London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

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