SOURCE: Ellis, Markman. “Ignatius Sancho's Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form.” In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, pp. 199-217. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

In the following essay, Ellis reviews the debate among critics regarding Sancho's “assimilation” into white English culture and his “mimicry” of his famous correspondent, Laurence Sterne, and shows that Sancho reworked conventions of spontaneity, sincerity, and naturalness to argue for the Black capacity for enlightened manners.

Over nearly two years between July 1766 and March 1768, a correspondence, and subsequently a friendship, blossomed between Ignatius Sancho—“a Negro, a Butler, and a Grocer”—and Laurence Sterne, a clergyman, a novelist, and a literary celebrity.¹ To their contemporaries, such a connection was unusual enough to appear a kind of wonder of the age, not only crossing firmly demarcated boundaries of status, education and...