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

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