Ignatius Sancho's Shop (Dead Men's Teeth Book 7) (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

Ignatius Sancho was a fascinating individual who led an unusual life. He is said to have been born on an Atlantic slave ship around 1729, and brought to England from the Spanish West Indies. From the age of two he grew up as a household servant in Greenwich, though this was still with the status of a slave by English law. The Duke of Montagu took an interest in Sancho and paid for his education, and after the Duke’s death in 1749 his widow took him into her service as her butler, leaving him a small annuity which eventually enabled him to set up in business as a grocer in Mayfair, Westminster. 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 and the first to be accepted into London literary society. Around the time I was writing this collection of stories, the British Library had recently acquired the archive of Ignatius Sancho’s letters, and so I was eager to read them. In my research I found that Sancho’s little shop in Mayfair attracted some of the top (often celebrity) artists, musicians, actors and politicians of the time, as well as the next generation of young people aspiring to be like their idols. They all came to buy their tobacco, sugar, rum, and tea; slave products. Sancho could have refused to sell these goods on moral grounds, but they were the most popular and expensive products of the time. He would not have been able to make the money to keep his shop without them. It was a shrewd move. He would chat with powerful and wealthy men regularly, about all manner of intellectual topics, becoming very close friends with many of them. All the while, over every cup of tea, every charming and eloquent letter sent, every little transaction in the shop, Sancho was influencing them to challenge slavery. His influence pulled together, for the first time, a group of people who could really work to bring about the abolition of slavery. The fact that he was a former slave, selling slave goods also drew public interest and put a spotlight on the slave trade. I can imagine the hipsters of the time saying things like: ‘Have you been to that grocery shop in Mayfair? Ignatius Sancho’s? Yah, it’s really cool, an ex-slave selling slave goods. It’s like, controversial, but really ironic at the same time… Yah, Laurence Sterne goes there. Him and Ignatius are like, best friends…sometimes we chat when I’m buying my snuff… I’m thinking about showing him my manuscript.’ And then of course, these 18th century hipsters want to follow in the footsteps of their idols and become the next generation of abolitionists. One of the letters in the archive is Sancho’s eyewitness account of the Gordon riots happening right outside his shop. The riots are nothing to do with him but, being a quite wealthy, property-owning African man at time when many people were living in abject poverty, he must have been at least a little nervous. I wanted to use this threat to explore Sancho’s mind. His moral dilemma and guilt about selling slave goods, his worries that all of his hard work influencing the powerful would be to no avail, his love of his wife, his pride about his shop, his yearning to see Africa, a land that he has only seen in his imagination… but I wanted to do this in an original and unusual way, personifying his sense of guilt and creating a surreal parable. A fairy-tale journey through which to explore his preoccupations.