Introduction

Abstract

Amongst the black population of Britain, clear signs of self-help are to be found, as one might expect, in the years leading up to the Somerset case and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield’s decision of 1772, and it is in this period that the earliest writing in English by black people is to be found. A rallying point was the abolitionist activity of Granville Sharp, who between 1765 and 1772 led the attack on slavery and fought a number of legal battles on behalf of so-called ‘runaways’, Jonathan Strong, Thomas and Mary Hylas, Thomas Lewis and James Somerset. It was during these years that black residents in Britain appear to have become active in support of abolition, working with Sharp, and beginning to record, in letters, journals and printed books, their own experience of life in Britain and elsewhere. Ignatius Sancho’s first known letter, to the novelist, Sterne, is dated 21 July, 1766¹; around 1770, the experiences of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw were being ‘taken from his own mouth and committed to paper by the elegant pen of a young lady of the town of Leominster’²; and Olaudah Equiano, on the Phipps’ Expedition to the Arctic of 1772–3, was recording his experiences in a diary which was to be the basis of his autobiography published in 1789.³