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

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.