@AfriClassical Looking forward to hearing Vincent Carretta speak on Sancho tonight @britishlibrary, who have just acquired his papers.
Arnold Hunt, Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts
Sancho blazed a trail for black Africans in Britain. He was the first black man to vote in a British parliamentary election, the first to publish any critique of slavery and the slave trade – preceding by some years the autobiography of the ex-slave and anti-slavery activist Olaudah Equiano – and the first to be accepted into London literary society. Even Thomas Jefferson, who complained that his letters were the product of a ‘wild and extravagant’ imagination, admitted that Sancho held ‘the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgement’.
The British Library has recently acquired the archive of Sancho’s letters to his friend and patron William Stevenson. These are the only manuscripts by Sancho that are known to survive, and the largest single collection of letters by any black Anglo-African of this period. In one unpublished letter, Sancho describes himself as ‘an Affrican – with two ffs if you please – and proud am I to be of a country that knows no Politicians nor Lawyers’. To learn more about this exciting new acquisition, come along to the British Library Conference Centre this Friday, 8 November, at 18:45, when Prof Vincent Carretta, editor of Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (2004), will be giving a public lecture on ‘Ignatius Sancho: Britain’s First African Man of Letters’.
Arnold Hunt
Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts
- See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/2013/11/black-georgians-an-affrican-in-georgian-london.html#sthash.qkXr5oXi.dpufSancho blazed a trail for black Africans in Britain. He was the first black man to vote in a British parliamentary election, the first to publish any critique of slavery and the slave trade – preceding by some years the autobiography of the ex-slave and anti-slavery activist Olaudah Equiano – and the first to be accepted into London literary society. Even Thomas Jefferson, who complained that his letters were the product of a ‘wild and extravagant’ imagination, admitted that Sancho held ‘the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgement’.
The British Library has recently acquired the archive of Sancho’s letters to his friend and patron William Stevenson. These are the only manuscripts by Sancho that are known to survive, and the largest single collection of letters by any black Anglo-African of this period. In one unpublished letter, Sancho describes himself as ‘an Affrican – with two ffs if you please – and proud am I to be of a country that knows no Politicians nor Lawyers’. To learn more about this exciting new acquisition, come along to the British Library Conference Centre this Friday, 8 November, at 18:45, when Prof Vincent Carretta, editor of Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (2004), will be giving a public lecture on ‘Ignatius Sancho: Britain’s First African Man of Letters’.
Arnold Hunt
Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts
- See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/2013/11/black-georgians-an-affrican-in-georgian-london.html#sthash.qkXr5oXi.dpuf
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