"A character immortalized": Gender, Necropolitics, and John Nichols's "Death Writing" on Ignatius Sancho (1780–Present)

Abstract: Obituary specialists have identified the Gentleman's Magazine (GM) as the first publication to use the term "obituary" to headline its death notices section (in 1780). Simultaneously, eighteenth centuryists have widely acknowledged Ignatius Sancho's as the first death notice of an African Briton (also in 1780). This essay connects these two firsts by presenting the death notice of Sancho in the GM as one of many "death writing" texts over decades that GM editor, proprietor, and printer John Nichols printed regarding Sancho to capitalize on the power of his life after death. The article presents a new literary category, "death writing," to denote the necropolitical function of certain death-centered forms of life writing including the GM 's "Obituary of Considerable Persons" section, posthumous letter collections such as the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African , book reviews and marketing of that collection in the Gentleman's Magazine , and compendiums and indexes of lives such as the Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century —all printed by Nichols. The essay argues that Nichols used Sancho as an exemplar to exhibit the GM 's signature brand of the self-made (gentle)man to assist the GM 's extreme longevity (a two-hundred-year print run, 1731–1922). To uphold the "grocer and oilman" aspects of Sancho's identity, the death writing on him ignores other aspects of his "character," including his family, a patriarchal practice that has obscured his wife, Anne Sancho, and the entire Sancho family from the historical record including their lack of entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , an index of lives that is heavily based on Nichols's GM and Literary Anecdotes . In conclusion, by critically examining Nichols's death writing system, arguably the most powerful in the Atlantic world, this essay sheds light on how his literary legacy continues to exert influence over who has lived and died to literary posterity since the eighteenth century.