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

The final dash gives this last sentence a quiet sting. Though Sancho couched his proposal in a tone of comic amiability – in doing so revealing a keen appreciation of how he was perceived by his fellow Londoners – there’s no disguising his terror of having what few savings (and social status) he’d accumulated over the years suddenly wiped out:

      Figure to yourself, my dear Sir, a man of a convexity of belly exceeding Falstaff – and a black face into the bargain – waddling in the van of poor thieves and pennyless prostitutes – with all the supercilious mock dignity of little office – what a banquet for wicked jest and wanton wit.¹²⁷

      During these latter years of economic insecurity, Sancho felt London was becoming ever crueller and more amoral: ‘Trade is duller than ever I knew it – and money scarcer; – foppery runs higher – and vanity stronger; – extravagance is the adored idol of this sweet town.’¹²⁸ Through the course of the Letters, he gets increasingly crabby. The city, he feels, has gone to the dogs and he is revolted by the decline in spirituality. As a shopkeeper, Sancho had daily contact with many of the fops he later lambasted. In one of his bleakest and most condemnatory letters, Sancho’s belief that ‘Trade is at so low an ebb [ … ] we are a ruined people’ drives him to an excoriating survey of metropolitan morality:

      The blessed Sabbath-day is used by the trader for country excursions – tavern dinners – rural walks [ … ] The poorer sort do any thing – but go to church – they take their dust in the field, and conclude the sacred evening with riots, drunkenness, and empty pockets: – The beau in upper life hires his whisky and beast for twelve shillings; his girl dressed en militaire for half-a-guinea, and spends his whole week’s earnings to look and be thought quite the thing. – And for upper tiptop high life – cards and music are called in to dissipate the chagrin of a tiresome tedious Sunday’s evening – The example spreads downwards from them to their domestics; – the laced valet and the livery beau either debauch the maids, or keep their girls – Thus profusion and cursed dissipation fill the prisons, and feed the gallows.¹²⁹

      Sancho’s outburst seems almost premonitory given the mass chaos that erupted a fortnight later during the Gordon Riots of June 1780 in which around 850 people died. Christopher Hibbert has located the cause of these riots not so much in doctrinal or anti-Catholic sentiment as in a confluence of aristocratic laxity and welled-up plebeian suffering. Sancho was blunter and lashed out at ‘the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with’.¹³⁰

      His hatred of foppery was influenced by Methodism which enjoined a distrust of ornamentation and anything smacking of Baroque excess. Sancho had converted in 1769 and loved to attend Sunday sermons. He particularly admired Dr Dodd, the preacher at Charlotte Chapel, Pimlico, on whose behalf he appealed – fruitlessly – for clemency after he was sentenced to death for forgery. Such sermons bolstered Sancho’s belief in the importance of good works. In a letter written one Sunday evening to John Meheux, he praised that morning’s sermonist, Richard Harrison, whose ‘whole drift was that we should live the life of angels here – in order to be so in reality hereafter’.¹³¹

      Chaos was the central fact of London life in the eighteenth century. The shopkeeper’s life was one of long hours, modest profits, and both short- and medium-term insecurity. Noisy vendors kept Sancho’s family awake at night by shrilly advertising late editions of the Gazette. Westminster was full of courtyards and alleyways which became no-go zones after dark. Writing a letter late one evening, Sancho was interrupted by a furious knocking at his shop-door. The man responsible had been delivering trunks for a lady when, his attention diverted, a boy he had asked to guard the other trunks in his cart had run off with them.

      As in most English households at the time, infant mortality and sudden bereavement frequently afflicted Sancho’s family. Personal and political anguish often meshed:

      The republicans teem with abuse, and with King’s friends are observed to have long faces – every body looks wiser than common – the cheating shop-counter is deserted, for the gossiping door-threshold – and every half hour has its fresh swarm of lies. – What’s to become of us? We are ruined and sold, is the exclamation of every mouth – the moneyed man trembles for the funds – the land-holder for his acres – the married men for their families, old maids – alas! and old fusty bachelors, for themselves.¹³²

      Sancho was an ardent royalist who mourned that ‘it is too much the fashion to treat the Royal family with disrespect’.¹³³ He felt further beleaguered by the economic and territorial wars that were breaking out throughout the Empire during the second half of the 1770s. At such fluxy times, Sancho often took refuge in his blackness. Invoking his African birthright seemed to give him a kind of spiritual and intellectual space into which he could retreat from the awfulness of his surroundings:

      Ireland almost in as true a state of rebellion as America. – Admirals quarrelling in the West-Indies – and at home Admirals that do not choose to fight. – The British empire mouldering away in the West – annihilated in the North – Gibraltar going – and England fast asleep [ … ] For my part, it’s nothing to me – as I am only a lodger – and hardly that.¹³⁴

      Sancho may claim he’s only a lodger but the mass of political details he supplied in this letter reveals someone who kept scrupulously up-to-date with contemporary affairs. This isn’t the blasé or casually ignorant response of the genuinely detached lodger. More likely, it’s the exasperated outcry of one hungry for quietude. Sancho’s life had rarely been free from disruption, upheaval, and enforced reversals of fortune. Now, spent and almost decrepit at the end of his life, all he wanted was to be able to look after his family and balance his grocery’s books. If he could also indulge in gossiping, or browse through the Gazette whilst reclining in his easy chair, occasionally gazing fondly at his wife slicing vegetables at a table and his children playing near the fireplace, then that was as close to happiness as he could imagine.

      There may be two Sanchos, but neither one is any less real than the other. An appreciation of either persona – urbanely self-assured, or nervous and indigent – sharpens our understanding of the other. The Sancho who was cultured, exulted in the company of other artists, and possessed sufficient personality to warrant a portrait by Gainsborough, becomes all the more admirable when we see how hard he had to struggle to pursue his artistic interests. He wasn’t to the manor born, he never possessed great wealth, writing and composing music had to be subordinated to the demands of retailing. Equally, the quotidian struggles of the tobacconist and tradesman become more fascinating when contrasted with the refined face he exposed to posh society.

      Perhaps the defining image of his life in London is to be found in one of the last letters he wrote, three months before his death in December 1780. He’d just attended hustings for the election of two Westminster MPs to the House of Commons where he would have heard speeches given by some of the greatest public figures of the day: Sir George Brydges Rodney, the heroic Rear Admiral of the relief of Gibraltar in 1780; the Honourable Charles James Fox, leader of the Opposition. The venue was packed; emotions and rhetoric ran wild; ‘the glorious Fox’ was ‘the father and school of oratory himself’; proceedings stretched out for over four and a half hours.¹³⁵ Here sits Sancho, taking in all the excitement and drama. He was born on a slave ship. Now he holds the franchise – the only black man in the eighteenth century known to have done so. Born in transit thousands of miles away, apparently destined for a short and brutally functional life, he finds himself in Westminster, at the very heart of Empire. He has arrived. He is at the centre. He belongs.

      And yet, as the hustings come to a close, and Sancho has voted for Rodney and Fox, he tells his correspondent of how he ‘hobbled home full of pain and hunger’.