The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Joseph Paterson and some thoughts on creating historical drama
The Craft Review #3 "This is the tale of a lucky African orphan, who despite being born in abject slavery, rose to become a leading light of the early abolitionist movement.”
This is my third The Craft Review, where I review a book, and then add some details about the craft that has gone into creating a story that works. Although this may seem a departure for me - I currently write and often review psychological thrillers and crime fiction - my previous novels were historical fiction, namely, The Priest and the Lily and Sugar Island. Sugar Island, and my non-fiction book, Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World, both deal with slavery, so I was keen to read The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph. I was originally commissioned to review the novel for WritersMosaic.
Not to mention, getting to attend the Best Book Event Ever - if you missed that one!
Paterson Joseph said he wanted to write a story about a black David Copperfield, the eponymous character in Charles Dickens’ novel, which follows ‘Davy’ from birth to death. In his debut novel, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, Joseph does exactly this, following the trajectory of a real life Black British man, Charles Ignatius Sancho, from his birth on a slave ship in 1729 to shortly before his death, aged 51, from gout in 1780. In between we have a rollicking rollercoaster of a story, but as Joseph warns us right at the start, ‘This isn’t slavery porn – the insidious desire for violence to suffuse all stories involving Black protagonists… This is the tale of a lucky African orphan, who despite being born into abject slavery, rose to become a leading light of the early abolitionist movement.’
Sancho was an extraordinary man. He was a man of firsts: he published plays and booklets of his musical compositions at a time when it was illegal to teach slaves to read, he had letters published in the papers, he was the first Black British man to vote and the first to be given an obituary in the British press. He met the King and played to Handel as a child; he was a butler and then a valet to the King’s friends. He was friends with leading luminaries of the age, including the playwright, David Garrick, and he corresponded with the celebrated author, Laurence Stern; and, perhaps most importantly, he married the love of his life and had seven children. Paterson has mined Sancho’s existing diaries and letters, published posthumously, recreating his voice pitch-perfectly. In the Afterword to the book, Joseph writes that he had but ‘bare facts offered by the threadbare archive’, and so has created by an act of ‘critical fabulation’, an imaginative tale based on the historical material.
The story, like that of David Copperfield, is told chronologically, but framed with notes from the older Sancho both describing and foreshadowing chapters and events as he pieces together an account of his life for his son, Billy. There is no shortage of drama. Joseph has skilfully woven in real life events with (perhaps?) fictitious ones, such as his encounters with his nemesis, slave-catcher, Jonathan Sill, and the chill callousness and brutality of the Three Sisters who raise him as if he were a trained animal from the age of three, and then, when he defies them by learning to read, lock him in the cellar without food or water.
Paterson has adroitly captured Sancho’s larger-than-life personality, his exuberance, his humour, his theatricality, but this is underscored with a more nuanced empathy. Sancho is constantly told that despite his indentured servitude, the lack of love and the constant fear he experiences, he is lucky: he could, after all, be a slave on a sugar plantation. This gives him a deeply ingrained sense of worthlessness, in spite of his intelligence, education and many accomplishments; worse, he believes he cannot talk to other black people because ‘my pampered cage-bird life was no match for even the mildest of their tales.’ As he grows older, he has moments of sorrowful self-awareness – his loneliness is palpable. He realises that, because of his colour and his up-bringing, there is no one else quite like him.
The pace of The Secret Diaries is, at times, uneven. There is a long section in the middle where Sancho and the woman he would later marry, Anne Osborne, correspond for five years. Anne, at the time, is a free servant living on her master’s plantation in the Caribbean and, although lengthy, this part of the book cleverly allows Paterson to weave in the horrors of slavery, which, whilst a stark contrast to Sancho’s life, also serve to highlight how extraordinary it was for him to have flourished at a time when, as Laurence Sterne wrote in a letter to Sancho, it was ‘no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavour to make ’em so.’
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is, on the one hand, a wonderful work of historical fiction, and on the other, of profound importance as Joseph readdresses many of our cultural misperceptions regarding the lives of black people in Britain.
This review was originally commissioned by WritersMosaic. Like The Secret Diaries…my fourth novel, Sugar Island, is also loosely based on a real person (Fanny Kemble), set in America when slavery was still legal, and I have definitely ‘confabulated’, changing names and times and indeed part of Fanny’s story itself, all in the interests of creating more drama. Sugar Island was my second historical novel; the first was The Priest and the Lily, also set in 1859, but in Outer Mongolia, and inspired in part, by a real person.
So I know first hand how much research it takes to write a historical novel. You need to know…