Charles Ignatius Sancho was a real person who lived in the eighteenth century, and the author has taken the few details known about his life and turned them into a work of fiction. According to the Preface, Sancho was 'a lucky African orphan, who despite being born in abject slavery, rose to become a leading light of the early abolitionist movement.'
The content of the book comprises of Sancho's diary pages written for his son Billy, and he really did have an extraordinary life for a black person living in London at that time. He became so well known that he had his portrait painted by Gainsborough, and in addition to his campaign for the abolition of slavery, he also composed and played music and had his writing published.
He was married to Anne Osborne and they had eight children, although not all survived to adulthood. Anne doesn't appear in the book until the second half, but their exchange of letters while she is attending to a sick relative on a sugar plantation in the West Indies are some of the most powerful passages in the book. Sancho is also thought to be the first known black person of African origin to have been qualified to vote in Britain and he enjoyed the company and support of several members of the nobility.
It's a well written book, and the subject matter is certainly worth knowing, but somehow this book didn't quite hit the spot for me. I think my biggest stumbling block was trying to accept that all the hundreds of pages could ever have been diary entries, and some of the letters would have had to have been bundled up as parcels if they were hand-written as script, but then I'm probably just being difficult. This is worth reading just to understand that there black people in Britain two hundred years before the Windrush and it is always good to celebrate the achievements of someone who made such a significant life after such a dreadful start.
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