As long ago as 1722 there was an established Black community in London, big enough to turn out in numbers in the wintry middle of January that year for the funeral of a black man named Phipps, who owned an eating-house. Newspapers reported, “six blacks held up the pall, and the Corpse was follow’d in good Order by 60 or 70 others of the same complexion, and about the same number of English People brought up the reer [sic].” Others estimated the attendance of whites as 156.
Sixty years later, in September 1782, the Gentleman’s Magazine gave a favourable review to the letters of Ignatius Sancho, a black Londoner, who had died two years before his writing appeared in print. Sancho was born on a slave ship, but lived to join the London middling ranks as a shopkeeper and musical composer. His children received a better education than he did, and one of them, William, became a publisher. Ignatius Sancho was a skilled and independent-minded writer, and his letters create a subtle and sophisticated self-presentation as a man of feeling. His style is creatively entertaining, combining jokes, wordplay, wild metaphors, and deliberate non-sequiturs, with penetrating though oblique political analysis. He had no false shame about his own literary abilities and had addressed letters to various celebrities including the novelist Laurence Sterne. His first letter to Sterne paid tribute to another novelist, Sarah Scott, who in Sir George Ellison had written (only mildly or moderately) against the slave trade. He did not know her name (she published anonymously) and was therefore unable to approach her directly, but he establishes a link between himself and these authors of socially sensitive texts. The letters were a popular success; a fifth edition was issued in 1803 by the author’s son William.
This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org.
