Mrs Sancho’s Barometer
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
1777
King George III 1760-1820
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
1777
King George III 1760-1820
Several years after his death, some letters of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer trading from King Charles Street in London and a former slave, were presented to the public in the hope of demonstrating that he was a writer quite as accomplished as many a native English literary man. In this extract, dated October 24th, 1777, he talks (as he often does) about his wife Ann.
DAME Sancho would be better in health, if she cared less.* I am her barometer. If a sigh escapes me, it is answered by a tear in her eye. I often assume a gaiety to illume her dear sensibility with a smile, which twenty years ago almost bewitched me, and mark! after twenty years’ enjoyment constitutes my highest pleasure!* Such be your lot — with a competency such as will make economy a pleasant acquaintance — temperance and exercise your chief physician* — and the virtues of benevolence your daily employ — your pleasure and your reward! And what more can friendship wish you? — but to glide down the stream of time blessed with a partner of congenial principles and fine feelings — true feminine eloquence — whose very looks speak tenderness and sentiment.
* His wife was of course not really Dame Sancho — in the 1770s, she would have had to be a baronetess in her own right, and in that case she ought to be Dame Ann — but plain Ann Sancho, née Osborne, from the West Indies. It was just Ignatius’s humour to call her by that title, when he did not call her ‘my best half.’ He dubbed his children (he and Ann had seven) collectively ‘the Sanchonettas.’
* Ignatius is rounding up. The letter was written in October 1777, but the couple married in 1758. There is a short biography at The British Library.
* Those who knew him might have been taken aback by Ignatius advising anyone on keeping fit. He had been pensioned off in 1774 because his spreading figure meant he could no longer fulfil his duties as valet to George, Duke of Montagu; George set him up with a grocery store in King Charles Street instead. Ignatius’s words on temperance came from the heart, however. Drink and gambling had ruined him as a young man, before the Montagus gave him a second chance. He also accused British merchants of using alcohol to degrade African chiefs in the hope of taking their goods and land. See Study the Heart.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did Sancho call himself Ann’s ‘barometer’?
Because his mood so often forecast hers.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Ignatius’s mood rose and fell. His wife’s mood changed with it.
See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.
IHusband. IIFluctuate. IIIMirror.