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

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