lives and about how, just before they decided to surrender themselves unto Christ, they experienced extreme guilt and self-abasement. The phrases they used to do so were often tired and hackneyed. In contrast, Equiano’s account of this troubled period in his life is far from formulaic. It also seems somehow implausible. Black people who roam London’s streets in this period usually do so because they’re panhandling or because they’re on the run from their masters. That they would dizzy themselves searching for faith is especially noteworthy given that throughout history most chroniclers of London have tended to dwell on its venal and secular aspects. Those who chart the immigrant experience associate faith with faith in the motherland or see it as a metaphor for resilience during hard times. In Equiano’s narrative the capital becomes a crucible for transformation, one that hoists him from servitude to freedom, from the choppy waves of agnosticism to the pure shores of Christian salvation – a double emancipation. This rebirth acted as a prelude to his decision to begin campaigning on behalf of his fellow black Londoners. The city was worth enskying – not just because as sailor, servant and activist he had flourished there – but because all those experiences had added up to make him a figure of such public importance as to merit an autobiography, one that helped accelerate the abolition of slavery, under which system he had been brought to the metropolis in the first place.
Equiano may be the most famous black writer of the eighteenth century but his is by no means the most substantial, nor the most astonishing chronicle of exilic London. That accolade belongs to Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), whose life, perhaps because it wasn’t quite as buffeted as that of Equiano or of Gronniosaw, has often been discussed in rather dismissive terms. He has been described as a Sambo figure and as ‘one of the most obsequious of eighteenth-century blacks’.48 Yet those who compare him unfavourably to the more ‘righteous’ Equiano rarely mention the fact that not only did the latter come from a slave-owning family, but that he gained his freedom through purchase rather than escape and, in so doing, ‘implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery’.49 Moreover, he later went on to buy slaves whom he set to work on a Central American plantation.
Sancho was born aboard a slave ship heading for the Spanish West Indies. His mother died before he was two years old; his father committed suicide. Soon after, he was brought over to England where his master gave him to three maiden ladies who lived in Greenwich. Like wicked sisters in a fairy story, they refused to educate him and bestowed, as did many wealthy families who owned blacks in the eighteenth century, a preposterous surname upon their new possession in the belief that he bore a passing likeness to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s much put-upon squire.
Fortunately, a godfather in the form of the eccentric John, second Duke of Montagu, soon emerged to offer Sancho an escape from what would have been a life of servitude and illiteracy. The Duke, who lived nearby at Montagu House in Blackheath, London, was famed for his philanthropy and had been known to rescue from penury total strangers whom he had seen wandering about in St James’s Park.50
The Duke was passionately interested in theatre and in opera. He devoted much of his energy to promoting both arts, though the size of his financial outlay was usually in inverse proportion to the artistic success it reaped. In 1721 he even brought a company to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Sancho found in his household a refuge from the cold philistinism he faced daily at the sisters’ home. Ever the cultural evangelist, Montagu fomented and helped to feed the African teenager’s growing appetite for literature and art. The Duke, so full of humanitarian zeal in his personal behaviour, also proposed constructing a seaport and depot in Beaulieu Creek – where he owned land – in order to profit from the slave trade by means of ‘grandiose schemes of exploitation’.51
These plans were never realized. John died of pneumonia in 1749. His death panicked Sancho for he longed to leave his mistresses’ home, but Lady Mary Churchill, the Duke’s widow, ‘never associated herself with [John’s] drolleries’, and was reluctant to allow him to serve as butler in her home.52 Sancho threatened to commit suicide before she finally relented. She died in 1751, leaving him seventy pounds and an annuity of thirty pounds.
Flushed with his new-found fortune, Sancho felt liberated and headed for central London where, like many eighteenth-century servants who had been granted their freedom, he frittered his allowance on aping aristocratic excesses such as gambling (he once lost all his clothes playing cribbage), boozing, women, and the theatre. His money exhausted, he returned to Blackheath in 1758 with his new wife, a West Indian named Anne Osborne, who bore him seven children. In November 1768, Sancho, who had attained a degree of celebrity two years earlier after a letter he had written to Laurence Sterne had been published, became the first definitively identified African in England to have his portrait painted when, following in the footsteps of Sterne, Garrick and Dr Johnson, as well as many members of the Montagu family, he sat for Thomas Gainsborough.53
Between 1767 and 1770 he had at least three pieces of music published which the musicologist Josephine Wright has described as revealing ‘the hand of a knowledgeable, capable amateur who wrote in miniature forms in an early Classic style’.54 He also wrote an analytical work dealing with music theory, no copy of which has survived. Towards the end of 1773, having become too incapacitated to continue work at Blackheath, he moved with his family to 20 Charles Street, Westminster, which lay close to another Montagu House, built by the second Duke at Privy Gardens in Whitehall. Here he opened up a grocery selling imperial products such as sugar, tea and tobacco. The shop lay on the corner of two streets, making Sancho – almost two centuries before the retailing revolution effected during the 1960s by an array of Patels, Bharats and Norats – the first coloured cornershop proprietor in England. Parish rate books show that his premises had one of the higher rents in a street that chiefly housed tradesmen such as cheesemongers and victuallers as well as surveyors, barristers and watchmakers.
The majority of Sancho’s extant correspondence stems from this period, a busy one during which he also composed harpsichord pieces, imparted literary advice to writers such as George Cumberland, socialized with the likes of Garrick, Reynolds and Nollekens, and succeeded – albeit with difficulty – in juggling both commerce and connoisseurship. For much of the 1770s, he paid the penalty for his youthful dissolution. Racked by constant stomach pains, he was also frequently gout-ridden, and died on 14 December 1780. Two years later one of his correspondents, Frances Crewe, took advantage of the rising tide of Abolitionism and published as many of his letters as she could track down in a two-volume edition that was also prefaced by a short biography by the Tory MP Joseph Jekyll. The book was a huge success, attracting 1182 subscribers (a number apparently unheard of since the early days of The Spectator) and selling out within months. It raised more than five hundred pounds for his bereaved family and was followed by another four editions over the next two years.
The letters themselves are of variable quality. Many are homiletic and filled with social and religious advice to his correspondents. Others contain literary and art criticism, accounts of illness-torn domestic life at Charles Street, political commentary, descriptions of election hustings and London’s pleasure gardens, requests for financial aid. Some are just business chits, workaday notes dealing with grocery matters, and are accordingly rather dull. Some, too, are clotted with the rhetoric of social decorum: cordiality, cultivation, civility, sincerity and gratitude are the key – and endlessly invoked – virtues. He lauds people excessively and claims they are ‘deservedly honoured, loved, and esteemed’.55 At his best, though Sancho can also be scatological and biting, as well as learned, tender and deeply moving. The letters brim, to an extent unparalleled for almost two centuries, with comedy, familial devotion and an unembarrassed love of London. They also display an obsession with literariness,
