you dare suppose I was in fault – No Sir, the pen was diabled – the paper worse, – there was a concatenation of ill-sorted chances – all – all – coincided to contribute to that fatal blot – which has so disarranged my ideas, that I must perforce finish before I had half disburthened my head and heart.80
At this point, the original edition reproduced a black blot.
Sancho – like Sterne – loved puns. They represented fun, randomness, peculiar verbal couplings. The scholar Walter Redfern has claimed that puns are ‘bastards, immigrants, barbarians, extraterrestrials: they intrude, they infiltrate’.81 Tristram Shandy is a celebration of such whimsical contingency. No wonder that Walter, forever obsessed with daft intellectual ideas (names determine success, noses determine greatness, the need to compile a ‘Tristrapaedia’ that contains all human knowledge), hates puns. He feels threatened by the disorderliness and unpredictability they represent. That said, Sancho’s puns are almost uniformly excruciating. He wrote to one correspondent, after receiving a gift of fawn meat, ‘Some odd folks would think it would have been but good manners to have thank’d you for the fawn – but then, says the punster, that would have been so like fawn-ing.’82
The most obvious sign of Sterne’s influence on the Letters is found in Sancho’s punctuation. Full stops, commas and semicolons have been largely replaced by dashes which resemble splinters strewn across a broken page. The effect is to hobble the reader who must pay particular scrutiny to each fragment of prose contained between the dashes. Instead of hurtling through each letter we’re constantly being forced to slow down, to accustom ourselves to the different, more leisurely time-scale of the writer.
These stylistic borrowings from Sterne were anathema to contemporary critics. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), his unflattering account of the mental and moral faculties of negroes, Thomas Jefferson, the future American president, denounced Sancho for affecting ‘a Shandean fabrication of words [ … ] his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky’.83 And in its otherwise complimentary notice of the Letters, The Monthly Review bemoaned Sterne’s and Sancho’s ‘wild, indiscriminate use’ of dashes which were ‘a most vicious practice; especially injurious to all good writing, and good reading too’.84
Sancho used dashes for three reasons. First, as a means of sardonically critiquing contemporary racialist theory. One of the recurring themes of pro-slavery doctrine during the 1770s and 1780s was the inability of negroes to perform linear functions. Edward Long’s notoriously poisonous History of Jamaica (1774) included a discussion of common African attributes:
their corporeal sensations are in general of the grossest frame; their sight is acute, but not correct; they will rarely miss a standing object, but they have no notion of shooting birds on the wing, nor can they project a straight line, nor lay any substance square with another.85
So common was the stress on lineality in anti-Abolition literature that William Dickson felt compelled to challenge it in his Letters On Slavery (1789):
The streets of many towns in this kingdom, and even of this metropolis, are crooked. If our ancestors, who laid out those streets were to be half as much calumniated as the negroes have been, it would probably be asserted, that they could not draw a straight line, between two given points, in the same plane.86
The likes of Edward Long and Samuel Estwick regarded lineality as a metonym for the ability to think straight, to rationalize. Ratiocination being the mark of humanity, Africans couldn’t be human. Long, in his extended discussion of the physical and intellectual similarity between negroes and orang-utans, seems to have come very near to believing this.
Sancho was well aware that Africans were meant to be innately unlinear and irrational. One of his letters begins with the kind of ironic, grandiloquent agglomeration of a sentence that’s also found in Salman Rushdie’s descriptions of London in The Satanic Verses (1988): ‘You have here a kind of medley, a hetrogeneous illspelt hetroclite, (worse) eccentric sort of a – a –; in short, it is a true Negroe calibash of ill-sorted, undigested chaotic matter.’87 Breezily dismissive, Sancho sprays his sentences with dots and dashes to mock the idea that humanity and intelligence are dependent on smooth prosody.
Secondly, the dashes embodied the flurry and chaos Sancho faced in running an urban grocery. Neither the literary allusions nor the discussions of contemporary culture with which his Letters are studded should blind readers to the fact that he spent the last seven years of his life trying to raise a large family whilst warding off poverty. Corresponding with his friends usually required Sancho to snatch spare moments in between serving customers at the counter: ‘I have a horrid story to tell you about the – Zounds! I am interrupted. – Adieu! God keep you!’88 In an earlier letter to Meheux, he noted: ‘Look’ye Sir I write to the ringing of the shop-door bell – I write – betwixt serving – gossiping – and lying. Alas! what cramps to poor genius!’89
The tone of this last remark is comic, but it also shows Sancho to be aware that both his presence among polite company and his aspirations towards becoming a belle-lettrist were regarded as anomalous. In a letter to one of his artist friends he cried, ‘For God’s sake! what has a poor starving Negroe, with six children, to do with kings and heroes, and armies and politics? – aye, or poets and painters? – or artists – of any sort?’90 There’s a palpable pride here; the contrast between the ‘starving Negroe’ and ‘kings and heroes’ is a touch overdone and wilfully self-dramatizing. And yet the letter bristles with a genuine anxiety that also emerged less hysterically in an earlier note to the same correspondent; it began with quotations from Young and Shakespeare before lapsing into self-severity: ‘but why should I pester you with quotations? – to shew you the depths of my erudition, and strut like the fabled bird in his borrowed plumage’.91 The dashes jolt and discombobulate. There’s a stutter here, a nervous tic. Is it appropriate, Sancho seems to be asking, for a mere grocer ever to aspire to join the republic of letters?
Sancho’s life lacked inevitability. His parents could hardly have expected that either they or their son would be sold into captivity. Nor was it probable that he would elude a life of hard labour under the noonday Caribbean sun by being shipped to England. Few imported slaves had the luck to encounter cicerones such as the Duke of Montagu. Fewer still ended their lives circulating among actors, writers and art connoisseurs while owning property a five-minute walk away from the Houses of Parliament. What’s more, at Montagu House in Greenwich, Sancho spent much of his day working in the servant quarters at the bottom corner of the front courtyard; in Westminster his shop was located on the corner between Charles Street and Crown Court. The dashes embody these discontinuities. In geographic as well as in racial and biographical terms, Sancho always occupied an edgy, recessive status.
Finally, Sancho, like Sterne, chose to use dashes extensively ‘to mock assumptions about the elegant measured unity of Enlightened discourse’.92 Parentheses were condemned by eighteenth-century linguistic theorists for signalling mental incoherence and anti-authoritarianism.
