he was known to be most fond of his humbler parishioners. He had great regard for ‘the house servants whom he portrayed so lovingly as Susannah, Obadiah, Jonathan the coachman, and the fat foolish scullion’.69 Sancho, who had spent most of his life as a domestic servant for the Montagus, would undoubtedly have appreciated the value of such personal kindnesses in daily life. He was also stirred by Sterne’s warmness towards the socially marginal. As someone who was handicapped by both colour and class, and who had gained literacy and an education only as a result of being taken up by an eccentric aristocrat, he had to be.
Sancho, then, grew up around – and was the beneficiary of – people who espoused a social creed that stressed the importance of looking out for and helping those struck down by misfortune. He imbibed their values. Generosity, toleration and philanthropy were to become key words in his ethical lexicon. As a small-scale grocer whose business frequently suffered from downturns in trade, Sancho often relied on the kindness of friends and acquaintances to keep his ailing business afloat.
It’s hardly surprising that he distrusted merely metaphysical theology, and forms of Christianity which, he felt, were ‘so fully taken up with pious meditations [ … ] that they have little if any room for the love of man’.70 In a letter from 1775, a depressed Sancho, writing about the poorliness of his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Lydia, claimed, ‘I am sufficiently acquainted with care – and I think I fatten upon calamity. – Philosophy is best practised, I believe, by the easy and affluent. – One ounce of practical religion is worth all that ever the Stoics wrote.’71 Lydia died six months later.
Issues of race and philanthropy come together in a letter praising the verse of the young black American poet, Phillis Wheatley, who had arrived in London in 1773 and whose first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, had created a literary and political sensation that same year:
the list of splendid – titled – learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress. – alas! shews how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are – without generosity – feeling – and humanity. – These good great folks – all know – and perhaps admired – nay, praised Genius in bondage and then, like the Priests and the Levites in sacred writ, passed by – not one good Samaritan amongst them.72
Sancho’s belief that linearity and eyes-on-the-prize straight-aheadedness were morally dangerous re-emerges in a letter about his friend Highmore who, he claimed, ‘rides uneasily [ … ] he is for smoother roads – a pacing tilt – quilted saddle – snaffle bride, with silken reins, and golden stirrups. So mounted we all should like; but I query albeit, though it might be for the ease of our bodies – whether it would be for the good of our souls.’73
Sancho wasn’t merely a passive recipient of acts of Christian charity; he helped others unstintingly. For instance, he played the Good Samaritan to Isaac de Groote, writing to Garrick and newspaper editors in an attempt to stoke up support for this myopic and paralysed octogenarian who was a descendant of the legal theorist Grotius. Even as he performed good deeds such as these, however, Sancho felt rather uneasy; he knew that some people would feel ashamed about relying on the beneficence of an ex-slave: ‘I have wished to do more than I ought – though at the same time too little for such a being to receive – without insult – from the hands of a poor negroe.’74 On other occasions he wrote coyly ironic letters of introduction on behalf of his black friends: his reference for the bandsman, Charles Lincoln, pastiched the rhetoric both of contemporary pseudo-science and of newspaper lost-and-found ads: ‘a woolly pate – and face as dark as your humble; – Guiney-born, and French-bred – the sulky gloom of Africa dispelled by Gallic vivacity – and that softened again with English sedateness – a rare fellow!’75
At least two other aspects of Sterne’s novel – naming and decrepitude – spoke directly to Sancho. Walter Shandy believed that names had a direct relationship to a child’s future success. Christening was, he felt, a form of branding and a means of determining social rank. He was understandably mortified to learn that his servant, Susannah, had been unable to get her tongue round ‘Trismegistus’, the mighty and winning name he had chosen for his son, and, instead, plumped at the baptism service for the paltry and demeaning ‘Tristram’. Sancho, like many of his fellow blacks in England at this time, was given his name because his owners believed that he would never – could never – attain sufficient status in society for his name to become a source of embarrassment to him. But Sancho far outstripped his anticipated destiny. Like Tristram, he exhibited such winning talent in both his life and his letters as to discredit theories that claimed people’s abilities could be predicted even before they were born.
Again, the preoccupation with weakness and illness in Tristram Shandy could hardly fail to resonate with the declining Sancho. As Gainsborough’s oil painting shows, his nose was as flat as that of the novel’s stricken narrator. Like Toby, and like Sterne himself whose bout of tuberculosis left him with a weak, cracked voice, Sancho had some speaking problems; Jekyll claims he harboured an ambition to perform on the stage, but ‘a defective and incorrigible articulation rendered it abortive’.76 It was ill-health that cut short his service with the Montagu family and led him to open a grocery. As the years passed and Sancho was increasingly tortured by gout, dropsy, corpulence and asthma, he continued to draw strength from Sterne’s belief in the need to struggle on in the face of physical debility.
Contemporary criticism focused on Sterne’s peculiar style and his rather salacious humour. It took Sancho, an ex-slave, to pinpoint immediately the moral core of Sterne’s work and, more than that, to glean how his form and subject matter were so intimately connected. In a lengthy letter comparing Sterne, Fielding and Swift, Sancho explained that his criterion for greatness was the diffusion and generosity of each writer’s moral vision. So Sterne surpassed Fielding in the ‘distribution of his lights, which he has so artfully varied throughout his work, that the oftener they are examined the more beautiful they appear’.77 Swift was a greater wit than Sterne, Sancho claimed, but Swift excelled ‘in grave-faced irony, whilst Sterne lashes his whips with jolly laughter’. He went on to argue that
Sterne was truly a noble philanthropist – Swift was rather cynical; – what Swift would fret and fume at – such as the petty accidental sourings and bitters in life’s cup – you plainly may see, Sterne would laugh at – and parry off by a larger humanity, and regular good will to man. I know you will laugh at me – do – I am content; – if I am an enthusiast in any thing, it is in favour of my Sterne.78
It was these thematic and ethical parallels between Sterne’s work and his own life that led Sancho to use Shandean literary devices. On the most superficial level, this involved creating comic neologisms: ‘bumfiddled’ for befuddled; ‘alas! an unlucky parciplepliviaplemontis seizes my imagination’; and describing his friend John Ireland as an ‘eccentric phizpoop’.79 Sancho clearly wanted to impress upon his correspondents his facility in the English language, something his vocal malady prevented him from doing on the stage. Born into slavery, he wished to slough off all vestiges of social and intellectual passivity by becoming a creator, an independent manufacturer of new words and concepts.
The Shandean echoes in Sancho’s letters weren’t solely verbal. He used asterisks when writing flirtatiously about rich farmers’ daughters. And in a letter to the First Clerk in the Board of Control, John
