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

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