Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African | Nicole Aljoe and Oliver Ayers

Nicole Aljoe, Professor of English and Africana Studies
Oliver Ayers, Associate Professor in History, Northeastern University-London

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 Africa 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.