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

died, and the rest quarrelled with their African neighbours who, refusing to see them as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, burned down their settlement.

      In the eighteenth century, as has been the case since the Second World War, the notion (however insecurely founded in reality) that too many black people were entering the country animated a number of critics. In 1723 the Daily Journal wrote, ‘’Tis said there is a great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that ‘tis thought in a short time, if they be not suppress’d the city will swarm with them’.²⁸ And in 1731, long before the build-up of a sizeable African presence in the metropolis, the Lord Mayor of London issued a proclamation decreeing that blacks could no longer hold company apprenticeships.

      Foreign travellers were startled (and Americans appalled) by how cosmopolitan the streets of London appeared. As early as 1710 one German visitor noted that, ‘there are, in fact, such a quantity of Moors of both sexes in England that I have not seen before’.²⁹ In a city whose increasing prosperity meant its streets were awash with noble women wrapped in costly shawls and dazzling pearls and shops which displayed exquisite jewellery and exotic fruit, black people embodied a new kind of globalism. Sitting down to compose the ‘Residence in London’ section of The Prelude (1805), William Wordsworth recalled his thrill upon emerging from three years of blanched provincialism at Cambridge:

      Now homeward through the thickening hubbub [ … ]

      The Hunter-Indian; Moors,

      Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,

      And Negro Ladies in white muslin Gowns.³⁰

      Black faces could be seen, if only in isolation, in most quarters of London society. Many turned to music: black bandsmen – particularly trumpeters, drummers and horn players – served with army regiments; others mustered meagre livings by fiddling on street corners and around taverns. Non-melodians begged, swept crossings, or turned to prostitution. Johnson’s biographer, Boswell, even recorded the existence of a black brothel in London in 1774.

      Black Londoners had a visibility far in excess of their small numbers. Images of them cropped up everywhere. They often featured in the prints of Hogarth, Cruikshank, Gillray and Rowlandson, as well as on countless tradesmen’s cards – particularly those of tobacconists. They were used to advertise products such as razors: ‘Ah Massa, if I am continued in your service, dat will be ample reward for Scipio bring good news to you of Packwood’s new invention that will move tings with a touch.’³¹ Huge pictures of negro heads or black boys were ostentatiously displayed on the signs outside taverns, shops and coffeehouses. Attractively painted and gilded, these extruded on to the streets, cutting out daylight on account of their size and, occasionally, falling and killing those people unfortunate enough to be passing below.

      Swarthy Londoners also fleet-foot their way through much of the century’s metropolitan literature. In Thomas Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1702), a quizzical Indian accompanies the narrator on his ambles through the city’s byways and sly-ways. One of the first people they see is another ‘sooty Dog’, who ‘could do nothing but Grin, and shew his Teeth, and cry, Coffee, Sir, Tea, will you please to walk in, Sir, a fresh Pot upon my word’.³² African characters were familiar to theatre-goers, with Southerne’s adaptation of Oroonoko (1696) being performed at least once a season until 1808. Stock characters with names like Mungo, Marianne or Sambo were especially popular; they functioned as comic and mangled-English-speaking versions of the black servants found in aristocratic households.

      After the Abolitionist movement began to flourish in the 1770s and 1780s, it became difficult to avoid the constant gush of anti-slavery poems, songs and broadsheets flooding from the printing presses. Black men and women were cast as heroic leviathans, their teeth of finest ivory, their brows set most nobly, their souls full of pride and vigour. Yet, despite such epic stature, they rarely spoke. Their enslavement and death were drawn out with the maximum of Latinate polysyllables and pathos. It’s no surprise that almost all of these poems – florid, well-intentioned, and crammed with formulaic pieties – have been long forgotten. They deserve the scorn cast upon them by the literary historian Wylie Sypher: ‘The slave and his wretched lot were a poetical pons asinorum: the worse the poet, the more he felt obliged to elevate his subject by the cumbrous splendor of epithet, periphrasis, and apostrophe, even at the cost of dealing with the facts only by footnotes and appendices.’³³

Africans were represented rhetorically as well as visually. Despite being cherished by their aristocratic owners and blending relatively seamlessly into underclass society, a cluster of negative clichés about black people developed and calcified over the course of the century: they were portrayed as stupid, indolent and libidinous. Violent and untrustworthy, they were said to lack ratiocination. They were wild and emotional. Often compared to orang-utans,^* their simian propensities encouraged audiences to believe that enslaving them in no way contradicted the laws of humanity. Such tropes peppered cartoons, stage plays, private journals, plantocratic tracts, coffeehouse pontification, parliamentary invective, and the thick-skulled, blue-blooded pomposities bandied about over the clink and gleam of crystal decanters in noble dining rooms. These views were also confirmed by textbooks – the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1810 described the negro thus:

      Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race; idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness, and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an aweful example of the corruption of man left to himself.³⁴

      It’s clear, then, that black people were almost inescapable in eighteenth-century London. Yet though they’re often spoken about in this period, they’re rarely heard to speak for themselves. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, or James Albert as he was christened, is an exception to this rule. His memoirs, ghost-written by Hannah More ‘for her own private Satisfaction’, were published in Bath in 1772.³⁵

      Gronniosaw, whose grandfather was the King of Baurnou in the north-eastern corner of what is now Nigeria, was sold on the Gold Coast to a Dutch captain for two yards of check cloth. After a long sea journey to Barbados, he eventually found himself in New York serving a young man called Vanhorn. He was soon sold again, this time to Theodore Frelinghuysen, an evangelical Dutch Reformed pastor who tried to educate him.³⁶ Mental collapse ensued: having been introduced to Bunyan’s writings, Gronniosaw became so convinced of his own wickedness that he tried to kill himself with a large case-knife. His master died, forcing him to become a cook on board a privateer’s ship in order to pay off his outstanding debts which an unscrupulous friend of Frelinghuysen had promised to clear. He came through countless adventures at sea before arriving in England where he was immediately robbed of his savings by a corrupt landlady. Eager to visit the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, whose sermons he’d been enthralled by in New York, he headed for London where the minister greeted him warmly before directing him to a lodging house in Petticoat Lane. While eating breakfast the next morning, Gronniosaw heard a clatter coming from above his head. Curious, he climbed upstairs to discover a loft full of women crouched over their looms weaving silk. One of them (never named) besotted him instantly. Despite learning that her errant husband had died, leaving her in debt and with a child to raise on her own, he decided to marry her.

      Difficulties soon arose when Gronniosaw left London to earn money for his new family. Following a brief spell as a servant in Holland, he and his wife settled in a small cottage near Colchester. It was a hideously bleak winter. Gronniosaw had been discharged from work, his wife was sick