SOURCE: Carretta, Vincent. Introduction to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, edited by Vincent Carretta, pp. ix-xxxii. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

In the following essay, Carretta provides a biography of Sancho, situates his work against the social background of eighteenth-century Britain, comments on his attitudes toward race and the slave trade, and finds him to be a master of epistolary art.

One of only two people of African descent (the other is the poet Phillis Wheatley) whose works elicited Thomas Jefferson's literary criticism, Charles Ignatius Sancho, better known simply as Ignatius Sancho, is also the only eighteenth-century Afro-Briton accorded an entry in [Britain's] Dictionary of National Biography. But almost everything that we know about Sancho, beyond what is found in his letters, we learn from Joseph Jekyll's brief biography that prefaces the first and subsequent editions of Sancho's Letters, published after Sancho's death. Jekyll later reported that...