Sancho’s decision to couch political dissent in ironic and deprecating modes emphasizes the fact that humour and conviviality are the abiding registers of the Letters. Such are their avuncularity and their jowly bonhomie that I’m inclined to agree with Lydia Leach, to whose letter of 14 December 1775 Sancho replied: ‘There is something inexpressibly flattering in the notion of your being warmer – from the idea of your much obliged friend’s caring for you.’105
One of the most unusual and appealing aspects of Sancho’s letters are his vignettes of home life. Black people in the eighteenth century were often denied their privacy. Their physiological traits were itemized for auction purposes, their free time was dependent on their owners’ whims. They were viewed as public performers, adorning the arms and advertising the wealth of aristocratic families. Black writers who appeared in print – Equiano, Cugoano, Naimbanna – all inhabited political roles: they assailed large audiences with accounts of the depredations wreaked on their countrymen. Their books were often exhortatory, redolent of the soapbox. Sancho himself wasn’t averse to making loud proclamations on political or social issues. But there’s another side to him. His letters show us a gentler, more intimate aspect of black London. In them he often speaks of his wife, his young children, leisurely family trips, a world that has nothing to do with the daily grad-grind of chopping sugar into lumps or scooping tea into containers.
The fact that Sancho had married a black woman was unusual in itself. Equally uncommonly, Anne Osborne was literate and often read the newspapers or the letters that her husband was busy scribbling. Her brother, John, lived with his own wife in Bond Street during the 1770s, and the two families got on well. In a bleak letter Sancho wrote after the death of his daughter Kitty, he announced, ‘Tomorrow night I shall have a few friends to meet brother Osborne. We intend to be merry.’106 At moments of the greatest distress, he found it comforting to drown his sorrows with people from a similar background.
Such bleakness was the exception rather than the rule. Anne brought her husband great joy. He referred to her jocularly as ‘old Duchess’ and ‘hen’, and to her and the children as ‘Sanchonettas’.107 He found being on his own in London very taxing, and missed Anne intensely whenever they were separated. In a letter from Richmond, Sancho wrote, ‘I am heartily tired of the country; – the truth is – Mrs Sancho and the girls are in town; – I am not ashamed to own that I love my wife – I hope to see you married, and as foolish.’108
One might think these statements insignificant: they’re the kind of soppy, affectionate words husbands are meant to say to their wives. Yet in over two hundred years of writing about London by African and South Asian writers, there are almost no accounts of quiet, domestic contentment. Home, all too often, is where the heartache is. This makes the Sanchos’ married life in Westminster during the height of the Atlantic slave trade, and when slavery was still legal in England, all the more noteworthy. The fact that Ignatius led a public life – chatting with customers at the counter or the shop-door, discoursing about aesthetic theories or the latest West End show with artists, writing letters to newspapers – makes the unguarded, familial episodes in his letters all the more endearing. There’s a dazed intoxication in the letter he writes to a female friend on the afternoon his wife had given birth: ‘she has been very unwell for this month past – I feel myself a ton lighter: – In the morning I was crazy with apprehension – and now I talk nonsense thro’ joy.’109 Recounting his daughter Marianne’s birthday, he observed – proudly, wistfully – how Mary was ‘queen of the day, invited two or three young friends – her breast filled with delight unmixed with cares – her heart danced in her eyes – and she looked the happy mortal’.110 Delighting in the progress of his only son, William, Sancho puts aside his usual verbal anticry and marvels that ‘He is the type of his father – fat – heavy – sleepy’. Later he rejoices in Billy’s teething and taking his first few steps.
But the joy is tempered with anxiety: Sancho is in his late forties and knows his health is deteriorating rapidly. He fears he won’t be around much longer and becomes even more apprehensive about his children: ‘The girls are rampant well – and Bill gains something every day. – The rogue is to excess fond of me – for which I pity him – and myself more.’ In the earlier letter recounting Billy’s first steps, Sancho wondered if he should ‘live to see him at man’s estate’ and prayed that ‘God’s grace should [ … ] ably support him through the quick-sands, rocks, and shoals of life’.111 His fears and fretting take on a special piquancy given the appalling circumstances of his parents’ deaths: ‘Say much for me to your good father and mother – in the article of respect thou canst not exaggerate – Excepting conjugal, there are no attentions so tenderly heart-soothing as the parental.’112
Most moving are Sancho’s attempts to ignore the threat of racial contumely and to treat his children to the sights and smells of London. One evening ‘three great girls – a boy – and a fat old fellow’ eschew travelling over Westminster Bridge and, more excitingly, go by boat to New Spring Gardens, near Lambeth Palace. Temporarily liberated from the anxieties of commerce, far away from the stench, fogs and clatter of the capital’s busy streets – which constituted the only metropolis most black Londoners would ever know – the Sanchos luxuriated in the August sunshine: ‘[they were] as happy and pleas’d as a fine evening – fine place – good songs – much company – and good music could make them. – Heaven and Earth! – how happy, how delighted were the girls!’113
They rarely enjoyed such simple pleasures as these. Unlike the legions of wealthy Europeans who toured England during the eighteenth century and visited such architectural and arboreal delights as Bath, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Blenheim Palace, Sancho’s family could not afford regular excursions. Nor did they want to be objects of scrutiny for passers-by: the London mob looked ‘on foreigners in general with contempt’.114 A letter of Sancho’s describes a day out at Vauxhall Gardens; as his family returned home, he says, they ‘were gazed at – followed, &c. &c. – but not much abused’.115 Eager not to bite back and create the kind of tension that might put his wife and children in danger, Sancho even refrained from the brusque wit that his friend William Stevenson later recalled him deploying on their ambles about the city:
We were walking through Spring-gardens-passage [near Charing Cross], when, a small distance from before us, a young Fashionable said to his companion, loud enough to be heard, ‘Smoke Othello!’ This did not escape my Friend Sancho; who, immediately placing himself across the path, before him, exclaimed with a thundering voice, and a countenance which awed the delinquent, ‘Aye, Sir, such Othellos you meet with but once in a century,’ clapping his hand upon his goodly round paunch. ‘Such Iagos as you, we meet with in every dirty passage. Proceed, Sir!’116
The vague fear Sancho felt as he gazed at his children dangling at his knees and playing by his puffed-up ankles becomes more palpable when he talks of ‘Dame’ Anne: ‘If a sigh escapes me, it is answered by a tear in her eye. – I oft assume a gaiety to illume her dear sensibility with a smile – which twenty years ago almost bewitched me.’117 He sauced and flirted with his female correspondents, but his love for Anne never dwindled. It intensified in the face of his increasing enfeeblement. Caught up as we are in the gathering momentum of his death, the last
