Selected Bibliography:
Ignatius Sancho
(1729-1780)

By Brycchan Carey,
University of London

Last revised 19 June 2001

Bibliographies

There is no comprehensive printed bibliography of secondary literature on Ignatius Sancho. Brycchan Carey has produced an attempt at a comprehensive on-line bibliography at http://pages.britishlibrary.net/brycchan.carey/sancho/biblio.htm.

Editions

• Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (London and New York: Penguin, 1998). Currently the standard edition, based on the 1782 first edition, with an introduction and a wealth of detailed notes. A significant advance in Sancho scholarship, not least because it makes the letters widely available for the first time since the early nineteenth century.
• Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780): An Early African Composer in England -- The Collected Editions of his Music in Facsimile, ed. Josephine R. B. Wright (London and New York: Garland, 1981). The only modern edition of Sancho's music.
• Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life, 2 vols. (London: John Nichols, 1782). The first edition, a best seller, was followed by four further editions by 1803.
• Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African, to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life by Joseph Jekyll, Esq., M.P., ed. Paul Edwards (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968). A facsimile of the 1803 fifth edition, with an important introduction and notes by Paul Edwards.
• The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, ed. Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1994). A new edition, based on the 1803 fifth edition, with an introduction, notes and bibliography. The first scholarly edition of the letters and still an important resource.

Biographies

• Joseph Jekyll, The Life of Ignatius Sancho (1782). A short biography, prefixed to every edition of The Letters of Ignatius Sancho. It appeared anonymously in the 1782 edition and was not acknowledged to be Jekyll's work until 1803. It contains everything we know about Sancho's early life and much that we know about his later life, although as much of this information has yet to be verified, it must be approached with some caution.
• Dictionary of National Biography. Sidney Lee's article is notable for being the only entry in the Dictionary to feature a Black British writer. It also highlights a number of biographical sources other than Jekyll's Life of Ignatius Sancho.

Criticism

• Collections

  • Reyahn King, ed., Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997). An excellent collection of four essays produced to mark an exhibition of Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Sancho at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1997. Contents:
    • Reyahn King, "Ignatius Sancho and Portraits of the Black Elite";
    • Sukhdev Sandhu, "Ignatius Sancho: an African Man of Letters";
    • James Walvin, "Ignatius Sancho: the Man and His Times";
    • Jane Girdham, "Black Musicians in England: Ignatius Sancho and His Contemporaries."
  
  

• Monographs and Articles

  Few critical or historical works are dedicated exclusively to Sancho. When the Sancho material mentioned here forms part of a longer discussion I have indicated where in the text it can be found.
  
  
  • Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: J. Stockdale, 1787). The first English edition (it was published in the U.S. in 1785), but the book has been reprinted many times in many places. Jefferson's thoughts on Sancho are part of "Query XIV" and include the dismissive line that his writing does "more honor to the heart than the head."
  • Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1942). An oddity of a book, this comprehensive account of the literature is still highly useful as a bibliographical tool, but is uncomfortably critical of anti-slavery. The Sancho material is at pp. 149-54 and 285-86.
  • J. R. Willis, "New Light on the Life of Ignatius Sancho: Some Unpublished Letters," Slavery and Abolition 1 (1980): 345-58. Fourteen letters attributed to Sancho. According to Carretta (Letters of Ignatius Sancho, 1998, p. xxxv), Willis is unwilling to subject them to scholarly examination, and so it is difficult to comment on their authenticity or significance.
  • Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984). The best general history of the British black presence to date, though sometimes too uncritical of the historical and literary sources. Sancho is discussed at pp. 93-98.
  • Keith Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-century Afro-English Writing (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1988). An influential work which introduces the notion of the "ironic strategy" by which eighteenth-century Black British writers registered their protest against slavery while ostensibly remaining within a mainstream discourse.
  • Paul Edwards, Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three Afro-British Authors of the Georgian Era: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1992). A short pamphlet taking issue with Sandiford and others. It is an important historicist counterblast to literary approaches to Sancho.
  • Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life Before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995). Sancho is frequently mentioned in this readable, though chatty, introduction to the eighteenth-century black community, and is discussed at length on pp. 57-66.
  • James Walvin, "In Black and White: Recent Publications on British Black Writings," Slavery and Abolition 16 (1995): 376-82. A useful round-up of recent literature.
  • Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). A valuable reading of Sancho in the context of the sentimental novel and in the context of his correspondence with Laurence Sterne. The Sancho material can be found at pp. 55-86.
  • Vincent Carretta, "Three West Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised," Research in African Literature 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 73-86. Important round-up of recent scholarship, including two recently identified letters by Sancho.
  • Sukhdev Sandhu, "Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne," Research in African Literature 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 88-105. A lively essay, taking issue with the view that Sancho was "obsequious" or "assimilated" to English culture.
  
  

Electronic Resources

• Brycchan Carey, The Ignatius Sancho Page, http://pages.britishlibrary.net/brycchan.carey/sancho/. Includes a more detailed bibliography, extracts from Sancho's letters, background material on Sancho's friends and Sancho's London, and links to resources on the Web.

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