'In short, I write just what I think.'
After a successful career in the service of an aristocratic family, Charles Ignatius Sancho (c.1729-1780) established a successful grocery business in Westminster and had eight children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Charming, playful, and thoughtful,
Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African provides an unequalled portrait of the everyday life of a Black family in eighteenth-century London. The collection of 161 letters reveals Sancho as a "man of letters," a committed Christian, and a politically-engaged citizen--one of the first Black Britons to cast a vote in a general election. Published posthumously in 1782, the volume met with immediate success. His letters, admired for their distinctive epistolary style, were reproduced as model examples of how to write with feeling, wit, and sincerity. Sancho also developed important commentary on European discourses of race and slavery, topics to which the correspondence repeatedly returns. His writing--both the fact of its existence and its cultural sophistication-- was important evidence for the abolition campaigns which emerged after his death.
Newly edited from the first edition of the
Letters, Nicole N. Aljoe, Markman Ellis, and Oliver Ayers provide new information about Sancho and his family in an introduction and detailed notes. Appendices present biographical notes on his principal correspondents and a summary of the contemporary response.
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Charles Ignatius Sancho
Nicole N. Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London, and Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with specializations in slave narrative, early novels about race, and digital humanities.
Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of several monographs on early modern literature and society, and has published essays on Ignatius Sancho, the 'slave' narrative, and eighteenth-century Caribbean poetry.
Oliver Ayers is Associate Professor in History at Northeastern University London, and London Director of Northeastern's Humanities Center. His research centres on themes of race, urban space and digital historical analysis. He is co-leader of the multiyear digital history project, Mapping Black London, alongside Nicole N. Aljoe.
