Objectivity/Subjectivity, Youth/Age, Africa/England in a 1778 letter by Ignatius Sancho
Ignatius Sancho was a man of many firsts: he was the first author of African descent in England to publish his correspondence (1784), an account of his domestic family life, literary criticism on Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry, and overt opposition to slavery. In addition to his writing accomplishments he became the first enfranchised British citizen (aka he could vote) of African descent as well as a patron of an artist (p. 35). He also influenced and inspired, through his bold, self-initiated correspondence to Laurence Sterne, who came to refer to him in letters as “my dear Sancho” and the link, key antislavery scenes and sentiments in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and sermons (appendix D, p. 311). Sancho, then, influenced English culture on multiple fronts including the domestic and public spheres, through domestic correspondence that was eventually published. He thus helped to shape not only the discourse of this key point in the history of British colonialism but also his correspondence sheds light on the uses of objectivity and subjectivity, and how those intertwine in his life experience and life writing. Sancho’s use of the epistolary form blends objectivity so valued by the Enlightenment ways of knowing and thinking with the subjectivity that paradoxically adds objectivity. His “biased” position against slavery as a man who may have been born on a slave ship to a mother who died and a father who ended his life to escape slavery lends to his credibility and writerly ethos, which he is able to use to his advantage by avoiding using “too much” subjectivity, aka becoming too emotional or using too much pathos in his correspondence. The first letter of the second volume of his letters, to Mr. J WE (Jack Wingrave), 1778 begins with objectivity and ends with subjectivity; however, the subjectivity is cut off and happens off-stage. Sancho acknowledges his subjective position, and exhibits his own strength and forbearance to not mention the unmentionable.
He begins this letter with a nod to the patriarchal system referring to “Your [Jack’s] good father” and invoking that Jack’s father insists “’Jack will be pleased with it’” (187). Jack might already know this, but the reader might not; it is a nod to their relationship, through his father and thus through the patriarch through whom the institutional power flows. Sancho invokes then the patriarchal, Abrahamic religion with a series of commands such as “Read your Bible” until he has “done preaching.” After this fatherly invocation he admonishes Jack for his previously expressed opinion on “the treachery and chicanery of the Natives.”
Sancho then reports the facts in a paragraph that starts with “I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country” and ends with the positive invocation of “even Savages will respect you—and God will bless you!” should he listen to these facts and abide by Sancho’s father-sanctioned advice. Three-quarters of the way through this paragraph, though (188), Sancho stops: after writing of the Christians’ furnishing of the treacherous and “petty Kings’” “hellish means of killing and kidnapping,” he writes “—But enough—it is a subject that sours my blood—and I am sure will not please the friendly bent of our social affectations.” He shifts into apology mode: “I mentioned these only to guard my friend against being too hasty in condemning the knavery of a people who bad as they may be—possibly—were made worse—by their Christian visitors” (188; emphasis my own). The words “only” and “mentioned” belittle the words that precede them. He is “only mentioning” the “hellish” kidnapping of Africans by other Africans, and the means by which they are furnished this (evil) practice—your (Jack’s) countrymen. In this way, Sancho operates as a “resident” in Jack’s country and positions himself to see the African slave trade more objectively, or at least from an objective perch through which his position, as sanctioned by Jack’s father, can benefit this youth whose father is lumped in with “old folks” who “like to seem wise” (187). Sancho wisely navigates his positionality in terms of class, race, gender, and age, throughout this letter that can serve not only to educate Jack but other youths like him. This allows Sancho to speak to the public, through his private correspondence intended for public consumption.
In the end, he self-deprecates again but in the same sentence that he asserts his age and thus love to “seem” “wise”: “This, young man, is my second letter—I have wrote till I am stupid, I perceive—I ought to have found it out two pages back.—Mrs Sancho joins me in good wishes—I join her in the same—in which double sense believe me, Yours, etc. etc., I. SANCHO.”
Works Cited
Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Caretta. Broadview, 2015.
