The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho

November 1, 2022

Having survived the Middle Passage on a ship where both his parents died, a young Black man named Charles Ignatius Sancho ends up in 1740s London, studiously avoiding slave catchers while placing his faith in the benevolent duke who taught him to read. Eventually, he will meet the king, compose and play praiseworthy music, become the first Black person to vote in Britain, and lead the fight for abolition. A debut based on real-life events; actor Joseph wrote and starred in a play about Sancho. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from February 13, 2023
Actor and playwright Joseph draws from his one-person show, Sancho: A Remembrance, for this thoroughly engrossing portrait of a historical Englishman who escaped from slavery and made inroads with the royal court. Born to two enslaved African people crossing the Atlantic in 1729, Charles Ignatius is soon orphaned and sent to three spinster women in Greenwich, England, who name him Sancho. One day, Sancho runs away and is rescued from the clutches of the local slavecatcher by John, Second Duke of Montagu. The duke, noting Sancho’s quick mind, brings him to his estate, teaches Sancho to read and write, and gives him a job as a butler. Among Sancho’s accomplishments, he composes and publishes music, plays the lead in a local production of Othello, and is painted by celebrated portraitist Thomas Gainsborough. At his lowest ebb, suicidal over gambling debts and enduring painful attacks of gout, he’s befriended by a supportive group of free Black Londoners, and later marries one of their daughters, a fellow abolitionist. Toward the end of his life, he buys a shop and becomes a grocer. The purchase makes him a free male landowner, and he becomes the first Black man to vote in Great Britain. Joseph channels the writing style of the day and draws on the real-life Sancho’s diaries to give voice to his hero’s rich interior life. Readers shouldn’t miss this exhilarating and rewarding account of a man living at the cusp of world change.

March 15, 2023
This debut novel comprises the rollicking fictionalized memoirs of a real-life Black British trailblazer who associated with David Garrick and Dr. Johnson, played Othello, served as a valet at Windsor Castle, was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, and voted for abolition. 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. An entertaining portrait that also illuminates rare opportunities for Black people in 18th-century London.

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