To this day, reading novels is tied to the pleasurable activity of immersing oneself in stories, to digress from the ordinary. However, when this digres-sion includes the depiction of the pain of others, the often cosy “familial feeling” can also morph into the more problematic paternalistic feeling for others. In literary sentimentalism the depiction of enslavement is fre-quently reduced to scenes of spectacular Black suffering and tearful white pity. As outlined in the introduction, the overlaps between this mode of writing and abolitionist discourse have garnered most attention and criti-cism in eighteenth-century studies. In his monograph on the politics of sensibility, Markman Ellis accordingly emphasises the limitations of senti-mentalism as a form of political agitation (cf. 1996: 83). This “public sentimental rhetoric” (Carey 2005: 60–61) links the private and familial sphere with the political debate of the day (maybe more explicitly than later Victorian domestic novels would). On the one hand, the fact that slavery became a prominent topic in a broad range of texts in the 1760s and 1770s demonstrates that there is public concern around anti-slavery or at least amelioration, even predating the peak of the abolitionist cam-paign. On the other hand, the reliance on idealised sentimental versions of white benevolence in the face of Black anguish is at risk of constructing sensibility as the unique capacity of those supposedly more refined. Thus, to understand the rise of the British novel and its reliance on “familial feel-ing”, epistolary novels and published letters appear especially relevant for the growing permeability of the public sphere for authors from the middle
ranks who conversed about political and everyday occurrences. In this context, the exchange of letters between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne is extremely valuable as both participated in but also transformed conventions of literary sentimentalism and how readers were to imagine feeling subjects.
Sancho and Sterne—connected via the Montagu family—are the only two writers joined in a chapter in this book who actually communicated with and cross-referenced each other and thus embody the most literal sense of entangled tonalities. Their digressive styles, I argue, are atypical of more straightforward sentimentalism in the wake of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (2004 [1747–1748]), associated, for example, with authors such as Sarah Scott and Henry Mackenzie.1 Both, while certainly relying on what Carey calls the “sentimental parable” (2005: 49), promote a more playful adoption of tears and blushes. Sancho and Sterne do not simply reproduce sentimentalised heroic depictions of African sorrow which shape the ensuing ameliorationist discourse in the mid-eighteenth cen-tury. Their tonality is also less moralistic and part of a much more humor-ous conception of familial feeling than the one found in the foundational narratives of Defoe and later Equiano. Their writing reveals the generic conventionality of sentimentalism combined with digressions on the topic of enslavement and thus provides pathos and entertainment. They also do not shy away from displaying aesthetic artifice in their prose. Their digres-sive styles, in fact, may have contributed more to the aesthetic develop-ment of novelistic writing than the political debate of the day. Sterne and Sancho are not invested in providing a realistic portrayal of a middle-class individual as Defoe or a feeling Black subject like Equiano. Instead, both emphasise the power of writing that reflects on its own capacity to instil emotions.
Sancho, the shopkeeper, witnesses political upheaval and engages in various topics but, at the same time, is concerned with the well-being of his kin and his correspondents. His letters, which, Carey maintains, are structured “in the form of an epistolary novel of sentiment” (2004: 82), are not a simple appeal to white compassion but prove that he already is a man of feeling, that “peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon of a man who both interprets and communicates with the world through the medium of his own emotions” (Carey 2003: 9). In comparison to the other transatlantic authors discussed in this book, Sancho’s writing dis-plays the most affective attachment to and comprehensive literary repre-sentation of his family life. His letters demonstrate how an Afro-British
subject partakes in the daily toils of London’s growing mercantile class, communicating with bankers, booksellers, but also members of the ser-vant class, including other Afro-Britons like Julius Soubise. It is this com-bination of familiarity with domestic matters and passing references to the grand political concerns such as slavery but also the Gordon riots and the American Revolution that marks what I describe as the digressive tonality of Sancho.
Sterne, the “provincial” clergyman, is not personally affected by the politics of London. He demonstrates literary bravura not in his letters but in his fictions that employ different personae and a highly intrusive narra-tive commentary to challenge conventions of writing. Sterne famously promotes a way of storytelling that has been characterised as postmodern avant la lettre, destabilising more predictable linear prose. Sterne’s convo-luted attempt to reconstruct Tristram Shandy’s family and life story as well as his Sentimental Journey are both panoramic in scope and familial in emotional address. Especially his tone in relation to constructions of mas-culinity (and the charge of “effeminacy” attached to sentimentalism) is often satirical. John Mullan describes this as Sterne’s departure from more conventional codes of sentimentalism:
While Richardson had attempted to exercise strict moralistic control over the interpretation of his novels, distrusting the very literary form that he was using, Sterne was willing to accept fashion as a virtue, trusting to the capaci-ties of the private reader, and making his very life as an author (in the personae of Tristram or Yorick) a fiction to flaunt in the face of his critics.
(2002: 149)
Accordingly, Mullan reads Sterne as both sentimental and self-reflexive, shaping a literary style that promotes moral ambiguities rather than edification.
Artifice and authenticity are conflictingly related in the extroverted and stylised displays of feeling in both authors’ texts but there are different things at stake for Sancho and Sterne. Sterne employs aesthetic playfulness to set himself apart from literary predecessors, Sancho uses it to claim a part in the culture of taste and sensibility. Since Sancho considers Sterne his most beloved literary writer, the question of influence and imitation remains relevant and has shaped the reception of their exchange. I read Sancho and Sterne’s literary adoption of a digressive tonality distinctly not as imitative but as entangled in their different attempts to create attention
in the growing public sphere. Accordingly, I will begin by discussing Sancho’s letters to focus on the points of connection and distinction between both writers. The famous dash in Sterne is often associated with a mimicking of intrusive thoughts and a meandering of the storyteller.
The political digressions in his texts are tied into more bawdy episodes.
His scenes dealing with slavery in this way, while not necessarily only sen-timental, still elude ideas of political solidarity by never committing fully to the consequences of these reflections. Sancho’s interjections of emo-tional concern not only highlight his capacity to feel (as well as his attach-ment to his family), in adopting the Sternian digressive dash, or in what I call his “dashing familiarity”, he does not adhere to the usual linear form of redemptive abolitionist writing and displays a uniquely Black aesthetic voice, albeit one that also reproduces deprecating sentimental tropes. This needs to be read as more than simply imitative or as mimicry in Homi Bhabha’s terms. While Sterne remains more elusive in his aestheticised divagations, Sancho’s digressive tone, I argue, intervenes more fundamen-tally into the sentimental romance with the cultured, feeling subject of modernity.2