helping the stray, the dispossessed and the routinely scorned, were so keen to stud their texts with them. By wedging dashes into almost every line, right at the centre of their prose, they were trying to illustrate their belief that over-polished and over-polite sentence structures reflected an excessively linear, solipsistic way of thinking that not only glossed over quotidian happenstance, but also, at worst, led to the abduction and enslavement of peoples who didn’t conform to such self-designatedly rational structures of thought. Irony, contingency, solidarity – these were the values they preferred to champion.
In his antepenultimate letter, written a fortnight before his death, when asthma had almost snatched away his last remaining breath and his body was swollen by gout, Sancho asked Spink to forgive ‘the galloping of my pen’ and thanked him for the kindness he’d shown ‘like the Samaritan’s’ over the years: ‘Indulge me, my noble friend, I have seen the priest, and the Levite, after many years’ knowledge, snatch a hasty look, then with averted face pursue their different routes.’93 Here, at the end of his life, when Sancho knew that he was dying, we find him brooding on a parable that he was familiar with from his own study of the Bible as well as the sermons of his beloved Sterne. He compares himself to the helpless roadside victim whose appeals for help were ignored by those travellers racing along the straight highway of self-interest. Only when the Good Samaritan slows down, looks sideways and steps off the beaten track, can he be saved. The dash-strewn, non-linear aesthetic that Sancho lifts from Sterne was similarly designed to stop his correspondent skating too swiftly, too insouciantly over the sentences, and to draw attention to the utterances, the needy existence of the narrator between the clauses.
Sancho was the first black writer to think of himself as metropolitan. He saw the city not just as a place to live in or to make money, but as a set of values, a tone of voice. At its best it was a form of conversation – learned, sophisticated, playful – in which he felt sufficiently confident to take part. His letters narrate both daily events in the capital (gobbets about trade, politics, entertainment), and, in their different registers (from coquettish gossip and news-chronicling to anomie-wearied cri de coeur), the very sound of the city. Long before George Lamming or V.S. Naipaul, and against the least congenial racial and political backdrop imaginable, Sancho saw London as a cultural centre, one that was the obvious place to be if one were – as he liked to think of himself – a man of letters.
Someone like Equiano thought of his work in terms of the good it could do; it might raise money and create publicity for the Abolitionist cause. He wrote with a very specific audience in mind. Sancho, though, wrote with few thoughts of publication. He merely sought a brief respite from the routine stresses of running a grocery. This doesn’t mean that his letters weren’t crammed with details of his quotidian, retail existence. They were. But, at the same time, he rejoiced in stylistic reverie to such an extent that we feel it’s only in his letters that he could fully vent his imagination. He was interested in language, in metaphor (his wife ‘groans with the rheumatism – and I grunt with the gout – a pretty concert!’94), in literary play. He experimented and fidgeted with grammar and layout. He concocted neologisms. One can feel the delight he felt in both writing and reading his own letters. He himself was aware of this and ended one note, ‘Is not that – a good one?’95 Brimming with energy and brio, they often begin with top-of-the-morning exhilaration – ‘Alive! Alive ho!’, ‘Go to!’, ‘Bravo!’ At his best, Sancho is an imp, a freestyler who’s constantly jamming and improvising. He showed that black literature about the city needn’t always be a species of protest literature, that it could be more than a crudely utilitarian discourse that exalts ‘relevance’ or ‘resistance’ at the expense of charm or aesthetics.
He was known to display such breezy confidence in real life too. A friend, William Stevenson, wrote:
When Mr Sancho lived with the Duke of Montagu, he was sent to ask the character of a cook who lived with a native West Indian Planter then residing in London. Upon his delivering the message verbally, the haughty Creole, eying him disdainfully from head to foot, exclaimed, ‘What, Fellow! could not your Master write?’ – My African Friend thus answered him, ‘Sir, when an English Nobleman sends a servant out of livery to another Nobleman, he means to do him an honour. But, when he sends a servant out of livery to a Plebeian, he thinks he does him a greater honour; and the Duke of Montagu has sent me to do you that honour, Sir!’96
The language and imagery of the tradesman often spill over into Sancho’s prose, resulting in the juxtaposition of moralizing abstraction and concrete retailing detail: ‘man is an absurd animal – [ … ] friendship without reason – hate without reflection – knowledge (like Ashley’s punch in small quantities) without judgment’.97 In one of his many excursions into literary criticism, Sancho regretted the commonplace insipidity of much of Voltaire’s Semiramis, and added, ‘From dress – scenery – action – and the rest of playhouse garniture – it may show well and go down – like insipid fish with good sauce.’98
Standing at his shop counter every day, gossiping, joking, often griping about his ailing profits with customers for hours on end, Sancho’s job supplied him with an unending stock of gags. Some were abysmal. He recounted one exasperating disagreement with a customer over the calendar: ‘what? – what! – Dates! Dates! – Am not I a grocer? – pun the second.’99 At other times, his teaselling incited biting satire. Enthusing about the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, he wished
that every member of each house of parliament had one of these books. – And if his Majesty perused one through before breakfast – though it might spoil his appetite – yet the consciousness of having it in his power to facilitate the great work – would give an additional sweetness to his tea.100
Humour is perhaps the dominant tone of these letters. Of course, debility, pensivity and gloom are never absent, either. But only through studied ebullience could Sancho hope to fend off depression. Much of this comedy was self-reflexive: ‘The gout seized me yesterday morning [ … ] I looked rather black all day.’101
Such lines shouldn’t be taken as self-loathing or a pitiable eagerness to amuse his correspondents.102 In a letter to Meheux, he observed that his pen
sucks up more liquor than it can carry, and so of course disgorges it at random. – I will that ye observe the above simile to be a good one – not the cleanliest in nature, I own – but as pat to the purpose as dram-drinking to a bawd – or oaths to a sergeant of the guards – or – or – dulness to a Black-a-moor – Good – excessive good!103
At one level, this passage demonstrates Sancho’s love of literary play. The first half is playful, self-referential, and far removed from the straight-edge polemics of such black Abolitionists as Ottobah Cugoano and John Henry Naimbanna; the second half, however, dispels any suspicion that Sancho is an apolitical Uncle Tom.104 As in Sterne’s work, the teasing and joking of this letter have a strong moral underpinning. Sancho stutters, he g(r)asps desperately for a third analogy to give balance to the sentence. The dashes and the repetition of ‘or’ show that time is running out. He’ll cleave to a simile, any simile, that’ll shore up this sentence in which he finds himself drowning. Which cliché does he use? That of blacks being stupid! Sancho frequently refuted similar nonsenses in his letters and, here, implies
