remark is comic, but it also shows Sancho to be aware that both his presence among polite company and his aspirations towards becoming a belle-lettrist were regarded as anomalous. In a letter to one of his artist friends he cried, ‘For God’s sake! what has a poor starving Negroe, with six children, to do with kings and heroes, and armies and politics? – aye, or poets and painters? – or artists – of any sort?’⁹⁰ There’s a palpable pride here; the contrast between the ‘starving Negroe’ and ‘kings and heroes’ is a touch overdone and wilfully self-dramatizing. And yet the letter bristles with a genuine anxiety that also emerged less hysterically in an earlier note to the same correspondent; it began with quotations from Young and Shakespeare before lapsing into self-severity: ‘but why should I pester you with quotations? – to shew you the depths of my erudition, and strut like the fabled bird in his borrowed plumage’.⁹¹ The dashes jolt and discombobulate. There’s a stutter here, a nervous tic. Is it appropriate, Sancho seems to be asking, for a mere grocer ever to aspire to join the republic of letters?

Sancho’s life lacked inevitability. His parents could hardly have expected that either they or their son would be sold into captivity. Nor was it probable that he would elude a life of hard labour under the noonday Caribbean sun by being shipped to England. Few imported slaves had the luck to encounter cicerones such as the Duke of Montagu. Fewer still ended their lives circulating among actors, writers and art connoisseurs while owning property a five-minute walk away from the Houses of Parliament. What’s more, at Montagu House in Greenwich, Sancho spent much of his day working in the servant quarters at the bottom corner of the front courtyard; in Westminster his shop was located on the corner between Charles Street and Crown Court. The dashes embody these discontinuities. In geographic as well as in racial and biographical terms, Sancho always occupied an edgy, recessive status.

Finally, Sancho, like Sterne, chose to use dashes extensively ‘to mock assumptions about the elegant measured unity of Enlightened discourse’.⁹² Parentheses were condemned by eighteenth-century linguistic theorists for signalling mental incoherence and anti-authoritarianism. The menial status of dashes – they were often used for page numbers – was precisely why Sterne and Sancho, two writers who believed fervently in the importance of helping the stray, the dispossessed and the routinely scorned, were so keen to stud their texts with them. By wedging dashes into almost every line, right at the centre of their prose, they were trying to illustrate their belief that over-polished and over-polite sentence structures reflected an excessively linear, solipsistic way of thinking that not only glossed over quotidian happenstance, but also, at worst, led to the abduction and enslavement of peoples who didn’t conform to such self-designatedly rational structures of thought. Irony, contingency, solidarity – these were the values they preferred to champion.

In his antepenultimate letter, written a fortnight before his death, when asthma had almost snatched away his last remaining breath and his body was swollen by gout, Sancho asked Spink to forgive ‘the galloping of my pen’ and thanked him for the kindness he’d shown ‘like the Samaritan’s’ over the years: ‘Indulge me, my noble friend, I have seen the priest, and the Levite, after many years’ knowledge, snatch a hasty look, then with averted face pursue their different routes.’⁹³ Here, at the end of his life, when Sancho knew that he was dying, we find him brooding on a parable that he was familiar with from his own study of the Bible as well as the sermons of his beloved Sterne. He compares himself to the helpless roadside victim whose appeals for help were ignored by those travellers racing along the straight highway of self-interest. Only when the Good Samaritan slows down, looks sideways and steps off the beaten track, can he be saved. The dash-strewn, non-linear aesthetic that Sancho lifts from Sterne was similarly designed to stop his correspondent skating too swiftly, too insouciantly over the sentences, and to draw attention to the utterances, the needy existence of the narrator between the clauses.

Sancho was the first black writer to think of himself as metropolitan. He saw the city not just as a place to live in or to make money, but as a set of values, a tone of voice. At its best it was a form of conversation – learned, sophisticated, playful – in which he felt sufficiently confident to take part. His letters narrate both daily events in the capital (gobbets about trade, politics, entertainment), and, in their different registers (from coquettish gossip and news-chronicling to anomie-wearied cri de coeur), the very sound of the city. Long before George Lamming or V.S. Naipaul, and against the least congenial racial and political backdrop imaginable, Sancho saw London as a cultural centre, one that was the obvious place to be if one were – as he liked to think of himself – a man of letters.

Someone like Equiano thought of his work in terms of the good it could do; it might raise money and create publicity for the Abolitionist cause. He wrote with a very specific audience in mind. Sancho, though, wrote with few thoughts of publication. He merely sought a brief respite from the routine stresses of running a grocery. This doesn’t mean that his letters weren’t crammed with details of his quotidian, retail existence. They were. But, at the same time, he rejoiced in stylistic reverie to such an extent that we feel it’s only in his letters that he could fully vent his imagination. He was interested in language, in metaphor (his wife ‘groans with the rheumatism – and I grunt with the gout – a pretty concert!’⁹⁴), in literary play. He experimented and fidgeted with grammar and layout. He concocted neologisms. One can feel the delight he felt in both writing and reading his own letters. He himself was aware of this and ended one note, ‘Is not that – a good one?’⁹⁵ Brimming with energy and brio, they often begin with top-of-the-morning exhilaration – ‘Alive! Alive ho!’, ‘Go to!’, ‘Bravo!’ At his best, Sancho is an imp, a freestyler who’s constantly jamming and improvising. He showed that black literature about the city needn’t always be a species of protest literature, that it could be more than a crudely utilitarian discourse that exalts ‘relevance’ or ‘resistance’ at the expense of charm or aesthetics.

He was known to display such breezy confidence in real life too. A friend, William Stevenson, wrote:

When Mr Sancho lived with the Duke of Montagu, he was sent to ask the character of a cook who lived with a native West Indian Planter then residing in London. Upon his delivering the message verbally, the haughty Creole, eying him disdainfully from head to foot, exclaimed, ‘What, Fellow! could not your Master write?’ – My African Friend thus answered him, ‘Sir, when an English Nobleman sends a servant out of livery to another Nobleman, he means to do him an honour. But, when he sends a servant out of livery to a Plebeian, he thinks he does him a greater honour; and the Duke of Montagu has sent me to do you that honour, Sir!’⁹⁶

The language and imagery of the tradesman often spill over into Sancho’s prose, resulting in the juxtaposition of moralizing abstraction and concrete retailing detail: ‘man is an absurd animal – [ … ] friendship without reason – hate without reflection – knowledge (like Ashley’s punch in small quantities) without judgment’.⁹⁷ In one of his many excursions into literary criticism, Sancho regretted the commonplace insipidity of much of Voltaire’s Semiramis, and added, ‘From dress – scenery – action – and the rest of playhouse garniture – it may show well and go down – like insipid fish with good sauce.’⁹⁸

Standing at his shop counter every day, gossiping, joking, often griping about his ailing profits with customers for hours on end, Sancho’s job supplied him with an unending stock of gags. Some were abysmal. He recounted one exasperating disagreement with a customer over the calendar: ‘what? – what! – Dates! Dates! – Am not I a grocer? – pun the second.’⁹⁹ At other times, his teaselling incited biting satire. Enthusing about the poetry of 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.¹⁰⁰

Humour is perhaps the dominant tone of these letters. Of course, debility, pensivity and gloom are never absent, either. But only through studied ebullience could Sancho hope to fend off depression. Much of this comedy was self-reflexive: ‘The gout seized me yesterday morning [ … ] I looked rather black all day.’¹⁰¹

Such lines shouldn’t be taken as self-loathing or a pitiable eagerness to amuse his correspondents.¹⁰² In a letter to 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 – dulness to a Black-a-moor – Good – excessive good!¹⁰³

At one level, this passage demonstrates Sancho’s love of literary play. The first half is playful, self-referential, and far removed from the straight-edge polemics of such black Abolitionists as Ottobah Cugoano and John Henry Naimbanna; the second half, however, dispels any suspicion that Sancho is an apolitical Uncle Tom.¹⁰⁴ As in Sterne’s work, the teasing and joking of this letter have a strong moral underpinning. Sancho stutters, he g(r)asps desperately for a third analogy to give balance to the sentence. The dashes and the repetition of ‘or’ show that time is running out. He’ll cleave to a simile, any simile, that’ll shore up this sentence in which he finds himself drowning. Which cliché does he use? That of blacks being stupid! Sancho frequently refuted similar nonsenses in his letters and, here, implies that such noxious utterances can stem only from writers over-eager to lend their prose a polished sheen, a rhetorical (both in its literal and pejorative sense) sonority. It’s a subtle and witty demolition of racist polemic.

Sancho’s decision to couch political dissent in ironic and deprecating modes emphasizes the fact that humour and conviviality are the abiding registers of the Letters. Such are their avuncularity and their jowly bonhomie that I’m inclined to agree with Lydia Leach, to whose letter of 14 December 1775 Sancho replied: ‘There is something inexpressibly flattering in the notion of your being warmer – from the idea of your much obliged friend’s caring for you.’¹⁰⁵

One of the most unusual and appealing aspects of Sancho’s letters are his vignettes of home life. Black people in the eighteenth century were often denied their privacy. Their physiological traits were itemized for auction purposes, their free time was dependent on their owners’ whims. They were viewed as public performers, adorning the arms and advertising the wealth of aristocratic families. Black writers who appeared in print – Equiano, Cugoano, Naimbanna – all inhabited political roles: they assailed large audiences with accounts of the depredations wreaked on their countrymen. Their books were often exhortatory, redolent of the soapbox. Sancho himself wasn’t averse to making loud proclamations on political or social issues. But there’s another side to him. His letters show us a gentler, more intimate aspect of black London. In them he often speaks of his wife, his young children, leisurely family trips, a world that has nothing to do with the daily grad-grind of chopping sugar into lumps or scooping tea into containers.

The fact that Sancho had married a black woman was unusual in itself. Equally uncommonly, Anne Osborne was literate and often read the newspapers or the letters that her husband was busy scribbling. Her brother, John, lived with his own wife in Bond Street during the 1770s, and the two families got on well. In a bleak letter Sancho wrote after the death of his daughter Kitty, he announced, ‘Tomorrow night I shall have a few friends to meet brother Osborne. We intend to be merry.’¹⁰⁶ At moments of the greatest distress, he found it comforting to drown his sorrows with people from a similar background.

Such bleakness was the exception rather than the rule. Anne brought her husband great joy. He referred to her jocularly as ‘old Duchess’ and ‘hen’, and to her and the children as ‘Sanchonettas’.¹⁰⁷ He found being on his own in London very taxing, and missed Anne intensely whenever they were separated. In a letter from Richmond, Sancho wrote, ‘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.’¹⁰⁸

One might think these statements insignificant: they’re the kind of soppy, affectionate words husbands are meant to say to their wives. Yet in over two hundred years of writing about London by African and South Asian writers, there are almost no accounts of quiet, domestic contentment. Home, all too often, is where the heartache is. This makes the Sanchos’ married life in Westminster during the height of the Atlantic slave trade, and when slavery was still legal in England, all the more noteworthy. The fact that Ignatius led a public life – chatting with customers at the counter or the shop-door, discoursing about aesthetic theories or the latest West End show with artists, writing letters to newspapers – makes the unguarded, familial episodes in his letters all the more endearing. There’s a dazed intoxication in the letter he writes to a female friend on the afternoon his wife 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 thro’ joy.’¹⁰⁹ Recounting his daughter Marianne’s birthday, he observed – proudly, wistfully – how Mary was ‘queen of the day, invited two or three young friends – her breast filled with delight unmixed with cares – her heart danced in her eyes – and she looked the happy mortal’.¹¹⁰ Delighting in the progress of his only son, William, Sancho puts aside his usual verbal anticry and marvels that ‘He is the type of his father – fat – heavy – sleepy’. Later he rejoices in Billy’s teething and taking his first few steps.

But the joy is tempered with anxiety: Sancho is in his late forties and knows his health is deteriorating rapidly. He fears he won’t be around much longer and becomes even more apprehensive about his 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 quick-sands, rocks, and shoals of life’.¹¹¹ His fears and fretting take on a special piquancy given the appalling circumstances of his parents’ deaths: ‘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.’¹¹²

Most moving are Sancho’s attempts to ignore the threat of racial contumely and to treat his children to the sights and smells of London. One evening ‘three great girls – a boy – and a fat old fellow’ eschew travelling over Westminster Bridge and, more excitingly, go by boat to New Spring Gardens, near Lambeth Palace. Temporarily liberated from the anxieties of commerce, far away from the stench, fogs and clatter of the capital’s busy streets – which constituted the only metropolis most black Londoners would ever know – the Sanchos luxuriated in the August sunshine: ‘[they were] as happy and pleas’d as a fine evening – fine place – good songs – much company – and good music could make them. – Heaven and Earth! – how happy, how delighted were the girls!’¹¹³

They rarely enjoyed such simple pleasures as these. Unlike the legions of wealthy Europeans who toured England during the eighteenth century and visited such architectural and arboreal delights as Bath, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Blenheim Palace, Sancho’s family could not afford regular excursions. Nor did they want to be objects of scrutiny for passers-by: the London mob looked ‘on foreigners in general with contempt’.¹¹⁴ A letter of Sancho’s describes a day out at Vauxhall Gardens; as his family returned home, he says, they ‘were gazed at – followed, &c. &c. – but not much abused’.¹¹⁵ Eager not to bite back and create the kind of tension that might put his wife and children in danger, Sancho even refrained from the brusque wit that his friend William Stevenson later recalled him deploying on their ambles about the city:

We were walking through Spring-gardens-passage [near Charing Cross], when, a small distance from before us, a young Fashionable said to his companion, loud enough to be heard, ‘Smoke Othello!’ This did not escape my Friend Sancho; who, 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!’¹¹⁶

The vague fear Sancho felt as he gazed at his children dangling at his knees and playing by his puffed-up ankles becomes more palpable when he talks 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.’¹¹⁷ He sauced and flirted with his female correspondents, but his love for Anne never dwindled. It intensified in the face of his increasing enfeeblement. Caught up as we are in the gathering momentum of his death, 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.¹¹⁸

A week before his death, ‘Mrs Sancho, who speaks by her tears, says what I will not pretend to decypher.’¹¹⁹ It’s an exhilarating moment in black English literature: here is a rare assertion of passion, mutual dependence and intimacy between a formerly enslaved husband and his wife. It’s also a chastening moment: Sancho is about to die; the domestic joy these letters reveal would not be narrated again for over 150 years. The more one reads the Letters, the more one becomes aware of the existence of two Ignatius Sanchos. The first is a public man – he writes to the press, dines with leading artists of the day, discourses on cultural issues. The other Sancho is chafed by poverty and domestic grief, deems himself friendless, is confused and angered by the sense of a society spinning out of control.

It’s the first Sancho who has attracted the attention, seized the imagination of historians and writers. This is hardly surprising. Who could resist the anomalous allure of a fleshy black Falstaff who was born aboard a slave ship but ended his life hobnobbing with the likes of Sterne and Garrick? Nor is this version of Sancho wholly wrong. After all, many of the letters show his keenness for staying abreast of topical affairs. He rejoiced in the acquittal of Jane Butterfield who had been charged with poisoning her benefactor. His politics – conservative by today’s orthodoxies – shine through in his exultation that ‘the Queen, God bless her! safe; – another Princess – Oh the cake and caudle! – Then the defeat of Washintub’s army – and the capture of Arnold and Sulivan with seven thousand prisoners.’¹²⁰

As well as reading and gossiping about the antics of rich and famous people, Sancho socialized with some of them. Gainsborough’s friend, John Henderson, known as the ‘Bath Roscius’, pressed Sancho to see him perform in Henry V. Another friend bought him a box ticket so that they might see Henderson’s Richard III; after the show they dined with Garrick, ‘where goodnature and good-sense mixed itself with the most cheerful welcome’.¹²¹ The composer and violinist, Felice Giardini, sent him tickets; he passed them on to a friend so that he might ‘judge of fiddlers’ taste and fiddlers’ consequence in our grand metropolis’.¹²² Such friendships often had financial benefits: George Cumberland was so pleased by Sancho’s response to his ‘Tale of Cambambo’ that he told his brother, ‘I shall like him as long as I live [ … ] In the mean time as he is a grocer I think it would be proper to buy all my Tea & Sugar of him.’¹²³ John Thomas Smith, later a Governor of the British Museum, recalled going with Joseph Nollekens to Charles Street to deliver a bust of Sterne. He observed that Sancho ‘spake well of art’ and ‘was extremely intimate’ with the painter, Mortimer.¹²⁴

However, there’s another side to Sancho’s account of life in the capital which is less grand. Though he never sank as low as Gronniosaw, he was by no means rich. Shops in Westminster were charged high rents compared to those in other parts of London. He couldn’t always afford to keep his shop heated; the exodus of affluent Londoners to their country residences during the summer left trade alarmingly slack. He wrote once to Spink that

I am at the present moment – thank fortune! not quite worth ten shillings – pity – cursed foolish pity – is, with as silly wishes, all I have to comfort you with. – Were I to throw out my whole thoughts upon paper, it would take a day’s writing, and thou wouldst be a fool to read it.¹²⁵

Finances were often so poor that he relied on his correspondents to send him old quills with which to pen his letters. In December 1779 he unsuccessfully applied to have his grocery act 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’.¹²⁶ The final dash gives this last sentence a quiet sting. Though Sancho couched his proposal in a tone of comic amiability – in doing so revealing a keen appreciation of how he was perceived by his fellow Londoners – there’s no disguising his terror of having what few savings (and social status) he’d accumulated over the years suddenly wiped out:

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.¹²⁷

During these latter years of economic insecurity, Sancho felt London was becoming ever crueller and more amoral: ‘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.’¹²⁸ Through the course of the Letters, he gets increasingly crabby. The city, he feels, has gone to the dogs and he is revolted by the decline in spirituality. As a shopkeeper, Sancho had daily contact with many of the fops he later lambasted. In one of his bleakest and most condemnatory letters, Sancho’s belief that ‘Trade is at so low an ebb [ … ] we are a ruined people’ drives him to an excoriating survey of metropolitan morality:

The blessed Sabbath-day is used by the trader for country excursions – tavern dinners – rural walks [ … ] The poorer sort do any thing – but go to church – they take their dust in the field, and conclude the sacred evening with riots, drunkenness, and empty pockets: – The beau in upper life hires his whisky and beast for twelve shillings; his girl dressed en militaire for half-a-guinea, and spends his whole week’s earnings to look and be thought quite the thing. – And for upper tiptop high life – cards and music are called in to dissipate the chagrin of a tiresome tedious Sunday’s evening – The example spreads downwards from them to their domestics; – the laced valet and the livery beau either debauch the maids, or keep their girls – Thus profusion and cursed dissipation fill the prisons, and feed the gallows.¹²⁹

Sancho’s outburst seems almost premonitory given the mass chaos that erupted a fortnight later during the Gordon Riots of June 1780 in which around 850 people died. Christopher Hibbert has located the cause of these riots not so much in doctrinal or anti-Catholic sentiment as in a confluence of aristocratic laxity and welled-up plebeian suffering. Sancho was blunter and lashed out at ‘the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with’.¹³⁰

His hatred of foppery was influenced by Methodism which enjoined a distrust of ornamentation and anything smacking of Baroque excess. Sancho had converted in 1769 and loved to attend Sunday sermons. He particularly admired Dr Dodd, the preacher at Charlotte Chapel, Pimlico, on whose behalf he appealed – fruitlessly – for clemency after he was sentenced to death for forgery. Such sermons bolstered Sancho’s belief in the importance of good works. In a letter written one Sunday evening to John Meheux, he praised that morning’s sermonist, Richard Harrison, whose ‘whole drift was that we should live the life of angels here – in order to be so in reality hereafter’.¹³¹

Chaos was the central fact of London life in the eighteenth century. The shopkeeper’s life was one of long hours, modest profits, and both short- and medium-term insecurity. Noisy vendors kept Sancho’s family awake at night by shrilly advertising late editions of the Gazette. Westminster was full of courtyards and alleyways which became no-go zones after dark. Writing a letter late one evening, Sancho was interrupted by a furious knocking at his shop-door. The man responsible had been delivering trunks for a lady when, his attention diverted, a boy he had asked to guard the other trunks in his cart had run off with them.

As in most English households at the time, infant mortality and sudden bereavement frequently afflicted Sancho’s family. Personal and political anguish often meshed:

The republicans teem with abuse, and with King’s friends are observed to have long faces – every body looks wiser than common – the cheating shop-counter is deserted, for the gossiping door-threshold – and every half hour has its fresh swarm of lies. – What’s to become of us? We are ruined and sold, is the exclamation of every mouth – the moneyed man trembles for the funds – the land-holder for his acres – the married men for their families, old maids – alas! and old fusty bachelors, for themselves.¹³²

Sancho was an ardent royalist who mourned that ‘it is too much the fashion to treat the Royal family with disrespect’.¹³³ He felt further beleaguered by the economic and territorial wars that were breaking out throughout the Empire during the second half of the 1770s. At such fluxy times, Sancho often took refuge in his blackness. Invoking his African birthright seemed to give him a kind of spiritual and intellectual space into which he could retreat from the awfulness of his 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.¹³⁴

Sancho may claim he’s only a lodger but the mass of political details he supplied in this letter reveals someone who kept scrupulously up-to-date with contemporary affairs. This isn’t the blasé or casually ignorant response of the genuinely detached lodger. More likely, it’s the exasperated outcry of one hungry for quietude. Sancho’s life had rarely been free from disruption, upheaval, and enforced reversals of fortune. Now, spent and almost decrepit at the end of his life, all he wanted was to be able to look after his family and balance his grocery’s books. If he could also indulge in gossiping, or browse through the Gazette whilst reclining in his easy chair, occasionally gazing fondly at his wife slicing vegetables at a table and his children playing near the fireplace, then that was as close to happiness as he could imagine.

There may be two Sanchos, but neither one is any less real than the other. An appreciation of either persona – urbanely self-assured, or nervous and indigent – sharpens our understanding of the other. The Sancho who was cultured, exulted in the company of other artists, and possessed sufficient personality to warrant a portrait by Gainsborough, becomes all the more admirable when we see how hard he had to struggle to pursue his artistic interests. He wasn’t to the manor born, he never possessed great wealth, writing and composing music had to be subordinated to the demands of retailing. Equally, the quotidian struggles of the tobacconist and tradesman become more fascinating when contrasted with the refined face he exposed to posh society.

Perhaps the defining image of his life in London is to be found in one of the last letters he wrote, three months before his death in December 1780. He’d just attended hustings for the election of two Westminster MPs to the House of Commons where he would have heard speeches given by some of the greatest public figures of the day: Sir George Brydges Rodney, the heroic Rear Admiral of the relief of Gibraltar in 1780; the Honourable Charles James Fox, leader of the Opposition. The venue was packed; emotions and rhetoric ran wild; ‘the glorious Fox’ was ‘the father and school of oratory himself’; proceedings stretched out for over four and a half hours.¹³⁵ Here sits Sancho, taking in all the excitement and drama. He was born on a slave ship. Now he holds the franchise – the only black man in the eighteenth century known to have done so. Born in transit thousands of miles away, apparently destined for a short and brutally functional life, he finds himself in Westminster, at the very heart of Empire. He has arrived. He is at the centre. He belongs.

And yet, as the hustings come to a close, and Sancho has voted for Rodney and Fox, he tells his correspondent of how he ‘hobbled home full of pain and hunger’.¹³⁶ To an onlooker, the sight of a well-dressed, rotund negro limping away from Westminster hustings, perhaps comparing notes with other members of the audience, perhaps on his own, cursing and wheezing, would have been incongruous and funny. It does have a comedic aspect. But there’s also pathos and poignancy. Sancho participates and is present at the great events of his day. Yet it’s a struggle – his family is poor; he is famished. His body is falling apart and, though his feet are swollen with gout, he can’t afford a carriage in which to go home. He has travelled so far in his life, he can barely hobble any farther. He has trafficked between the worlds of the grocery and of high culture, an enslaved past and a liberated present, the slave ship and the metropolis. He can’t stride much farther. Almost at the centre, but not quite, Sancho’s experiences foreshadow those of many of the writers who follow him down the centuries.

^* ‘Orangoutangs do not seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race; with some of whom, it is credible that they have the most intimate connexion and consanguinity. The amorous intercourse between them may be frequent; the Negroes themselves bear testimony that such intercourses actually happen; and it is certain that both races agree perfectly well in lasciviousness of disposition.’ Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), vol. 2, p.370.