THE SECRET DIARIES OF CHARLES IGNATIUS SANCHO
Author Joseph, who wrote and starred in the 2018 play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, researched Charles Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) for 20-plus years. Here, Sancho recounts his life through diary entries and letters—some between him and his future wife, Anne Osborne, during a long separation; others addressed to his son, Billy, as, gout-ridden, Sancho nears death. The story opens on a slave ship. Sancho’s young African parents die in quick succession: his mother in childbirth, his father by suicide. From the Americas, Sancho is taken to England at age 3 to live with his owner’s three unmarried aunts. They treat him like a pet, trotted out to perform amateur theatrics for friends’ entertainment (his name comes from a resemblance to “the rotund servant of Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote”). Under the secret patronage of the Duke of Montagu, the boy learns to read and play music. The aunts imprison him in the cellar for his audacity, but with a maid’s help he escapes. Neither slave nor documented freeman, the adult Sancho is well spoken and impeccably dressed; as likely to carouse with William Hogarth—alcohol, food, and gambling being his chief vices—as to be collared by slave catcher Jonathan Sill. He earns distinction as a musician and composer and becomes a landowning shopkeeper, but the brutality of slavery, such as Anne witnessed on Caribbean plantations, is a constant reminder of his privilege. Vindictive guardians, shifting fortunes, and the protagonist’s sheer pluck add Dickensian flavor, and the picaresque style recalls Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill.
