London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City

As Pilgrims, and very poor Pilgrims, we are travelling through many difficulties towards our HEAVENLY HOME, and waiting patiently for his gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us out of the evils of this present world and bring us to the EVER-LASTING GLORIES of the world to come. – TO HIM be PRAISE for EVER and EVER, AMEN.³⁷

Gronniosaw’s brief narrative is a depressing start to the history of black English literature. He had headed for England believing it to be a cruelty-free nation. London, in particular, appealed to him because he was ‘very desirous to get among Christians’.³⁸

In the years following his arrival in London, Gronniosaw’s life mirrored that of many of his black compatriots in a number of respects: his enduring marriage to a white woman; the poverty and bereavement which dogged them at every turn; their need to scuttle constantly between different parts of England. Scholars have tried and failed to assemble a detailed biography of Gronniosaw. This isn’t surprising. In his enforced mobility, his dependence on handouts, his inhabitation of seedy lodging houses and freezing cottages both in London and on the edges of other English towns, Gronniosaw, like so many ex-slaves in the eighteenth century, relied both on his long-suffering family and on his sorely-tested religious faith for survival. The pilgrimage motif on which the narrative ends tempers Gronniosaw’s despair with what is only a partially convincing vision of future repose. The journey across the Atlantic to America, the passages to England and, finally, to London, may have been fruitless. However, when earthly cities are so inhospitable to the transplanted African, it’s understandable if the goal of migrating to a heavenly city becomes the only redeeming alternative.

Gronniosaw is still a largely unknown figure. The same cannot be said of Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797). Born (or so he claimed) to Ibo parents in Essaka, a village in what is now Nigeria, he was the youngest son of an aristocratic, slave-owning family. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After surviving the Middle Passage, he found himself working in a plantation house in Virginia before being sold to Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal christened him Gustavus Vassa after a sixteenth-century Swedish freedom-fighter, a name which, as personal inscriptions and his letters to the press reveal, Equiano used for most of his life.

Coming to England for the first time in 1757, Equiano stayed in Falmouth and London where he slowly learned to read and write. He spent much of the next five years aboard British ships fighting the French in the Mediterranean. At the end of 1762 he was sold to Captain James Doran who, five months later, sold him on to a Quaker merchant named Robert King. Equiano worked for four years as a small goods trader in the West Indies and various North American plantations; the money he earned during this period allowed him to purchase his freedom for forty pounds in 1766. The following year he returned to London where he practised hairdressing before his maritime twitchings got the better of him and pushed him towards the oceans where he adventured away the next few years serving under various ship captains. An intensely ambitious man of ‘roving disposition’, he was the first black to explore the Arctic when he joined Lord Mulgrave’s 1773 expedition to find a passage to India, sailing on the same ship as a young Horatio Nelson.³⁹

Equiano spent much of the final two decades of his life campaigning against the slave trade. In 1783 he was responsible for notifying the social reformer Granville Sharp about the case of the 132 Africans who had been thrown overboard from the Liverpool slave ship, the Zong, for insurance purposes. The incident, though hardly unprecedented in the miserable annals of slave history, provoked mass outrage and was later the subject of one of Turner’s finest paintings, ‘Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on’ (1840). His growing status amongst London blacks was rewarded by his appointment in November 1786 as Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the 350 impoverished blacks who had decided to take up the Government’s offer of an assisted passage to Sierra Leone. It made him the first black person ever to be employed by the British Government, but the job did not last long. Angered by the embezzlement perpetrated by one of the official agents, he notified the authorities but was dismissed from his post. The affair did not curtail his political activities: he fired off letters to the press, penned caustic reviews of anti-Abolitionist propaganda, and became an increasingly effective speaker for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade as well as the more radical London Corresponding Society.

Equiano published his autobiography in 1789. Over the next five years it ran to nine editions and was translated into Dutch, Russian and German. He was a canny businessman and held on to the copyright of his book after its initial publication by subscription. This meant that he reaped all of the profits that accrued to him when he toured the United Kingdom inveighing against slavery and hawking his narrative. By the time he died in 1797, his literary success allowed him to leave an estate worth almost a thousand pounds to Susan Cullen, the white Englishwoman he’d married in 1792, and their two daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna. It was a far cry from the single half-bit with which he had bought a glass tumbler on the Dutch island of St Eustatia, a transaction that had kicked off his career as a small trader.

Over the course of the last two decades Equiano has become one of the most famous black Englishmen to have lived before World War Two. His memoirs were issued in 1995 as a Penguin Classic and have sold tens of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. Films, documentaries and cartoons have been based on his adventures. His life and travels have inspired a growing amount of academic research into eighteenth-century maritime culture. Of the millions of people who flocked during 2000 to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich a good proportion would have seen a video about him that was screened in the ‘Faith Zone’ there.

This level of fame is in part a belated – and hence amplified – recognition of his distinction in being the first African to write rather than dictate his autobiography, an achievement which confounded pro-slavery ideologies and led various newspaper critics to question the book’s authenticity. The Interesting Narrative is also one of the earliest slave narratives, a genre more normally associated with nineteenth-century American figures such as Frederick Douglass. It offers a rare – and, for a black writer, unprecedented – account of life below the deck of a slave ship. Long before the golden period of anti-imperialist activity in the metropolis – the first half of the twentieth century when Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore railed against colonialism – Equiano, in tandem with a cabal of black revolutionaries who had named themselves the ‘Sons of Africa’, fought tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. His autobiography is also, inadvertently, a fascinating account of life in black London in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

To Equiano the capital seemed a place of liberty, a shelter from the storms that slavery had rained down upon him since he was a young boy. Throughout the time he was chained below deck or toiling in plantation fields, London lingered stubbornly in his imagination as a city that, far off and possibly unreachable, might be an asylum from the immiseration in which he and his fellow blacks found themselves. It was a dream, one that inspired hope. He had seen friends dashed to pieces in battles at sea. He had seen female slaves raped, men tied to the ground and castrated before having their ears chopped off bit by bit. In Georgia he himself had been randomly bludgeoned and left for dead by one Doctor Perkins. And when he was in Montserrat he

knew a Negro man, named Emanuel Sankey, who endeavoured to escape from his miserable bondage, by concealing himself on board of a London ship: but fate did not favour the poor oppressed man; for being discovered when the vessel was under sail, he was delivered up again to his master. This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back.⁴⁰

The Interesting Narrative is invaluable as a book about witnessing. It is a record of horrible things seen, horrible events from which the author would rather have averted his gaze, which, he hopes, might be brought to an end as a result of his describing them. London, in contrast, is a place where looking is a pleasure, not a duty. A place full of entertaining spectacle, not evil: ‘Though I had desired so much to see London, when I arrived in it I was unfortunately unable to gratify my curiosity; for I had at this time the chilblains.’⁴¹ Equiano found himself unable to stand up and had to be sent to St George’s Hospital where his condition deteriorated. The doctors, fearing gangrene, wanted to chop off one of the twelve-year-old boy’s legs. He recovered just in time only to find that, on the brink of being discharged, he had contracted smallpox. By the time many months later he had regained his health he was needed to sail to Holland and then on to Canada, having seen almost nothing of the capital except the inside walls of a hospital dormitory.

Such dismal experiences didn’t turn Equiano against the city. When he returned two years later in 1759 he had a much better time. While serving three sisters in Greenwich, the Guerins, he decided to learn skills that might hasten his liberty. He attended school to improve his English and got himself baptized at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster. He watched how the nobility comported themselves and what made them tick. For a while he became rather besotted by them: ‘I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us.’⁴²

As he attended Miss Guerin around town, ‘extremely happy; as I had thus very many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’, he also saw many sights – public executions, a white negro woman – that imprinted themselves on his memory.⁴³ No doubt he would have seen other blacks, in situations not dissimilar to his own, working as coachmen and footmen for the aristocracy. Such sightings would have alerted him to the fact that some black people in London were not as blessed with good fortune as he was, and that not only could he strike up friendships with them, but he could also help to improve their lots.

On Equiano’s own daily perambulations, though, danger and delight were never far away. Once, hanging around a press-gang inn located at the foot of Westminster Bridge, he was playing with some white friends in watermen’s wherries. Along came two ‘stout boys’ in another wherry and started abusing him. When they suggested that he should cross over to their boat, Equiano, eager to placate them, tried to do so but was pushed into the Thames, ‘and not being able to swim, I should unavoidably have been drowned, but for the assistance of some watermen, who providentially came to my relief’.⁴⁴

Equiano never forgot London. Through the years he spent at sea it stuck in his memory as a brief interlude of joy. The moment he gained his freedom in 1766 his thoughts turned back to the grey, sportive city across which he had once ranged. At dances in Montserrat his freshly purchased clothes caught the attention of pretty women: ‘Some of the sable females, who formerly stood aloof, now began to relax, and appear less coy, but my heart was still fixed on London, where I hoped to be ere long.’⁴⁵ Over the course of the next fifteen years Equiano’s ‘roving disposition’, his attraction to the ‘sound of fame’, and the poor wages that domestic service offered in comparison to seafaring led him back to the ocean time and again. Yet he always returned to the capital.

Perhaps the pivotal moment in Equiano’s life came in 1773 after his return from Lord Mulgrave’s Arctic expedition. Arriving in London he went to a lodging house in the Haymarket near the Strand. He had stayed in this area before, during which time he had learned to dress hair and to play the French horn and had persuaded a neighbouring Reverend to teach him arithmetic. Now he felt much less resourceful: ‘I was continually oppressed and much concerned about the salvation of my soul, and was determined (in my own strength) to be a first-rate Christian.’⁴⁶ He began to go up and talk to anyone he thought might be able to succour him in his hour of spiritual need. When this proved to be useless he wandered dejectedly around the streets of central London. Soon he was visiting local churches, including St James’s and St Martin’s, two or three times a day, always searching for fresh answers. He approached Quakers, Catholics, Jews. Yet ‘still I came away dissatisfied: something was wanting that I could not obtain, and I really found more heart-felt relief in reading my bible at home than in attending the church’.⁴⁷ He fled to Turkey. In 1779 he resolved to become a missionary in Africa, but, despite visiting the Bishop of London to seek permission, was refused ordination.

Equiano’s memoir is couched as a spiritual autobiography, a genre that was hugely popular during the eighteenth century. It required its authors to talk at length about their sinful lives and about how, just before they decided to surrender themselves unto Christ, they experienced extreme guilt and self-abasement. The phrases they used to do so were often tired and hackneyed. In contrast, Equiano’s account of this troubled period in his life is far from formulaic. It also seems somehow implausible. Black people who roam London’s streets in this period usually do so because they’re panhandling or because they’re on the run from their masters. That they would dizzy themselves searching for faith is especially noteworthy given that throughout history most chroniclers of London have tended to dwell on its venal and secular aspects. Those who chart the immigrant experience associate faith with faith in the motherland or see it as a metaphor for resilience during hard times. In Equiano’s narrative the capital becomes a crucible for transformation, one that hoists him from servitude to freedom, from the choppy waves of agnosticism to the pure shores of Christian salvation – a double emancipation. This rebirth acted as a prelude to his decision to begin campaigning on behalf of his fellow black Londoners. The city was worth enskying – not just because as sailor, servant and activist he had flourished there – but because all those experiences had added up to make him a figure of such public importance as to merit an autobiography, one that helped accelerate the abolition of slavery, under which system he had been brought to the metropolis in the first place.

Equiano may be the most famous black writer of the eighteenth century but his is by no means the most substantial, nor the most astonishing chronicle of exilic London. That accolade belongs to Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), whose life, perhaps because it wasn’t quite as buffeted as that of Equiano or of Gronniosaw, has often been discussed in rather dismissive terms. He has been described as a Sambo figure and as ‘one of the most obsequious of eighteenth-century blacks’.⁴⁸ Yet those who compare him unfavourably to the more ‘righteous’ Equiano rarely mention the fact that not only did the latter come from a slave-owning family, but that he gained his freedom through purchase rather than escape and, in so doing, ‘implicitly acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery’.⁴⁹ Moreover, he later went on to buy slaves whom he set to work on a Central American plantation.

Sancho was born aboard a slave ship heading for the Spanish West Indies. His mother died before he was two years old; his father committed suicide. Soon after, he was brought over to England where his master gave him to three maiden ladies who lived in Greenwich. Like wicked sisters in a fairy story, they refused to educate him and bestowed, as did many wealthy families who owned blacks in the eighteenth century, a preposterous surname upon their new possession in the belief that he bore a passing likeness to Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s much put-upon squire.

Fortunately, a godfather in the form of the eccentric John, second Duke of Montagu, soon emerged to offer Sancho an escape from what would have been a life of servitude and illiteracy. The Duke, who lived nearby at Montagu House in Blackheath, London, was famed for his philanthropy and had been known to rescue from penury total strangers whom he had seen wandering about in St James’s Park.⁵⁰

The Duke was passionately interested in theatre and in opera. He devoted much of his energy to promoting both arts, though the size of his financial outlay was usually in inverse proportion to the artistic success it reaped. In 1721 he even brought a company to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Sancho found in his household a refuge from the cold philistinism he faced daily at the sisters’ home. Ever the cultural evangelist, Montagu fomented and helped to feed the African teenager’s growing appetite for literature and art. The Duke, so full of humanitarian zeal in his personal behaviour, also proposed constructing a seaport and depot in Beaulieu Creek – where he owned land – in order to profit from the slave trade by means of ‘grandiose schemes of exploitation’.⁵¹

These plans were never realized. John died of pneumonia in 1749. His death panicked Sancho for he longed to leave his mistresses’ home, but Lady Mary Churchill, the Duke’s widow, ‘never associated herself with [John’s] drolleries’, and was reluctant to allow him to serve as butler in her home.⁵² Sancho threatened to commit suicide before she finally relented. She died in 1751, leaving him seventy pounds and an annuity of thirty pounds.

Flushed with his new-found fortune, Sancho felt liberated and headed for central London where, like many eighteenth-century servants who had been granted their freedom, he frittered his allowance on aping aristocratic excesses such as gambling (he once lost all his clothes playing cribbage), boozing, women, and the theatre. His money exhausted, he returned to Blackheath in 1758 with his new wife, a West Indian named Anne Osborne, who bore him seven children. In November 1768, Sancho, who had attained a degree of celebrity two years earlier after a letter he had written to Laurence Sterne had been published, became the first definitively identified African in England to have his portrait painted when, following in the footsteps of Sterne, Garrick and Dr Johnson, as well as many members of the Montagu family, he sat for Thomas Gainsborough.⁵³

Between 1767 and 1770 he had at least three pieces of music published which the musicologist Josephine Wright has described as revealing ‘the hand of a knowledgeable, capable amateur who wrote in miniature forms in an early Classic style’.⁵⁴ He also wrote an analytical work dealing with music theory, no copy of which has survived. Towards the end of 1773, having become too incapacitated to continue work at Blackheath, he moved with his family to 20 Charles Street, Westminster, which lay close to another Montagu House, built by the second Duke at Privy Gardens in Whitehall. Here he opened up a grocery selling imperial products such as sugar, tea and tobacco. The shop lay on the corner of two streets, making Sancho – almost two centuries before the retailing revolution effected during the 1960s by an array of Patels, Bharats and Norats – the first coloured cornershop proprietor in England. Parish rate books show that his premises had one of the higher rents in a street that chiefly housed tradesmen such as cheesemongers and victuallers as well as surveyors, barristers and watchmakers.

The majority of Sancho’s extant correspondence stems from this period, a busy one during which he also composed harpsichord pieces, imparted literary advice to writers such as George Cumberland, socialized with the likes of Garrick, Reynolds and Nollekens, and succeeded – albeit with difficulty – in juggling both commerce and connoisseurship. For much of the 1770s, he paid the penalty for his youthful dissolution. Racked by constant stomach pains, he was also frequently gout-ridden, and died on 14 December 1780. Two years later one of his correspondents, Frances Crewe, took advantage of the rising tide of Abolitionism and published as many of his letters as she could track down in a two-volume edition that was also prefaced by a short biography by the Tory MP Joseph Jekyll. The book was a huge success, attracting 1182 subscribers (a number apparently unheard of since the early days of The Spectator) and selling out within months. It raised more than five hundred pounds for his bereaved family and was followed by another four editions over the next two years.

The letters themselves are of variable quality. Many are homiletic and filled with social and religious advice to his correspondents. Others contain literary and art criticism, accounts of illness-torn domestic life at Charles Street, political commentary, descriptions of election hustings and London’s pleasure gardens, requests for financial aid. Some are just business chits, workaday notes dealing with grocery matters, and are accordingly rather dull. Some, too, are clotted with the rhetoric of social decorum: cordiality, cultivation, civility, sincerity and gratitude are the key – and endlessly invoked – virtues. He lauds people excessively and claims they are ‘deservedly honoured, loved, and esteemed’.⁵⁵ At his best, though Sancho can also be scatological and biting, as well as learned, tender and deeply moving. The letters brim, to an extent unparalleled for almost two centuries, with comedy, familial devotion and an unembarrassed love of London. They also display an obsession with literariness, a quality not especially prized by Equiano or Gronniosaw, or, indeed, those who would value eighteenth-century black English writing for its historical rather than its aesthetic significance.

A major reason for the success of Sancho’s book was that he was already known to a large section of the metropolitan elite. This was because of his friendship with Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), country pastor and author of Tristram Shandy, a ninevolume novel that is in equal parts philosophical treatise, family saga, shaggy-dog story, anatomy of melancholy, and proto-Modernist experimental fiction with a memorable cast of characters that includes the grandiloquent and crazed autodidact Walter Shandy, placid Uncle Toby who only ever gets animated by the thought of military fortifications, and the waspish and incompetent Dr Slop. Standing alongside Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson as one of the three most important novelists of the eighteenth century, Sterne has been a major influence on twentieth-century writers such as Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera.

Sterne was at the height of his considerable popularity when Sancho first contacted him during the summer of 1766. He had been reading a copy of Sterne’s theological tract, Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life (1760), when he came across a passage which dealt with ‘how bitter a draught’ slavery was.⁵⁶ Wanting to thank the author for such progressive sentiments, and perhaps also to establish contact with so distinguished a man of letters, Sancho introduced himself in his note as ‘one of those people whom the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs”’, before going on to praise Sterne’s character Uncle Toby: ‘I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to shake hands with the honest corporal.’⁵⁷ The bulk of the letter, though, picked up on the reference to slavery in Job’s Account. Why not, he asked,

give one half-hour’s attention to slavery, as it is this day practised in our West Indies. – That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many – but if only of one – Gracious God! – what a feast to a benevolent heart.⁵⁸

Sterne – whose own father had died of fever in 1731 after his regiment had been sent by the Duke of Newcastle to put down a slave uprising in Jamaica – was delighted to receive this letter.⁵⁹ A benighted negro – known in the Georgian period merely as a trope of literary sentimentalism – was here communicating to him in person, confronting the author. In his reply, Sterne mused on the ‘strange coincidence’ that he had been ‘writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl’ at the very moment Sancho’s letter had arrived, and promised to weave the subject of slavery into his narrative if he could. Picking up on Sancho’s conceit of walking a great distance to meet Toby, he declared that he ‘would set out this hour upon a pilgrimage to Mecca’ in order to alleviate the distress of African slaves. Sterne ended his letter by congratulating Sancho on his academic diligence, and promised that, ‘believe me, I will not forget yr Letter’.⁶⁰

The ninth volume of Tristram Shandy (1767) contains Trim’s account to Toby of how he once went to visit his brother and a Jewish widow. He entered their shop only to find there a ‘poor negro girl’ whose behaviour as well as her colour captivated him. She was so sensitive to the idea of pain that she made sure never to swat flies, but instead slapped at them with a bunch of soft white feathers.⁶¹ Hearing the tale, Toby was moved that a girl who had been oppressed on account of her colour from the day she was born was, nonetheless, loth to ‘oppress’ flies. He insisted to his sceptical friend that the story proved categorically that black people, like Europeans, possessed souls. This being the case, Africans could not be the inferior, sub-human brutes that plantation owners and pseudo-scientists in the late eighteenth century claimed they were.

Sterne’s and Sancho’s friendship wasn’t confined to the epistolary sphere. In a letter from June 1767, Sterne hoped that his ‘friend Sancho’ wouldn’t forget his ‘custom of giving me a call at my lodgings’.⁶² He was writing from Coxwould near York having temporarily left the Bond Street home in London at which Sancho frequently used to call. The letter’s tone is one of intimacy, both in revelation and in register; Sterne bemoans his ailing health, his weary spirits and his equally weary body. In another letter he asked Sancho to urge the Montagus to subscribe to his book.⁶³ The idea of a successful white author in the middle of the eighteenth century asking a slave’s son for financial assistance is startling. It certainly testifies to their closeness for, as one biographer has observed, ‘A person has to be quite secure of his position to ask and receive such favours, especially from a man who could not afford a subscription himself.’⁶⁴

Sancho always loved Sterne. One of his most prized possessions in his Charles Street grocery was a cast of the novelist’s head that had been made in Rome from a bust by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. It’s unlikely that he knew much about where it had come from. The truth emerged when Lord Justice Mansfield, the man whose 1772 court ruling played an important role in outlawing slavery in England, later had an appointment to sit for Nollekens. The sculptor pointed to Sterne’s bust and confided to Mansfield that he had used plaster casts of it to smuggle silk stockings, gloves and lace from Rome to London.⁶⁵

Sancho was drawn to Sterne’s writing not because of its avantgarde trickiness, but because of the religious values it expressed. These can be found (though they are rarely emphasized) in all of the pastor’s work. For instance, in the sermon, Philanthropy Recommended (1760), Sterne recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan who, unlike the wealthier travellers who had preceded him on that route, had been prepared to deflect his attention and compassion towards the stricken victim lying at the side of the road down which he’d been travelling. Sterne used this story to attack the bogus and solipsistic theology of a certain kind of Christianity:

Take notice with what sanctity he goes to the end of his days in the same selfish track in which he first set out – turning neither to the right hand nor to the left – but plods on – pores all his life long upon the ground, as if afraid to look up, lest peradventure he should see aught which might turn him one moment out of that strait line where interest is carrying him.⁶⁶

Linearity equals selfishness. We must be prepared to look around us, to halt, to be diverted by what’s going on in the corners, the crevices, the byways of life. These side-routes are full of value, pleasure, goodness. Here, in Sterne’s work, sermons pop up in military textbooks; young negro girls are found to have souls and compassion. This is a religious doctrine that commands us to be concerned for the defective, the maimed, the incapable, those unable to hasten along the straight paths of economic or social success. Indeed, Tristram Shandy is a novel characterized by disability: Toby has a wounded groin, Trim a creaky knee, the narrator a flattened nose. Sterne allowed these characters to talk, to yarn, to smuggle their way into our affections. He achieved this by means of digressions, hobbyhorses, and by procrastinating and shilly-shallying rather than by kowtowing to the narratory imperative. Tristram, the novel’s narrator, was literally – and morally – correct when he asserted: ‘my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, – and at the same time’.⁶⁷ Sterne himself eschewed a rigidly linear, sequential unfurling of plot. In Tristram Shandy he approvingly reproduced Hogarth’s line of beauty: it dips, rises, fluctuates rather than heading straight into the future.⁶⁸ By choosing to incorporate dashes and marbled pages within his novel, Sterne requires us to read more deeply into the text, to recognize that smooth-talking eloquence is less important than empathy, solidarity.