for its historical rather than its aesthetic significance.
A major reason for the success of Sancho’s book was that he was already known to a large section of the metropolitan elite. This was because of his friendship with Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), country pastor and author of Tristram Shandy, a ninevolume novel that is in equal parts philosophical treatise, family saga, shaggy-dog story, anatomy of melancholy, and proto-Modernist experimental fiction with a memorable cast of characters that includes the grandiloquent and crazed autodidact Walter Shandy, placid Uncle Toby who only ever gets animated by the thought of military fortifications, and the waspish and incompetent Dr Slop. Standing alongside Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as one of the three most important novelists of the eighteenth century, Sterne has been a major influence on twentieth-century writers such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera.
Sterne was at the height of his considerable popularity when Sancho first contacted him during the summer of 1766. He had been reading a copy of Sterne’s theological tract, Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life (1760), when he came across a passage which dealt with ‘how bitter a draught’ slavery was.56 Wanting to thank the author for such progressive sentiments, and perhaps also to establish contact with so distinguished a man of letters, Sancho introduced himself in his note as ‘one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs”’, before going on to praise Sterne’s character Uncle Toby: ‘I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to shake hands with the honest corporal.’57 The bulk of the letter, though, picked up on the reference to slavery in Job’s Account. Why not, he asked,
give one half-hour’s attention to slavery, as it is this day practised in our West Indies. – That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many – but if only of one – Gracious God! – what a feast to a benevolent heart.58
Sterne – whose own father had died of fever in 1731 after his regiment had been sent by the Duke of Newcastle to put down a slave uprising in Jamaica – was delighted to receive this letter.59 A benighted negro – known in the Georgian period merely as a trope of literary sentimentalism – was here communicating to him in person, confronting the author. In his reply, Sterne mused on the ‘strange coincidence’ that he had been ‘writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ at the very moment Sancho’s letter had arrived, and promised to weave the subject of slavery into his narrative if he could. Picking up on Sancho’s conceit of walking a great distance to meet Toby, he declared that he ‘would set out this hour upon a pilgrimage to Mecca’ in order to alleviate the distress of African slaves. Sterne ended his letter by congratulating Sancho on his academic diligence, and promised that, ‘believe me, I will not forget yr Letter’.60
The ninth volume of Tristram Shandy (1767) contains Trim’s account to Toby of how he once went to visit his brother and a Jewish widow. He entered their shop only to find there a ‘poor negro girl’ whose behaviour as well as her colour captivated him. She was so sensitive to the idea of pain that she made sure never to swat flies, but instead slapped at them with a bunch of soft white feathers.61 Hearing the tale, Toby was moved that a girl who had been oppressed on account of her colour from the day she was born was, nonetheless, loth to ‘oppress’ flies. He insisted to his sceptical friend that the story proved categorically that black people, like Europeans, possessed souls. This being the case, Africans could not be the inferior, sub-human brutes that plantation owners and pseudo-scientists in the late eighteenth century claimed they were.
Sterne’s and Sancho’s friendship wasn’t confined to the epistolary sphere. In a letter from June 1767, Sterne hoped that his ‘friend Sancho’ wouldn’t forget his ‘custom of giving me a call at my lodgings’.62 He was writing from Coxwould near York having temporarily left the Bond Street home in London at which Sancho frequently used to call. The letter’s tone is one of intimacy, both in revelation and in register; Sterne bemoans his ailing health, his weary spirits and his equally weary body. In another letter he asked Sancho to urge the Montagus to subscribe to his book.63 The idea of a successful white author in the middle of the eighteenth century asking a slave’s son for financial assistance is startling. It certainly testifies to their closeness for, as one biographer has observed, ‘A person has to be quite secure of his position to ask and receive such favours, especially from a man who could not afford a subscription himself.’64
Sancho always loved Sterne. One of his most prized possessions in his Charles Street grocery was a cast of the novelist’s head that had been made in Rome from a bust by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. It’s unlikely that he knew much about where it had come from. The truth emerged when Lord Justice Mansfield, the man whose 1772 court ruling played an important role in outlawing slavery in England, later had an appointment to sit for Nollekens. The sculptor pointed to Sterne’s bust and confided to Mansfield that he had used plaster casts of it to smuggle silk stockings, gloves and lace from Rome to London.65
Sancho was drawn to Sterne’s writing not because of its avantgarde trickiness, but because of the religious values it expressed. These can be found (though they are rarely emphasized) in all of the pastor’s work. For instance, in the sermon, Philanthropy Recommended (1760), Sterne recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan who, unlike the wealthier travellers who had preceded him on that route, had been prepared to deflect his attention and compassion towards the stricken victim lying at the side of the road down which he’d been travelling. Sterne used this story to attack the bogus and solipsistic theology of a certain kind of Christianity:
Take notice with what sanctity he goes to the end of his days in the same selfish track in which he first set out – turning neither to the right hand nor to the left – but plods on – pores all his life long upon the ground, as if afraid to look up, lest peradventure he should see aught which might turn him one moment out of that strait line where interest is carrying him.66
Linearity equals selfishness. We must be prepared to look around us, to halt, to be diverted by what’s going on in the corners, the crevices, the byways of life. These side-routes are full of value, pleasure, goodness. Here, in Sterne’s work, sermons pop up in military textbooks; young negro girls are found to have souls and compassion. This is a religious doctrine that commands us to be concerned for the defective, the maimed, the incapable, those unable to hasten along the straight paths of economic or social success. Indeed, Tristram Shandy is a novel characterized by disability: Toby has a wounded groin, Trim a creaky knee, the narrator a flattened nose. Sterne allowed these characters to talk, to yarn, to smuggle their way into our affections. He achieved this by means of digressions, hobbyhorses, and by procrastinating and shilly-shallying rather than by kowtowing to the narratory imperative. Tristram, the novel’s narrator, was literally – and morally – correct when he asserted: ‘my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, – and at the same time’.67 Sterne himself eschewed a rigidly linear, sequential unfurling of plot. In Tristram Shandy he approvingly reproduced Hogarth’s line of beauty: it dips, rises, fluctuates rather than heading straight into the future.68 By choosing to incorporate dashes and marbled pages within his novel, Sterne requires us to read more deeply into the text, to recognize that smooth-talking eloquence is less important than empathy, solidarity.
Sterne
