exercise is all I want – but the fogs and damps are woefully against me. – Mrs Sancho [ … ] reads, weeps, and wonders, as the various passions impel.118
A week before his death, ‘Mrs Sancho, who speaks by her tears, says what I will not pretend to decypher.’119 It’s an exhilarating moment in black English literature: here is a rare assertion of passion, mutual dependence and intimacy between a formerly enslaved husband and his wife. It’s also a chastening moment: Sancho is about to die; the domestic joy these letters reveal would not be narrated again for over 150 years. The more one reads the Letters, the more one becomes aware of the existence of two Ignatius Sanchos. The first is a public man – he writes to the press, dines with leading artists of the day, discourses on cultural issues. The other Sancho is chafed by poverty and domestic grief, deems himself friendless, is confused and angered by the sense of a society spinning out of control.
It’s the first Sancho who has attracted the attention, seized the imagination of historians and writers. This is hardly surprising. Who could resist the anomalous allure of a fleshy black Falstaff who was born aboard a slave ship but ended his life hobnobbing with the likes of Sterne and Garrick? Nor is this version of Sancho wholly wrong. After all, many of the letters show his keenness for staying abreast of topical affairs. He rejoiced in the acquittal of Jane Butterfield who had been charged with poisoning her benefactor. His politics – conservative by today’s orthodoxies – shine through in his exultation that ‘the Queen, God bless her! safe; – another Princess – Oh the cake and caudle! – Then the defeat of Washintub’s army – and the capture of Arnold and Sulivan with seven thousand prisoners.’120
As well as reading and gossiping about the antics of rich and famous people, Sancho socialized with some of them. Gainsborough’s friend, John Henderson, known as the ‘Bath Roscius’, pressed Sancho to see him perform in Henry V. Another friend bought him a box ticket so that they might see Henderson’s Richard III; after the show they dined with Garrick, ‘where goodnature and good-sense mixed itself with the most cheerful welcome’.121 The composer and violinist, Felice Giardini, sent him tickets; he passed them on to a friend so that he might ‘judge of fiddlers’ taste and fiddlers’ consequence in our grand metropolis’.122 Such friendships often had financial benefits: George Cumberland was so pleased by Sancho’s response to his ‘Tale of Cambambo’ that he told his brother, ‘I shall like him as long as I live [ … ] In the mean time as he is a grocer I think it would be proper to buy all my Tea & Sugar of him.’123 John Thomas Smith, later a Governor of the British Museum, recalled going with Joseph Nollekens to Charles Street to deliver a bust of Sterne. He observed that Sancho ‘spake well of art’ and ‘was extremely intimate’ with the painter, Mortimer.124
However, there’s another side to Sancho’s account of life in the capital which is less grand. Though he never sank as low as Gronniosaw, he was by no means rich. Shops in Westminster were charged high rents compared to those in other parts of London. He couldn’t always afford to keep his shop heated; the exodus of affluent Londoners to their country residences during the summer left trade alarmingly slack. He wrote once to Spink that
I am at the present moment – thank fortune! not quite worth ten shillings – pity – cursed foolish pity – is, with as silly wishes, all I have to comfort you with. – Were I to throw out my whole thoughts upon paper, it would take a day’s writing, and thou wouldst be a fool to read it.125
Finances were often so poor that he relied on his correspondents to send him old quills with which to pen his letters. In December 1779 he unsuccessfully applied to have his grocery act as a post office: ‘it would emancipate me from the fear of serving the parish offices – for which I am utterly unqualified through infirmities – as well as complexion’.126 The final dash gives this last sentence a quiet sting. Though Sancho couched his proposal in a tone of comic amiability – in doing so revealing a keen appreciation of how he was perceived by his fellow Londoners – there’s no disguising his terror of having what few savings (and social status) he’d accumulated over the years suddenly wiped out:
Figure to yourself, my dear Sir, a man of a convexity of belly exceeding Falstaff – and a black face into the bargain – waddling in the van of poor thieves and pennyless prostitutes – with all the supercilious mock dignity of little office – what a banquet for wicked jest and wanton wit.127
During these latter years of economic insecurity, Sancho felt London was becoming ever crueller and more amoral: ‘Trade is duller than ever I knew it – and money scarcer; – foppery runs higher – and vanity stronger; – extravagance is the adored idol of this sweet town.’128 Through the course of the Letters, he gets increasingly crabby. The city, he feels, has gone to the dogs and he is revolted by the decline in spirituality. As a shopkeeper, Sancho had daily contact with many of the fops he later lambasted. In one of his bleakest and most condemnatory letters, Sancho’s belief that ‘Trade is at so low an ebb [ … ] we are a ruined people’ drives him to an excoriating survey of metropolitan morality:
The blessed Sabbath-day is used by the trader for country excursions – tavern dinners – rural walks [ … ] The poorer sort do any thing – but go to church – they take their dust in the field, and conclude the sacred evening with riots, drunkenness, and empty pockets: – The beau in upper life hires his whisky and beast for twelve shillings; his girl dressed en militaire for half-a-guinea, and spends his whole week’s earnings to look and be thought quite the thing. – And for upper tiptop high life – cards and music are called in to dissipate the chagrin of a tiresome tedious Sunday’s evening – The example spreads downwards from them to their domestics; – the laced valet and the livery beau either debauch the maids, or keep their girls – Thus profusion and cursed dissipation fill the prisons, and feed the gallows.129
Sancho’s outburst seems almost premonitory given the mass chaos that erupted a fortnight later during the Gordon Riots of June 1780 in which around 850 people died. Christopher Hibbert has located the cause of these riots not so much in doctrinal or anti-Catholic sentiment as in a confluence of aristocratic laxity and welled-up plebeian suffering. Sancho was blunter and lashed out at ‘the maddest people that the maddest times were ever plagued with’.130
His hatred of foppery was influenced by Methodism which enjoined a distrust of ornamentation and anything smacking of Baroque excess. Sancho had converted in 1769 and loved to attend Sunday sermons. He particularly admired Dr Dodd, the preacher at Charlotte Chapel, Pimlico, on whose behalf he appealed – fruitlessly – for clemency after he was sentenced to death for forgery. Such sermons bolstered Sancho’s belief in the importance of good works. In a letter written one Sunday evening to John Meheux, he praised that morning’s sermonist, Richard Harrison, whose ‘whole drift was that we should live the life of angels here – in order to be so in reality hereafter’.131
Chaos was the central fact of London life in the eighteenth century. The shopkeeper’s life was one of long hours, modest profits, and both short- and medium-term insecurity. Noisy vendors kept Sancho’s family awake at night by shrilly advertising late editions of the Gazette. Westminster was full of courtyards and alleyways which became
