Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African

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Cosimo, Inc., 2005 M01 1 - 310 pages
Born in 1729 on a slave ship bound for the West Indies, orphaned by the age of two and taken to England by his owner, Ignatius Sancho rose from servitude to become the most celebrated Afro-Briton of his time. Sancho's varied accomplishments include a number of Afro-British milestones, among them: first playwright; first art critic; first published correspondence; first direct attack on slavery; the only documented Afro-British voter during the eighteenth century; and the first Afro-Briton to be accorded an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. His thoughts on race and politics - including his criticism of British imperialism in India, the complicity of Africans in the slave trade, and the blatant racism that flourished in his adopted homeland - will be of particular interest to twentieth-century readers.
 

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Page ix - And he who surveys the extent of intellect to which Ignatius Sancho had attained by self-education, will perhaps conclude, that the perfection of the reasoning faculties does not depend on a peculiar conformation of the skull or the colour of a common integument...
Page iii - Indignation, and the dread of constant reproach arising from the detection of an amour, infinitely criminal in the eyes of three maiden ladies, finally determined him to abandon the family.
Page iv - Freedom, riches, and leisure, naturally led a disposition of African texture into indulgences; and that which dissipated the mind of Ignatius completely drained the purse.
Page vii - Don Quixote" and had his portrait painted by Gainsborough and engraved by Bartolozzi. He was a correspondent with Garrick and Sterne and, apparently, something of a poet as well. "A commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of a shop,
Page vii - Such was the man whose species philosophers and anatomists have endeavoured to degrade as a deterioration of the human; and such was the man whom Fuller, with a benevolence and quaintness of phrase peculiarly his own, accounted 'God's Image, though cut in Ebony.

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