Review: The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, by Paterson Joseph, pub. Dialogue Books 2023

[sheenaghpugh]

"Strangely, though I was flattered by my employer’s decision to have my likeness taken by Mr Gainsborough, my mind was very much elsewhere. I had come so far in my turbulent life to this point. Gazing upon me in my finery (a costume, after all), these folks could have no idea how I came to be in this fortunate position."

I’m stepping out of my custom here, which is not to review books that don’t need any extra publicity. But in this case, it struck me that some of my friends who like litfic and hist fic might miss out by mistaking the kind of book it was. Seeing the name of a famous actor as author, plus endorsements from the likes of Stephen Fry, might lead some to think “oh, another celebrity who thinks he can write novels”. And that would be an error on their part, because this one most emphatically can.

Our protagonist-cum-narrator is Charles Ignatius Sancho, c.1729-1780, writer and musical composer, also, from time to time, butler, valet and shopkeeper, active in the abolitionist movement, which was hardly surprising as he had been born to a captive woman on an Atlantic slave ship. Orphaned soon after birth, he was a Londoner from the age of about two and overcame his somewhat shaky start to become, among other things, the first known British African to vote in a general election (for Charles James Fox, huzza!), the first to publish a collection of letters and the first whose obituary was published in the British press.

Joseph could presumably pick up Sancho’s spoken idiom from the man’s letters, but it is not just the voice he has hit off so convincingly; it is also the whole ambience of Georgian London. It’s a period and place in which I have done some immersing myself, thanks to Mike Rendell’s histories, and I have not seen its streets, coffee-houses and inhabitants better brought to fictional life. It is done so subtly that quotation will not work to illustrate it: Sancho does not indulge in poetic description of his surroundings; he just knows them, with an assurance that communicates itself instantly to the reader.

In many ways the story is of Sancho working out exactly who he is and where he belongs. Despite having spent almost his whole life in London, he never feels completely at home there and always resents its native inhabitants both for their attitude to him and for what they have done to his people. Yet, brought up as a sort of domestic pet among white people and with many more white than non-white acquaintance, he also for a long time feels estranged from, and resented by, the non-white community. In some ways, as he recognises, they are right to see him as privileged; he has known poverty but ends up able to cast a vote because he is a male householder who fulfils the necessary financial conditions, which lifts him above all women and about 87% of men at the time. His consciousness of this estrangement is part of what leads him to be, in later life, a campaigner for abolition, and his development in this direction is skilfully done, never more so than when Sancho, himself a musician and composer in the European tradition, hears African music for the first time in the Black Tar Tavern:

"The music that struck my ears was at first difficult to assess. Percussive sounds that moved in a time signature I was unfamiliar with – there seemed to be more than eight beats in each bar and the bars were not clear to my unaccustomed sensibility. It was as if one of Handel’s liveliest dance pieces were subject to an urgency that rendered the melody secondary to the rhythm – constant – imperative – wild. But there was something else to the music – something other than just the beat – the richness and detail of the harmonic layers created a sense of abandon.”

For a debut novel, this is astoundingly assured and in control of its material. I would guess it is based on the play Joseph wrote earlier about Sancho, and that it has benefitted from this earlier incarnation. This author is not a celebrity who thinks he can write; he's a writer who happened first to become famous in another field.