Penman's Devil: The Chirographic and Typographic Urgency of Race in the Letters of the Late Ignatius...

Penman’s Devil: The Chirographic and Typographic Urgencyof Race in the <em xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Lettersof the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African

Mark Alan Mattes

Early American Literature, Volume 48, Number 3, 2013, pp. 577-612(Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/eal.2013.0047

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Mark alan Mattes University of Iowa

Penman’s DevilThe Chirographic and Typographic Urgency of Race in the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African

When Ignatius Sancho, an Anglo- African and former slave, died in 1780, editor Frances Crew assembled his extant letters (fig. 1). Crew worked with printer-publisher John Nichols to publish the first edition of Sancho’s correspondence under the title the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To which are prefixed, Memoirs of his Life (1782). Earlier publications of Sancho’s correspondence with Laurence Sterne and the piqued curiosities of those who condescendingly saw him as a novelty likely fueled some demand for the Letters, but a great many subscribers were Britons engaged in the growing tide of abolitionist and antislavery sentiments that escalated during the closing decades of the eighteenth century.1 The urgency in producing this collection lay in these Britons’ desire to represent a black man as a reasoning, feeling, civilized being who would be accessible to white audiences. According to her edito-rial note, Crew hoped to demonstrate “that an untutored African may pos-sess abilities equal to an European; and the still superior motive, of wishing to serve his worthy family” (4). Crew believed this demonstration would do much to counter doubts about the humanity and the mental capacities of African men and women.2

In light of the overt connections Sancho and his readers made among race, ethnicity, and the physical materials of writing, printing, and read-ing, it is surprising that more scholars have not explicitly brought the con-cerns of book history and media studies to bear on the Letters.3 Leon Jack-son and Joseph Rezek have made similar observations about the relative lack of intellectual exchange between book historians and scholars of their respective domains, African American culture and the Black Atlantic.4 A

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clear expression of the neglect that they observe can be found, ironically, in literary critic Sukhdev Sandhu’s work on Sancho’s manuscript prac-tices. In his analysis of Sancho’s orthography and punctuation, Sandhu cogently argues that his “dashes, digressions, and textual games” (“Igna-tius Sancho: An African” 51) were a “means of sardonically critiquing con-temporary racialist theory,” which held that dark- skinned African men and women were innately unable “to perform linear functions” (London Calling 39–40). Sandhu asserts that Sancho’s nonlinear style exposed the intellectual impoverishment of Enlightenment racism. Yet, despite his will-

fIgUre 1. Frontispiece portrait of Ignatius Sancho from the 1782 edition. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago. Call no. E5 S205.

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ingness to credit the disruptive visual appearance of the orthography and punctuation as a “radical form” of protest, Sandhu elevates the virtuosity of verbal performances and deemphasizes the significance of material texts in his final assessment of the Letters’ political import, asserting that Sancho’s “literary criticism and philosophical passages . . . over and above the very existence of his book, forced proponents of negro inferiority” to reframe their critiques of black writing in terms of aesthetics (“Ignatius Sancho: An African” 70).

Sandhu’s elevation of verbal expressions over material texts is deeply problematic for two reasons. First, “the very existence of [Sancho’s] book” could lead to what Rezek has recently described as “hierarchical thinking about race” (“Print Atlantic” 33). Rezek reminds us that “the texts of the print Atlantic come to us mediated through institutions of dissemination, institutions to which authors . . . often found themselves subject and in which, rarely, they wielded considerable power” (39). This state of subjec-tion is especially true of the posthumous Letters. Producers and consumers often used its paratexts5—the print materials, reviews, and editorial appa-ratus that accompanied the printed volumes and their reception—to racially inscribe Sancho’s body and construct him as an emblem for the intellectual and moral abilities of all African men and women.6

The second problem with Sandhu’s reading is that Sancho’s “intertwin-ing of linguistic and” material content provides as important a counter to racist dismissals of his letters as any piece of literary criticism or philosophy (McGann 13). The multiple print editions of the Letters, as archives of San-cho’s manuscript practices, did not uniformly obliterate his strategies for evading racial and ethnic typologies.7 Encoded within these printed texts are, to quote Jackson, traces of the “racial politics in the actual, physical format” Sancho deployed in his handwritten letters (271). These traces re-veal the “racially and corporeally marked ways” in which the chirographic, typographic, and codexical properties of Sancho’s writing mediated both his social criticisms and his readers’ access to those assertions (265). The first section of this essay interrogates Sancho’s use of pen, ink, and paper to discuss how he used his letters to dismantle commonly racialized theories of verbal and visual aesthetics.8 By illuminating the hermeneutic richness of Sancho’s manuscript production within a sentimental rhetoric of excess, this section shows how he rejected deterministic connections people made among visual markers of race, human bodies, and the reading and writing


practices that signified Enlightenment reason. Subsequent sections turn to reviews of the Letters, as well as to the changing editorial apparatus and typography found in the first five editions appearing between 1782 and 1803. While abolitionist involvement with the printed Letters racialized Sancho’s body and militated against his own fashioning of political authority, that involvement did not completely impede posthumous recognition of his complex social identifications. Holding in view the physical text’s ability to constrain signification, this essay acknowledges the role that publishing and reviewing the Letters played in racializing the terms of Sancho’s recep-tion. However, it simultaneously argues that the decisions of printers, pub-lishers, and Sancho himself could also work to frame the Letters according to the antiracist terms that his writing elaborates. In doing so, this study illuminates the capacity of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century media practice to extend and challenge the social myopias of both Sancho’s supporters and critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

the “ChaOtIC Matter” Of sOCIal CrItIqUe

The majority of Sancho’s letters contain overt appeals to sentiment. A critical facet of his sentimental rhetoric was its exploration of the materials of epistolary thought and language—pen, ink, and paper. This rhetorical mode offered what literary critic Brycchan Carey describes as “whimsical humour, open emotions, and the idea that large morals could be drawn from everyday occurrences” (“Ignatius Sancho” 776)—occurrences such as the “blots and blunders” that plagued Sancho’s handwriting (Letters 47). As he became infirmed by advancing age, growing weight, decreasing mo-bility, and regular attacks of gout, Sancho turned to letter writing in order to maintain his friendships. Letters acted as surrogates for his failing body, paper- and- ink performances designed to circulate where his person could no longer go. Yet even handwriting could be an excruciating task. Sancho often struck a sentimental rhetorical pose when alluding to the debilitating obstacles he faced, and many times his letters included comments on the illegibility of his script. His September 3, 1777, letter to John Meheux, an amateur artist whom Sancho thought of as a protégé in the humane arts, is an exemplary specimen on this point. Suffering from a case of gout, San-cho rejected the forbearing solitude of stoicism, instead asking his inter-locutor for reciprocity of feeling—sympathy for his pain—to complete the


healing process. Although Sancho’s body had become “much better,” his spirit still required sentiment’s balm:

My friend, I have had a week’s gout in my hand, which was by much too hard for my philosophy.—I am convinced, let the Stoics say what they list—that pain is an evil;—in short I was wishing for death—and little removed from madness—but (thank heaven) I am much better—my spirits will be mended if I hear from you—better still to see you.—I find it painful to write much, and learn that two hands are as necessary in writing as eating. (95–96)

In this letter to Meheux, Sancho proposed two potential modes of reci-procity: hearing from his friend by word of mouth or seeing him in person. Perhaps such a transaction took place. What interests me here, however, is that Sancho conveyed the aural and visual elements of feeling through the verbal and graphic elements of his double- fisted script. During such trying moments, Sancho yoked a rhetoric of sentiment to a materialist aesthetic, one attuned to the constitutive relations among inscriptive media, somatic experiences, and bodily performances.9 Literary critic Sarah Pearsall sheds light on this process by describing the dynamic connections between ob-jects, bodies, thoughts, and feelings operating within the culture of sensi-bility of which Sancho was a part:

In the culture of sensibility . . . there was a considerable emphasis on the physical, the body, and the thing. . . . [A] physical object could pro-voke an emotional reaction. . . . Letter- writers sought to render physical objects—a piece of paper, the ink from a quill—into indicators of a feel-ing heart. The body—with its tears, its expressions, its convulsions—could display authentic affection, approbation, or disapprobation. How-ever, in correspondences, since the body was missing, the letter had to stand in for it. (89)

Many participants in this culture adjudicated one another’s sensibilities—what they perceived as the innate capacities of people to register sensa-tions, to think, to feel—by considering both the verbal and visual content of written words. The visual characters of script, produced through physi-cal impressions of pen on paper, could signal a writer’s emotions. Those same characters—the script appearing upon the letter sheet and meto-nymically making writers’ bodies present to their interlocutors—could in


turn impress on those readers, eliciting emotional responses and their at-tendant signals or displays.10

Many of Sancho’s letters invoked the culture of sensibility’s linkage be-tween “the written character and the human character” (Thornton 3–4). Sancho’s materialist aesthetic, however, did not neatly fit into a singular, deterministic logic of how handwriting signified. While one must acknowl-edge how the contemporary discourse of Cartesian- Lockean psychology animated the linkages people made among physical objects, thoughts, and feelings in the culture of sensibility, it is equally important to recognize that, as Carey contends, “in daily practice, sentimental writing operated without theory and was available for use by” a broad socioeconomic spec-trum of men and women (British Abolitionism 9). Sancho’s manuscript practices assert and inform the nonessentialist outlook that Carey discerns in his verbal rhetoric. He willingly incorporated and strategically undercut signifying logics of sentimental (hand)writing as it suited his arguments for the humanity of socially and economically disenfranchised people. The close readings that follow show how Sancho exposed and exploited the contradictions that emerged within a culture that assumed both a corre-spondence between handwriting and sensibility and a correlation between race and mental capacity.

Sancho often challenged racist attitudes through a series of reversals and revisions centered on verbal, graphic, and social propriety. On Novem-ber 26, 1776, Sancho produced one such reversal in a letter he wrote to William Stevenson, a Norwich banker, printer, and bookseller. In his letter, Sancho expounded on their contrasting prose styles with mock humility:

Mark that; simplicity is the characteristic of good writing—which I have learnt, among many other good things, of your Honor—and for which I am proud to thank you;—in short I would write like you—think like you (of course); and do like you; but as that is impossible, I must con-tent myself with my old trick.

Later in his letter, Sancho noted with similar false modesty the embarrass-ment he felt over Stevenson’s father having read a previous letter: “So—my cramp epistle fell into the hands of thy good and rev. father—tant pis—why he must think me blacker than I am.” In these passages, Sancho con-trasted the clarity of thought resulting from Stevenson’s level epistolary


demeanor with the relatively opaque prose stemming from his own verbal acrobatics (52).

The latter passage from the November 26, 1776, letter is notable for the racial adjective “blacker,” which Sancho used to describe the reflection that his prose cast on his character. Elsewhere in his correspondence with Stevenson, Sancho continued to claim a racial component for his writing. On August 31, 1779, Sancho spiced his letter with “the warm ebullitions of African sensibility” (170). On January 4, 1780, he opened with an attempt to exceed the limits of hyperbole itself: “You have here a kind of medley, a heterogeneous, ill- spelt, heteroclite, (worse) excentric sort of a—a—; in short, it is a true Negroe calibash—of ill- sorted, undigested chaotic matter. What an excellent proem! what a delightful sample of the grand absurd!” (203). In these letters, Sancho linked his rhetoric of excess to his blackness, his “African sensibility,” his status as a “Negroe.” Indeed, as a person of African descent with a high degree of writing literacy, Sancho must have seemed a “heteroclite” to his contemporaries, a word that Samuel Johnson defined as “any thing or person deviating from the common rule” (Dictio-nary, qtd. in Letters [1998] 313).

Sancho did not simply construct a racialized, African body in these let-ters. He made references to his color and his origin to claim a moral di-mension for his aesthetic practice. For instance, his use of “blacker” in the November 26, 1776, letter simultaneously registered a connotation of im-morality or impropriety. Sancho often used this double meaning of skin color and propriety to great effect by performing “blackness” as an inherent willingness to exceed the bounds of rhetorical taste. The self- deprecating context of Sancho’s letter to Stevenson magnified the artifice of his perfor-mance, foregrounding the self- awareness of his style.

By constantly highlighting the care with which he constructed his “proems,” Sancho undercut connections that other participants in the eighteenth- century culture of sensibility were making between verbal aes-thetics, biology, and origin. He often decoupled such linkages by forcing his readers to confront the quality of his epistolary writing, and by exten-sion, his status as an Anglo- African of at least coequal intelligence. Pear-sall similarly observes, “When Africans, African- Americans, and Anglo- Africans challenged notions of racial insensibility, they often did so by emphasizing their own sensibility” (89). In Sancho’s case, such moments of emphasis were not made in demurral to an aesthetic status quo. He


confronted racist theories of sentimental writing by yoking a heightened, oftentimes excessive rhetoric of feeling to the large moral purpose of in-terrogating social inequality.

Sancho’s language did not serve this purpose alone. The manner by which he physically produced his letters proved to be a fundamental com-ponent of his epistolary sensibility. Throughout his life, Sancho twinned his self- conscious reflections on verbal style with the visual text of his let-ters. For his part, William Stevenson’s background as a printer must have heightened his awareness of his interlocutor’s aesthetic, a point not likely lost on Sancho. In his January 4, 1780, letter to Stevenson, Sancho included the phrases an “eccentric sort” and “ill- sorted, undigested chaotic matter” (203). Sancho’s use of a typographic term, sort, referred to both the visual display of letters and symbols, as well as to the sets of individual pieces of type for each specific character within a font. Such careful phrasing and at-tention to audience suggests that Sancho offered the “chaotic matter” of his letter as a chirographic parallel to a poorly arranged or flawed line of type.11

A similar dilation on visual disruption appeared in his March 11, 1779, letter to Stevenson: “Pox on it, my hand aches so, I can scrawl no longer. . . . [D]o write large and intelligible when you write to me, I hate fine hands and fine language—write plain honest nonsense, like thy true friend” (156). In linking handwriting with verbal content, Sancho rejected conformity to prescribed epistolary hands or models of verbal propriety. Instead, he as-serted that the intelligibility of a script was incumbent on the use of “non-sense” language. Another such claim appears in his November 26, 1776, letter to Stevenson. He connected the legibility of style and script in his self- deprecating use of the word cramp, which denoted both verbal and visual (un)intelligibility.

In each of these letters to Stevenson, Sancho crafted verbal and visual disruptions that called attention to the unjust experiences of marginalized people. When Sancho implied that an uneasily deciphered, deviant visual text should be employed in the “plain” and “honest” work of “nonsense,” he argued that the supposed nonsense of blackness—the state of being cast by others as an improper, immoral body when one “deviat[es] from the com-mon rule[s]” of dominant aesthetic or cultural protocols—rendered a per-son well suited to the moral work of critiquing racist expectations regard-ing verbal linearity or social decorum. At no moment did Sancho more


vociferously assert this social critique than during those most heinous of deviations from the chirographic script: inkblots.

On August 14, 1779, Sancho responded to a letter from John Meheux by toying with the idea that the legibility of script could serve as a crite-rion for judging the sentiment and reason of a piece of writing. He began with self- deprecating anger: “[N]ow pox take bad quills—and bad pen-makers.—Sir, it was fifty pound to a bean- shell, but that you had had a blot as big as both houses of parliament in the very fairest, yea, and hand-somest part of this epistle.” As in his letters to Stevenson, Sancho framed chirographic obstruction as an indecorous manner of conducting corre-spondence, one unsuitable to the “fair” and “handsome” medium of the “epistle.” Inkblots, however, did not hinder the correspondence he sought with Meheux. In the same letter, Sancho took his mechanical troubles as an opening for probing the relationship between sensibility and race. On the heels of chirographic failure, Sancho often found opportunity to embrace the effusiveness of a pen as a catalyst for racial commentary. He offered a damning critique of racializing aesthetic quality by revising the terms of verbal, graphic, and social propriety:

[M]y pen, like a drunkard, sucks up more liquor than it can carry, and so of course disgorges it at random.—I will that ye observe the above simile to be a good one—not the cleanliest in nature I own—but as pat to the purpose as dram- drinking to a bawd—or oaths to a serjeant of the guards—or—or—dullness to a Black- a- moor—good—excessive good. (165)

In this libertine passage, Sancho compared his pen’s tendency to stretch the capacity of its reservoir to the indulgence of an inebriate, and the in-creased propensity of blotting to the drunkard’s expulsion of bodily fluids. Sancho continued to draw comparisons to blotting and overflow, including alcoholism and sexual promiscuity, swearing and military life, and blunt-ness and African descent. These similes are apt when considered within the very narrow goal of trying to describe the messiness of blotted script.

Sancho, however, did not limit these associations to his technical dif-ficulties with the physical production of words. His similes unsustainably assert that deviations from an ideal visual text are the cause of his prose style. And it is out of a calculated decision to feign chirographic determin-


ism that Sancho’s social critique surfaces. While it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that a structurally compromised quill inevitably leads to visual overflow, it does not follow that dripping ink onto a page must produce an overflowing verbal aesthetic. Similarly, while overconsumption often leads to regurgitation, alcoholism does not cause sexual promiscuity, vio-lent regimentation does not cause indecorous swearing, and African de-scent does not cause voluble irrationality.

The pause preceding Sancho’s comparison of his pen to a “Black- a- moor” is a crucial moment in the series of similes, for it emphasizes the ar-tifice of the comparisons. This moment reveals the self- consciousness with which Sancho toyed with, and ultimately rejected, technologically and so-cially deterministic explanations of degeneracy. By framing the relation-ship between script and style with a series of uninevitable deviations from proper behavior, Sancho argued for the viability of an effusive verbal aes-thetic in rejecting tests of African intelligence that valued linear forms of thought. The similes Sancho offered Meheux in his August 14, 1779, letter are utterly obtuse. But there is no want of acuteness in the care with which Sancho demonstrated that a “Black- a- moor” is not, ipso facto, a dullard. In doing so, Sancho asserted that social identity should not be predicated on racial or ethnic characterizations of intellect. Rather than assign a de-terministic logic to the relationship between the visual and verbal compo-nents of his letters, Sancho understood the interdependence of script and style as an ever- contingent reciprocity that continually opens new possi-bilities for self- identification.

The presence of an inkblot in the printed collection would certainly heighten the stakes for reading the interplay of Sancho’s script and style. Luckily, the printers of the 1782 edition took on the typographic challenge of including an inkblot from the letter that Sancho sent to Meheux on September 3, 1777 (fig. 2).12 The typographic blot is an oblong, rounded parallelogram that is not completely shaded in. It is difficult to ascertain exactly how the printers created this character. They may have used a scrap piece of metal, or it might be a pounded- out or flipped- over em space, raised with spacing material so that its surface stood on the same plane as the rest of the registered type. The printers most likely thought that this character served as a ready, inexpensive solution, given the limitations in printing images such as inkblots during the late eighteenth century.13 But to their credit, the editorial powers involved with the 1782 edition seem-


ingly understood the usefulness of the blot as a visual stimulus for San-cho’s thinking.

At the beginning of this letter and others, Sancho described how physi-cal disabilities resulting from his poor health and financial constraints posed by the costs of letter stationery and writing implements hindered his penmanship.14 With a “week’s gout in [his] hand,” he was forced to write “from one corner of the paper to the other” (95–96), possibly wielding, as he indicated to Jack Wingrave on January 5, 1780, a used quill whose struc-

fIgUre 2. Typographic inkblot from the 1782 edition. Image courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Collections Center, University of Pennsylvania.


tural integrity, much like his own, was questionable: “I fear you will hardly make out this scrawl, although it is written with a pen of thy father’s—a present mended from a parcel of old quills” (204). Toward the end of his September 3, 1777, letter, Sancho dwelt on the resulting imperfections in his handwriting:

I hope [inkblot] confound the ink! What a blot! Now don’t you dare suppose I was in fault—no, Sir, the pen was diabled—the paper worse, there was concatenation of ill- sorted chances—all—all—coincided to contribute to that fatal blot—which has so disarranged my ideas—that I must perforce finish before I had half disburthened my head and heart. (96)

Sancho manipulated and played on the physical and economic conditions of letter writing, shaping his epistolary identity within the material cir-cumstances to which he was subjected. He began by assessing blame for his inkblot. The pen was possessed by the devil. The letter sheet was even deeper in his clutches. A string of misfortunes beyond the control of the merely human Sancho resulted in a blot proving “fatal” to the linearity of his thinking. It “has so disarranged [his] ideas, that [he] must perforce finish” without committing to paper the emotional and reasoned content emanating from the culture of sensibility’s binary nonpareil, the “head and heart.”

Sancho’s excuses rendered the physical and economic obstacles to let-ter writing as forces beyond his control. By humorously shifting blame to issues of health and financial cost, he softened a negative perception of his prose and rhetorically separated the “disarrangement” of his letter from either perceptions of his mental aptitude or the possibility of choice. Of course, by choosing to write in this manner, Sancho actually staked a claim for “disarrangement” as a reasonable aesthetic. It is curious, though, that he embraced the devil’s chirographic machinations, his heightened lan-guage portending a sordid willingness to deal with the dark lord in point-ing out the absurdity of correlating linearity with quality. Such a rhetorical performance begs the question, who is the devil in Sancho’s letter?

Recall the language of disavowal Sancho used in his letter to Meheux: “Sir, the pen was diabled—the paper worse, there was concatenation of ill- sorted chances.” Sancho’s words encode the dense web of media inter-dependence on which his epistolary performance relied. The bedeviled


pen and paper’s immaterial concatenations parallel the fundamentally material concept of the printer’s devil, an apprentice in a print shop. The printer’s devil was often portrayed with face and body stained by black ink, and he or she was often the blamed party for mistakes made by other workers, including typesetters. In both look and action, the association be-tween the grimy print- shop underling and much darker forces was easily made. However, by choosing to place the devil alongside the typographic term sort, it is clear that Sancho thought of himself as the chirographic version of a printer’s devil. By representing himself as a penman’s devil—his indelible blackness haunting his manuscript, confounding his ink, pre-tending to mask the insurrectionary force of intelligence and wit found in his nonsense language—Sancho remade the impoverished physical and economic conditions of the blot’s occurrence into the content of his social criticism.

the raCIal POlItICs Of PrInt PUBlICatIOn

Sancho’s cringe- inducing wit powerfully asserts that “a generic and univocal social qualification to cultural practices” constitutes a techno-logically deterministic, politically myopic, and morally dangerous vision (Chartier 3). The painful jokes of his August 14, 1779, letter partially avoid these failings by overturning a negative understanding of his pen’s propen-sity to blot.15 Sancho’s letters advocate a more fluid, open- ended approach to the signifying potential of writing technology and script. In productively using chirographic failure to claim an “excessively good” fit between blot-ting and overflow and dark skin and volubility, Sancho asked his reader to reject attributing dullness of mind to people of African descent, and more generally, to reject a direct correlation between aesthetic linearity and intellectual quality. In doing so, he offered what one might anachro-nistically call a constructivist approach to technological meaning and so-cial categorization—an approach that stood in stark contrast to the con-nections that both his champions and detractors made between racial and ethnic identity and technologies of inscription and dissemination.

Two such readers of Sancho’s Letters were Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Jefferson, whose commentaries respectively appeared in An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) and Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Both responses posited imagined communities of


readers, called forth by print publications created by and directed toward socially homogenous audiences, in which white, Anglo males enumerated and interpreted examples of African genius. Their reviews cordoned off af-fective responses to figures like Sancho by confining such interactions to a racially and ethnically exclusive fraternity.

Clarkson’s unabashed defense of black equality in An Essay launched him to the fore of the British abolition movement. Within this longer trea-tise, Clarkson included a brief entry on Sancho:

To this poetry [Phillis Wheatley’s] I shall add, as a farther proof of their abilities, the Prose compositions of Ignatius Sancho, who received some little education. His letters are too well known, to make any extract, or indeed any farther mention of him, necessary. If other examples of Afri-can genius should be required, suffice it to say, that they can be pro-duced in abundance; and that if I were allowed to enumerate instances of African gratitude, patience, fidelity, honour, as so many instances of good sense, and a found understanding, I fear that thousands of the en-lightened Europeans would have occasion to blush. (175)

Clarkson’s review is revealing for the ways it invokes printed materials in terms of an Africa- Europe dichotomy. His description of Sancho’s Letters as “too well known” registered the existence, commoditization, dissemi-nation, and discussion of the printed book. But it was the existence of the book itself, rather than Sancho’s words, that exemplified “African genius.” No “extract, or indeed any farther mention of him [was] necessary” to im-mediately figure Sancho as a panethnic emblem for all dark- skinned men and women. Clarkson even went so far as to assert that a more statistically significant (if still anecdotal) number of “examples of African genius” that demonstrated “good sense, and a found understanding” could have been produced, but such an effort would have been unnecessary in light of his reference to the existence of Sancho’s book.16

What, then, did Clarkson mean when he wrote that examples of Afri-can genius “can be produced in abundance”? If his elevation of the printed Letters over Sancho’s epistolary thoughts is any indication, then Clarkson did not mean “instances” to indicate the actual words and actions of men and women of African descent that were heard and experienced by “Euro-peans.” His commentary refers instead to the mediation and dissemina-


tion of those words and actions. This process could take an extreme sense of mediation and dissemination via a printed and bound book such as the Letters, or a more immediate sense such as Clarkson’s own “enumera-tion”—his recounting and relating of examples within a tract that, via thousands of printings, was imagined to arrive in the hands of “thousands of . . . enlightened Europeans.”

The final phrase of Clarkson’s review—“I fear that thousands of the en-lightened Europeans would have occasion to blush”—is especially salient, for it links the dissemination of printed materials to the imagined affective responses of their readers in very displaced and peculiar ways. The “occa-sion” on which thousands of people might “blush” would not be the act of reading Sancho’s words. Nor would an encounter with Sancho’s book em-barrass proslavery readers. Neither would a mention or relation of Sancho’s words or deeds via a commentator such as Clarkson provoke a response. Instead, it was the mere knowledge of Sancho’s book that should force pro-slavery readers to reconsider their position. And yet Clarkson went so far as to imagine that not even the mention of Sancho’s book could have the desired effect. Such a case, then, would require the verbal enumeration of other examples of genius within Clarkson’s book to elicit a blush—an un-meditated betrayal of a sincerely felt change of heart regarding enslaved men and women of African descent. Clarkson willingly displaced Sancho’s book with his own print production, one in which he emphasized the im-portance of the verbal content over that of the physical medium. His short commentary demonstrates how specific expectations of print could lead to the reductive generalization of Sancho- as- African, and it represents an at-tempt to reserve the affective interaction between writers and readers for a community to which Sancho could not belong.

Through his mention of the printed and bound Letters and his invoca-tion of blushing Europeans, Clarkson’s review registered a racial politics rooted in knowledge of the existence of Sancho’s writing rather than in the verbal and visual content. While the review did not offer an overt racial de-marcation of the sphere in which affective interaction was possible, it cer-tainly refused to cede judgment of Sancho’s rationality to the writer him-self. This refusal is especially interesting in that it parallels an eerily similar dynamic within the decidedly negative assessment of Sancho’s Letters in “Query XIV” of Jefferson’s Notes. Immediately following his notorious dis-


missal of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, Jefferson’s review betrayed an anxiety over the mastery of cultural practices by racial others. Unlike Clarkson, Jefferson questioned Sancho’s emotional and intellectual capacities. How-ever, like Clarkson’s elevation of his own texts over Sancho’s words, Jeffer-son’s aestheticization of the corporeal body circumscribed the full social power of Sancho’s epistolary writing:

Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition; yet his letters do more honour to the heart than the head. They breathe the purest effusions of friendship and general philanthropy, and shew how great a degree of the latter may be compounded with strong reli-gious zeal. He is often happy in the turn of his compliments, and his stile is easy and familiar, except when he affects a Shandean fabrication of words. But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes inces-santly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epis-tolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column. (178)

Jefferson compulsively asserted that a linear verbal aesthetic (most often the logic of syllogistic “demonstration”) was the outcome of a sensibility capable of conveying rational thought.17 According to Jefferson, Sancho’s imagination was incapable of conveying reason because his feelings were too effusive. His emotions were not calibrated to the fine tune of his con-temporaries, resulting in a nonlinear, “incoherent,” and “eccentric” style. When Sancho did offer a simple and felicitous prose, it was the result of “religious zeal” rather than an equally imaginative rendering of logos through pathos. Jefferson held Sancho to a double standard, rejecting the possibility that his brand of emotion might actually be the harbinger of a coequal mental aptitude while reserving such a possibility for the rest of his white “epistolary class.”18 Ultimately, his review attempted to delegiti-


mize the pathetic dimension of Sancho’s letters, rendering his reason in-scrutable in the face of his blackness. It is almost as if Jefferson took San-cho’s play on inebriation a bit too seriously in his wish for an aesthetic of “sober reasoning.”

Before his reviews of Wheatley and Sancho in “Query XIV,” Jeffer-son offered a sustained meditation on skin color that located reason in the white readers of “texts” made by dark- skinned men and women rather than in the authors of those expressions, since the physical bodies that produced those texts could not legibly emote within his visual system for indexing mental aptitude and character. This dubious logic found its apo-theosis in Jefferson’s meditation on blushing:

The first difference that strikes us is of color—a difference fixed in na-ture. . . . [I]s this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mix-tures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? (176)

By locating the potential for understanding in the perceived legibility of the human face rather than on the face of the page, Jefferson denied that dark- skinned people of African descent could be read as individuals who were able to rationally communicate. For Jefferson, the writing of black men and women could not convey a sense of subtlety and complexity. Rather, their writing seemed to him a mere extension of their dark faces’ unread-able, eternal “monotony.” Thus, in his reading of African emotion, intel-lect, and creativity, a racist aesthetics of the human body determined the capacity for writerly excellence. This move resulted in an overdetermined assessment of Sancho’s letters that interpreted his “extravagant” sentiment as the logical expression of the supposedly innate emotive capacities of a black, African body. Jefferson’s invocation of the blushing trope, moreover, denied that there could ever be a sense of mutual understanding, or corre-spondence, based on sentiment among a multiracial body politic that en-franchised people of African descent.19 Suffice it to say, dark- skinned men and women labored under the obvious limitations of this cultural logic. Much as Clarkson’s review did, Jefferson’s commentary constituted the


body as a key site of interpretation, foreclosing the possibility of a coequal affective interaction between Sancho and his readers. In doing so, Jeffer-son attempted to limit Sancho’s assertions of social and political authority among his posthumous interlocutors.20

The vast majority of Jefferson’s review articulated a corporeal aesthetics of racial othering that denied “the quality of [Sancho’s] authorship” (Gates 49). Yet in his final word on the Letters, Jefferson recapitulated the cate-gory of authenticity within a script- print register: “This criticism supposes the letters published under his name to be genuine, and to have received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be of easy inves-tigation” (178). Printing the Letters produced an epistemological gap for Jefferson. The letters in print displaced a perceived metonymic surrogacy through which Sancho’s manuscripts could authenticate their origins. This gap offered a point of departure for those willing to debate “the possibility of authorship,” even those who were otherwise opposed to the Virginian’s critique (Gates 49).21

The strength of Jefferson’s salvo in this debate rested on an eighteenth- century premise, shared by both supporters and critics of Sancho’s writ-ing, that “letters came to be considered more authentic and sincere if un-revised and written with no thought of possible subsequent publication and if they exposed the private rather than the public self or addressed personal rather than public issues” (Carretta, introduction xx). According to the logic of this premise, the transition of Sancho’s letters from manu-script to print might have radically transformed readers’ perceptions of their authenticity. Frances Crew’s foreword to the 1782 edition attended to this possibility:

The Editor of these Letters thinks proper to obviate an objection, which she finds has already been suggested, that they were originally written with a view to publication. She declares, therefore, that no such idea was ever expressed by Mr. Sancho; and that not a single letter is here re-printed from any duplicate preserved by himself, but all have been col-lected from the various friends to whom they were addressed. Her mo-tives for laying them before the public were, the desire of shewing that an untutored African may possess abilities equal to an European; and the still superior motive, of wishing to serve his worthy family. And she


is happy in thus publicly acknowledging she has not found the world in-attentive to the voice of obscure merit. (4)

Crew’s defense of authenticity stipulated that sent holographs were used as the exemplars for the printed text. This privileging of handwriting over printing responded to contemporaries who might have viewed the print volume as a medium that disconnected Sancho’s body, a perceived site of authenticity, from the words in the Letters. Crew’s note posited a linkage between authenticity and text in which handwriting served as a transpar-ent link to “originality” or “truth.” By elevating handwriting over another form of mediation, print, Sancho’s manuscripts served as privileged points of access. This understanding of mediation seems to have been operating in the minds of Sancho’s posthumous interlocutors.22 The existence of the Letters, with its printed pages eliminating Sancho’s physical, chirographic trace, made possible Jefferson’s forgery assertion. Conversely, the sympa-thetic editor of the letters claimed that her access to Sancho’s handwrit-ing could appropriately signal the authenticity of the printed contents. The new material status of Sancho’s letters in print cast doubts on that possi-bility, which Jefferson sought to exploit and Crew sought to mitigate.

In claiming to passively lay the contents of Sancho’s sent manuscripts before the public, Crew did not just attempt to deflect questions of revision or forgery. Drawing on the conventions of both posthumous letter collec-tions and eighteenth- century novels, Crew relied on a generic understand-ing of epistolarity in which the private intentions of letter writers were essential to the familiar letter’s ability to reveal the authentic self. However, both Crew’s rhetorical deflection of her editorial work and her claim that Sancho’s writing occurred under private intentions were suspect. Brycchan Carey notes that Crew was a very active editor. She commissioned a prefa-tory biography by Joseph Jeckyll, she did not incorporate all of Sancho’s ex-tant correspondence, she included footnotes in the collection, and she at-tempted to place the letters in chronological order.23 Furthermore, though it is difficult to ascertain whether Sancho intended his letters to appear in a collection edited by Crew, it is undeniable that Crew was aware of his readiness both to make his writing public and to see his writing in numer-ous print formats.24 She included letters in the printed collection that San-cho wrote for insertion into newspapers, letters that he first circulated in manuscript form.25


Crew’s editorial note rather transparently concealed the historical reality of letter writing and transmission in the eighteenth century, which as Vincent Carretta points out, “was private in origin but ultimately public in dissemination (introduction xxii). Sancho himself must have been aware of this precondition to his epistolary production, for his letters to Laurence Sterne appeared in multiple printed collections during his lifetime. But per-haps the most striking evidence of Sancho’s self- consciousness about the future circulation of his letters—in either manuscript or print, by either his initiative or the work of others—appears in a letter exchange between Sancho and Edmund Rack. An author, abolitionist, and member of the Bath Philosophical Society, Rack came into the possession of letters that Sancho wrote to interlocutors in both the East Indies and Philadelphia. On April 20, 1779, Rack requested Sancho’s “permission to print them in a col-lection of Letters of Friendship.” If Sancho would agree to this first request, Rack suggested that he should reply with a letter “as thou art willing to have appear with the other two in my collection” (301). By intimating that the reply might appear in the printed volume, Rack made the possibilities of print publication and future circulation unavoidable thresholds for San-cho’s putting pen to paper.

Later that month, Sancho replied to Rack’s letter: “[Y]ou have my free consent to do as you please with them—though in truth there wants no increase in books in the epistolary way—except we could add to the truly valuable names of Robertson—Beattie—and Mickle—new Youngs—Richardsons—and Sternes” (151–52). Sancho’s letter demonstrated his knowledge of epistolary print culture and asserted membership in what Jefferson called “the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand.” More importantly, though, Sancho asserted his membership in reply to a letter that foisted an unavoidable “view to publication.” It is not surprising, then, that editors did not include Rack’s April 20, 1779, letter in eighteenth- century editions of the Letters. Rack’s requests—permission to publish two previously sent letters and an offer of a third letter intentionally written for publication—suggest Sancho’s awareness not only of how previously sent letters could appear in formats oriented toward future circulation but that he had actively written for such temporal- textual conditions.


MedIatIng the CharaCter Of thOUght

Contemporary anxieties over media transition and racializations of Sancho’s body constituted a vital threshold for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century approaches to the Letters. It is, therefore, easy to imag-ine that technologically deterministic, hierarchical conceptions of media might have circumscribed the signifying potential of the collection’s most salient visual expression of Sancho’s trace, the typographic inkblot (fig. 2). After all, without the visual cue of splotchy ink, the verbal profusion of Sancho’s prose does not automatically read as a carefully crafted mitigation of and play on an involuntary blot. The inkblot character, centered on the x- height of the font, justified against the left- hand margin, and immediately preceding the text of Sancho’s commentary on it, occupies a spatially and temporally linear place within the printed letter. The typesetter even used the same en spacing found between other words on the same page when setting the space between the blot character and the word “confound.” This blot seems to mitigate the disorientation that might accompany a read-ing of a smudged, inky manuscript sheet. Whereas his holograph might have posited verbal profusion as a rational response to the vicissitudes of handwriting, the orderly typographic blot of the printed Letters seemingly frames verbal profusion as a non sequitur. The relatively clean nature of the inkblot character seems to limit the political and aesthetic potential San-cho suggests in his August 14, 1779, letter on the random spew of the ine-briate. Printing Sancho’s Letters did not inherently guarantee the erosion of his authority over how others perceived his thoughts on writing and so-cial identity, but specific typographic renderings of his penmanship, such as his blot, were certainly open to this possibility.26 The typographic sup-pression of the nonlinear style in which Sancho reveled might have easily stoked contemporary anxieties over his posthumous print publication.

Sancho’s musings on his inscription technologies suggest, however, that the technological determinism and social myopia of these anxieties hide from view the full complexity of the chirographic urgency with which he tackled issues of race. Rather than the deterministic quality that readers such as Jefferson and Crew assigned to the printed status of the Letters, Sancho’s blot shows how the social meanings assigned to the material pro-cesses attending both handwriting and printing are not inherent to any particular technology. Subsequently, those processes and technologies are


available to a variety of political positions. Sancho’s blot ultimately asserts what Harold Love describes as the essential “evasiveness and indetermi-nacy” of the material text, whether it be handwritten or printed (155).

Unfortunately, many scholars who take note of the blot assert what Paul Gutjahr and Megan Benton describe as an “ethic of typographic invisi-bility” (1) that circumscribes the politics encoded by the materiality of San-cho’s letters. Editors Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt misguidedly describe the mark as a “whimsical introduction of an irrelevant digression” (San-cho, Letters [1994] 106). Edwards and Rewt, unwilling to plumb the depths of visual surfaces, miss the political implications of the blot’s hermeneutic richness. Their dismissal risks reiterating the discourses of inscrutability by which Jefferson dismissed Sancho’s writing. Literary critic Madeleine Des-cargues speculates that Sancho’s blot is but one example of his “imitation of Sterne” (159), a bibliographic allusion that reflects a “taste for conversa-tional style [that] induces him to scatter strokes of his inspiration” among his letters; the “blots probably warrant [the] spontaneity” that both he and Sterne understood as an “intrinsic quality of conversational writing” (158). Her reading of the blot as a graphic imitation of the conversational spon-taneity found in Sterne’s prose brings into view an understanding of San-cho’s manuscript practices as mimetic or assimilationist gestures. Sukhdev Sandhu recognizes in the verbiage of Sancho’s blot- filled letters how deft rhetorical play served as “a subtle and witty demolition of racist discourse” (“Ignatius Sancho: An African” 56). However, even Sandhu’s reading misses the full import of the letter’s materiality. The signifying potential of its physical production and visual appearance does not merely reflect Sancho’s verbal social criticisms. The material condition of Sancho’s writ-ing, including his chirographic impropriety, is inextricable from the poli-tics of his epistolary practices.27 Sancho’s manuscripts were physical forms of social criticism that shaped his verbal expressions as much as his words took up the materials and appearances of writing. The reciprocity between his blots and his rhetorical sensibility was a crucial means by which he ex-posed the intellectual and moral impoverishment of Enlightenment- based racism.

One way to illuminate the persistence of Sancho’s transgressive media strategies that avoids both the technological determinism of his contem-poraries and the readings of digression, mimesis, assimilation, and reflec-tion offered by recent scholarship is to complicate the idea that his letters


merely transitioned from manuscript to print. The interpretive significance of Sancho’s material practices should not be understood within a singular, unidirectional movement from a monolithic manuscript culture serving as a realm of freedom and sociability to a monolithic print culture character-ized by fixity and impersonality. His writing both requires and exemplifies a sophisticated temporal understanding of media as standing in mutually constitutive, inextricable relation with one another.28

A suggestion commonly found in previous studies of the Letters, that the blot character appearing in the September 3, 1777, letter to Meheux was “probably in imitation of some of the typographical games Laurence Sterne plays in Tristram Shandy,” contains latent evidence depicting the re-ciprocal significations of media that undergird Sancho’s text (Carretta in Letters [1998] 283).29 Of interest here is that Sancho might have had previ-ous instances of printing in mind when producing his manuscript letter. Rather than a merely passive media transition, Sancho’s previous encoun-ters with Shandean typography may have engendered a new form of writing in which the choice to blot occasioned social critique. This is not simply an effect of Sancho’s previous reading of Sterne. Taken together with Sancho’s manuscript encoding of printing terminology, these technological imbri-cations suggest that Sancho might have intended to blot his September 3, 1777, letter to Meheux. The design and setting of the typographic blot in the 1782 edition, rather than being read as a poor representation of involun-tary chirographic failure, might denote a visual linearity that Sancho chose for his own handwriting. An intentionally linear inkblot would ironize his previous apologies for the messiness of his script. It would force his readers to reject chance occurrence in favor of a well- sorted line of ink and prose. Sancho may have conceived of the blot as a participant in the same illogical correlations he deployed in his similes about overflowing deviance, forcing it to stand in contradistinction to his verbal profusion and troubling deter-ministic understandings of social identity and aesthetic practice.

The indeterminacy of Sancho’s epistolary writing also stems from the numerous transformations posthumously undertaken across five edi-tions of the Letters between 1782 and 1803. These books include impor-tant editorial and typographic changes, which when viewed over time re-veal a bibliographic apparatus that does not uniformly misrecognize the social import of his thought. The typographic blot, which first appeared in 1782, offers one site to mark changes in editorial vision. In subsequent


eighteenth- century editions of Sancho’s Letters, including the London edi-tions of 1783 and 1784, as well as a Dublin edition from 1784, the typo-graphic blot dropped out. While its exclusion from these editions might be attributed to economic considerations or the vagaries of the print shop, the fact that John Nichols oversaw its exclusion in the 1783 and 1784 London editions after including it in the 1782 version makes one wonder whether the editorial powers involved during the initial publication fully under-stood the critical role that penmanship played in Sancho’s thought pro-cesses, let alone the social critique he deployed in his letters to Meheux, Stevenson, and others.

In the early nineteenth century, Sancho’s son, William, initiated an edi-torial reframing of the Letters that acknowledged this critical role for the physical materials of writing. William himself was very familiar with book culture. He served as a librarian in the 1790s for the naturalist, botanist, and science patron Joseph Banks, and later he became a bookseller in his father’s Westminster store.30 While working as a bookseller, William pub-lished a fifth edition of the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1803), in which he reintroduced the typographic blot that appeared in the 1782 effort (fig. 3). Also appearing for the first time in an edition of the Letters were an engraved facsimile of Laurence Sterne’s July 27, 1766, letter to William’s father (fig. 4) and Edmund Rack’s April 20, 1779, request to include his father’s letters in the projected collection, Letters of Friendship.

It is possible that William’s reintroduction of the typographic blot might have been meant as a form of authentication. It is also possible that Frances Crew included the blot in her 1782 edition for the same reason. Represent-ing Sancho’s trace could have been intended to rebuke questions of author-ship in much the same way that Crew claimed to have used sent manu-scripts as exemplars. William’s inclusion of the facsimile, with the relative immediacy of Sterne’s trace, albeit one that stood at least two removes (en-graving and printing) from a manuscript letter, could have also served as an authorizing gesture. Sterne’s letter extended canonical cover, perhaps serving to confirm for doubting readers and critics an Anglo- African’s active participation in letter correspondence.

William’s foregrounding of handwriting, however, need not be cyni-cally understood in terms of the body politics in which figures such as Jefferson, Clarkson, and Crew engaged. The previous section of this essay argues that Edmund Rack’s letter worked against “establishing the . . . ab-


sence of premeditation on Sancho’s behalf.” It stands to reason that by pub-lishing Rack’s letter in the 1803 collection, William embraced aspects of his father’s premeditative epistolary practice. William’s contributions did not engage in a “preoccupation” with sincerity and authenticity to the extent of Crew’s editorship. Instead, as Descargues suggests, the inclusion of the typographic blot “might well be construed as an intentional mark of re-spect for [his father’s] turn of mind, from [one] who could be expected to have gained an insight into his father’s way of thinking” (154). Part of William’s insight was how the physical constitution of writing served as

fIgUre 3. Typographic inkblot from the 1803 edition. Image courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.


an important stimulus for both his father’s mind and potentially for the readers who encountered his writing in manuscript or print.

Although it is impossible to know William’s personal interpretation of his father’s penmanship, it is nonetheless worth dwelling on the design and typesetting of the 1803 blot (fig. 3). Note the ascender of what was likely an “f ” or a long “s” rising from the top of the blot, the body of which was possibly the deformed x- height portion of the ascender- topped character. This decision is striking. It holds out the tantalizing prospect of reading the typographic blot as a visual recording of writing and blotting in action. Perhaps Sancho began with the formation of an ascender. He then moved his quill leftward and downward to create the x- height portion of an “f ” or long “s,” but instead of reaching the baseline, his quill broke. Or his reser-voir leaked. Or the paper caught his nib at just the wrong angle, and the ink spilled onto the page.

fIgUre 4. Facsimile of Sterne’s July 27, 1766, letter to Sancho from the 1803 edition. Images courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.


The importance of the 1803 blot, however, does not inhere in any de-sign for documenting a specific moment of handwriting with any degree of visual or temporal fidelity. In fact, existing holographs containing Sancho’s cursive suggest that it is extremely unlikely he would have used a script that required an initial ascender in the formation of either the “f ” or the long “s.”31 The significance of the 1803 blot, instead, rests in its expression of the simultaneity and interdependence of Sancho’s verbal and material registers. Consider, too, the spacing of the blot between the words that im-mediately precede and follow it: “hope[blot]confound” scans as a single image- text. The 1803 blot—a semblance of an alphabetic character, emerg-ing from its own graphic failure, spatially embedded within a line of type so as to blur the relationship between word and illustration— constitutes a site where chirography and typography, verbal and visual, text and image are indivisible, serving to destabilize the meanings Sancho’s contempo-raries assigned to his writing and to his body.

It is not surprising that William grasped the connections that his father made between material practice and social critique. Sandhu suggests that the appeal which nonlinear expression held for Sancho might be under-stood in light of the fact that discontinuity was the status quo for those who, like father and son, existed on the economic margins of slave soci-eties (“Ignatius Sancho: An African” 57). Keeping in mind this historical circumstance of nonlinearity’s social moment, as well as William’s sense of the role that material practices played in his father’s thought processes, I am tempted to read the “fatal blot” as social inequality itself (Letters 96). Slavery was an institution that James Callendar, a political operative who worked for and against Thomas Jefferson, described as “a dark stain on our character” (qtd. in Durey 137). This apt phrase captures the interplay among race, morality, inequality, and the materials of writing present in Sancho’s letters. And yet the typographic blot resists the parsing offered by Callendar’s phrase. His invocation of the plural first- person, “our,” rhe-torically occupies a privileged socioeconomic position that, much like Jefferson’s description of slavery as a “blot in our country,” risks interpret-ing slavery as the burden of those who are not enslaved (Notes 141).32 Like the affective burden Clarkson’s text places on enlightened Europeans, or the burden of corporeal interpretation lamented by Jefferson, Callendar’s “dark stain” marginalizes the disenfranchised it purportedly represents.

Ultimately, the blot is a black character. It is a visual emblem of a per-


forming body that, like the entwined technologies and practices of manu-script and print, resisted interpretive closures posited by both supporters and critics.33 It serves as a rebuke to Enlightenment- based, racist theo-ries of aesthetic linearity and as a counter to the racial and ethnic efface-ments of Sancho’s self- representations by the abolitionist vanguard. The remediation of his letters in printed volumes partially hid from view his socially conscious invocations of material texts and provoked contempo-rary anxieties over the authenticity of his writing. Both sympathetic and antagonistic forces involved with the collection’s production and recep-tion seized upon these anxieties, which intersected with an Enlightenment bias toward writing as the sign of a rational (and thus human) being. The result of this intersection, made possible by deterministic ideas about “the very existence of his book,” allowed Sancho an opportunity to be seen as a man of intellect and creativity by the abolitionist vanguard, and it offered opportunities for both his critics and supporters to assert positions that his own words militate against (Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho: An African” 70). However, despite the very real and powerful disruptions that the paratex-tual world of the printed Letters held for obstructing the full terms of his self- fashioning, the media history of Sancho’s writing reveals that those terms did not disappear.

nOtes

I wish to thank Matthew P. Brown, Kathleen Kamerick, Rob Mcloone, and Laura Rigal for their careful readings and helpful suggestions. Mike Chaser, Bob Mattes, Brian Mendonsa, Elizabeth Munger, and Jennifer Trivedi offered key insights along the way, and the anonymous readers and editorial staff at Early American Literature offered salutary criticisms. The Newberry Library, the Spe-cial Collections Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Library Com-pany of Philadelphia were very generous with their materials and time. Portions of this article were written with the financial support of a Jacob K. Javits Fellow-ship from the US Department of Education and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow-ship in Early American Literature and Material Texts from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Library Company of Philadelphia, as well as funding from the University of Iowa Center for the Book, Department of Ameri-can Studies, and Graduate College.

1. On previous appearances of Sancho’s letter to Sterne, see Ellis 205–06 and Sterne 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Sancho’s Letters are from Carretta’s

edition. 3. Nonetheless, Sancho scholars have certainly taken up themes held in common


by book history and media studies. Examinations of Sancho’s handwriting and the Letters’ typography can be found in Descargues and in Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho: An African,” “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne,” and London Call-ing. The most thorough and exemplary discussion of the materiality of the pub-lished Letters to date appears in Rezek, “Print Atlantic.”

4. See Jackson and Rezek, “Orations.” Although Jackson does not explicitly men-tion Sancho, I contend that “theoriz[ing] the mediatory connections between” (293) what McGann famously described as the “linguistic and bibliographic codes” (13) of texts would do as much for the study of the Letters as it would for the works of the early black Atlantic writers whom Jackson cites through-out his article, including James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, John Jea, Phillis Wheatley, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. Jackson’s implicit suggestion that an exchange between African Americanists and book historians can bring interpretive value to the study of figures such as Sancho is made explicit by Rezek when he argues that “scholarship on the early black Atlantic can benefit from more attention to the functions black writers as-signed to print” (655). Furthermore, by making recourse to examples of early nineteenth- century oratory in order to uncover those functions, Rezek himself makes an implicit suggestion: that scholars attend to the interconnected, hetero-geneous media environments in which those writers participated. Or, as Jackson succinctly puts it, “the study of print culture ought [to] be about more than print-edness” (259). An important remedy to the interdisciplinary dearth observed by Jackson and Rezek occurred during the same year in which their essays were published. The conference “Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice” was held in Philadelphia on March 18–20, 2010. See Goddu. A collec-tion of essays based on this conference, Early African American Print Culture (Cohen and Stein), was published in 2012.

5. On the concept of text- paratext, see Genette 1–2. Also see McGann 13–14, for his rethinking and expansion of Genette’s concepts.

6. Recent scholarship has concentrated on the processes by which many of Sancho’s own supporters elaborated racially essentialist views as they framed the Letters for contemporary reading publics. In addition to Rezek, Carey, British Abolition-ism 57–63 and “Hellish Means,” and Hammerschmidt have been especially atten-tive to how circumstances regarding the posthumous publication and circulation of the Letters potentially effaced the complexity of Sancho’s social and political identifications.

7. I take one of my cues from Cook’s argument that the gender politics of eighteenth- century epistolary writing arose from contradictions among notions of private and public that, in part, emanated from and played out in “[t]he material forms of books.” This essay draws on Cook’s insight to examine how the racial politics of Sancho’s letters were entwined with “print- culture issues of representation” elaborated by his supporters, his detractors, and himself (3).

8. This essay draws on a rich vein of scholarship dedicated to the aesthetic strategies


Sancho used to negotiate the racializing tendencies of both his political enemies and his abolitionist supporters. In addition to Carey, Ellis, Hammerschmidt, and Sandhu, see Carretta, introduction and “Three West Indian Writers”; Nussbaum; and Sandiford.

9. In examining the various objects and practices of writing by which Sancho, his printers, and his readers both wielded and encountered eighteenth- century sen-timental rhetoric, this essay is indebted to Gitelman’s concept of “inscription,” which she defines as “a form of intervention, into which new machinery con-tinues to interpose.” These interventions and interpositions “allow . . . histories of the senses, as different media and varied forms, genres, and styles of representa-tion act as brokers among accultured practices of seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing” (Scripts, Grooves 3). Gitelman’s list of gerunds and their implication of an active, sensorial body is important here, because it opens up “performance” as a means of historicizing inscriptions such as Sancho’s. In this respect, Roach’s use of the concept of “orature” (11–12), discussed in n. 28, is an important theo-retical model for approaching the Letters.

10. In addition to Pearsall, an excellent reading of the relationship between inscrip-tion and the culture of sensibility can be found in Barker- Benfield 62–100. For valuable general introductions to the relations of textual media to performance media and to the status of textual media as performance media, see Marotti and Bristol and Gustafson and Sloat.

11. The opening line of Sancho’s January 4, 1780, letter to William Stevenson, as it appears in the 1782 edition, contains a potential misspelling of the word “You” as “Your.” Printers of subsequent editions corrected this probable mistake on the original typesetter’s part. Such errata illustrate how representations of Sancho’s handwriting were themselves subject to the chaos of setting moveable type, a theme taken up in greater length during later sections of this essay. More de-finitive evidence regarding this error might exist in the former collection of the late John Ralph Willis, whose holdings included Stevenson’s fifth edition copy of Sancho’s Letters. The copy contains fourteen or fifteen tipped- in manuscript let-ters attributed to Sancho, seven to ten of which appeared in the printed collec-tion. The exact numbers are not clear. Varying accounts of the existing Sancho holographs in Stevenson’s edition, published and unpublished, can be found in Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne” 96–98; Carretta, “A Note on the Text”; and the description of “Lot 37489.” Some of these letters were written di-rectly to Stevenson, and they may include his January 4, 1780, letter on “chaotic matter,” which would yield valuable insights into the connections Sancho made between verbal and visual form. Heritage Auctions sold these materials in Feb-ruary 2010 to an unidentified buyer.

12. It is unclear whether John Nichols or a laborer in his employ created the typo-graphic blot character and set the type. I have used the generic term printers to deal with this ambiguity.

13. My sincerest thanks to typographer and letterpress printer Elizabeth Munger.


This essay has benefitted tremendously from her keen observations and specula-tions on the inking of the typographic blots found in the 1782 and 1803 editions.

14. See Dierks on the social consequences attending the production, consumption, and use of stationery supplies during the eighteenth century.

15. I use the caveat “partially” because the transgressive racial politics in Sancho’s August 14, 1779, epistolary performance involved activating sexist protocols of gender and propriety within the male sociable space he and Meheux inhabited through their letter exchange. Sancho’s self- affiliation with the degeneracy of the bawd in relation to his own material practice was crucial in asserting the mas-culinity of his alternative verbal aesthetic. This maneuver descended from a long history of “likening penmanship errors to sexual transgressions” and thus “pre-sent[ing] writing as action that belies feminine passivity” (Stabile 90–91). San-cho, via his blots, couched his own writing in terms of a sexually potent deviance that was nonetheless appropriately masculine because of the shared, libertine rhetorical context of the exchange between Meheux and himself. For another example of Sancho’s “masculine” epistolary aesthetics, consider his connection of verbal expression, script quality, and “efficacious” romantic interludes in his mocking of Meheux on October 17, 1779: “Poor blundering M[eheux], I pity thee—once more I tell thee—thou art a bungler in every thing—ask the girls else.—You know nothing of figures—you write a wretched hand—thou has a nonsensical style” (Letters 183).

16. For a more detailed exploration of how cultural understandings of printed books could lead to the social flattening of minoritized figures, see Rezek, “Print Atlan-tic.” Rezek notes that “black authors, unlike any others, were in their persons subject to commodification, just like the books they published. Book publica-tion intensified the drama of this conjunction . . . [and] catalyzed aesthetic judg-ments that led readers to believe in a text’s ability to represent the talents of an entire race. The cultural significance of the book helped make this leap of logic possible” (22). This leap could even include “opinions [that] derive more from widespread knowledge of their books than the writing within them” (32).

17. For a wider discussion of the prevalence of Enlightenment- based theories of linearity during the late eighteenth century, see Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne” 99–101 and London Calling 39–43.

18. Interestingly enough, Jefferson was even “compelled to enroll” his copy of San-cho’s Letters “at the bottom of the [‘epistolary’] column” in his library catalog. It is tempting to interpret this placement as an instance of Enlightenment- based spatial tabulation that is equivalent to his critical review, but according to Gil-reath and Wilson, the position of the Sancho entry was likely due to Jefferson’s preference for using chronology and physical size to order his books.

19. For a reading of how Jefferson’s meditation on skin color highlights the politi-cal danger that indecipherable aesthetic deviation seemingly posed to the early American Republic, see Fliegelman 192–93. For a more recent treatment of the linkage of black literary production to political participation in Notes on the State


of Virginia, see Jarrett, who argues that “Jefferson’s hypothesis of black literary or intellectual inferiority . . . [was] just one among several incidental steps toward proving a grand hypothesis: that reason and imagination are prerequisite to the induction of blacks into the early American polity” (299).

20. See similar linkages between Jefferson’s critique of the Letters and his doubts about the social and political enfranchisement of African Americans in Burstein 279 and Foner 40 (qtd. in Barker- Benfield 406–10).

21. While Gates rightly argues that Jefferson’s Notes established a criterion of quality by which to judge black writing, he misses what the book historian Dinius de-scribes as the material “registers in which people make meaning from texts” (57). See Dinius for a mediacentric critique of Gates. For a detailed analysis of Gates’s inattention to the historicity of material texts, see Jackson 251–59.

22. On the cultural politics of elevating script over print, see Goldberg 7. 23. For a lengthier discussion of Crew’s editorial contributions, see Carey, “Hellish

Means” 81–95. 24. It is extremely tempting, however, to read a late letter from Sancho to Frances

Crew, dated September 9, 1780, as alluding to the publication of his letters in a collection. See Letters 236. For a close reading of this circumstantial evidence, see Carey, “Hellish Means” 89.

25. See Carretta, “Three West Indian Writers” 77. 26. Sandhu comments on the dangers of this possibility: “Most editions fail to illus-

trate that the length of individual dashes varied according to the sense and con-text of particular sentences or passages. The original letters were also sprinkled with dots that appear to have been inserted deliberately and which, together with the dashes (many of them broken), convey the hesitations, pauses, and rhythms of Sancho’s speaking voice far more vividly than even the edition of his corre-spondence” (“Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne” 98).

27. In his analysis of the marbled page in essay thirty- six, volume three of Tristram Shandy, which Sterne himself described as “the motley emblem of my work,” the book historian De Voogd observes that Sterne composed his text according to “the paradoxical principle of accidental design, of carefully planned seeming chaos” (281). He argues that “the intricate process through which this ‘painting’ [Tristram Shandy] comes about can be analysed by reconstructing the blot- like ramifications of its ‘accidental’ elements” (287). Building upon De Voogd’s in-sights, the bibliographer McKenzie argues that the material features of Sterne’s novel indicate an “intention to embody an emblem of non- specific intention, of difference, of undetermined meaning, of the very instability of text from copy to copy. . . . Sterne’s principles and practice here confirm the idea of textual indeter-minacy, but in fact, in the very moment of denying the authority of the author, the extraordinary specificity of a hand- marbled page deviously confirms it” (36). Sancho’s blot draws on Sterne’s materialist orientation toward what McKenzie describes as “textual indeterminacy” (36). The blot, however, is no mere imita-tion of Sterne. Rather, Sancho reconfigures Sternian materiality as a critique of racial determinism.


28. Here I am indebted to Roach’s use of the concept of “orature,” which he de-scribes as an analytic by which “performance studies complicates the familiar di-chotomy between speech and writing,” showing how “modes of communication have produced one another interactively over time and that their historic opera-tions may be usefully examined under the rubric of performance” (11–12). Taking my cue from Roach’s interrogation of speech- writing dichotomies, I suggest that dichotomizing multiple modes of inscribed communication would be similarly ahistorical. Sancho’s physical act of blotting and subsequent typographic media-tions of his blot together constitute a microhistory of the multimedial interaction Roach describes. For further reading on the dangers of rendering “manuscript” and “print” as mutually exclusive, ahistorical, static categories in the context of epistolary culture, see Bannet xi; on the historicity and historiography of tex-tual and performance media in early American contexts, see Gustafson; on how inscribed media coordinate multiple notions of history, see Gitelman, Always Already New 1–22; on how media practices produce notions of history, see Liu; on how media metaphors repress queer temporalities in nineteenth- century lit-erary contexts, see Pratt 24–62; on how histories of information transmission are “multimedial” records, see M. Cohen.

29. See Descargues 158; Edwards and Rewt in Sancho, Letters (1994) 106; Sandhu, “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne” 96–97.

30. Information on William Sancho can be found in Fryer 96–97; Sandhu, London Calling 59.

31. See “Lot 37489.” 32. For an analysis of Jefferson’s “blot” diction, see Erkkila 47. 33. For a discussion of race, slavery, the performing body, and typography as synec-

doche, see Dinius 65.

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