The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Rasselas Prince of Abissinia

Cover of corrected Second Edition of 1759
Author Samuel Johnson
Original title The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre Apologue, Theodicy, Fable
Publisher R. and J. Dodsley, W. Johnston
Publication date
 April 1759
Media type Print

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, originally titled The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale, though often abbreviated to Rasselas, is an apologue about happiness by Samuel Johnson. The book's original working title was "The Choice of Life".[1] He wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral, intending to complete it on 22 January 1759 (the eve of his mother's death).[1] The book was first published in April 1759 in England. Johnson is believed to have received a total of £75 for the copyright. The first American edition followed in 1768. The title page of this edition carried a quotation, inserted by the publisher Robert Bell, from La Rochefoucauld: "The labour or Exercise of the Body, freeth Man from the Pains of the Mind; and this constitutes the Happiness of the Poor".[1]

Johnson was influenced by the vogue for exotic locations. He had translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo in 1735 and used it as the basis for a "philosophical romance".[2] Ten years prior to writing Rasselas he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in which he describes the inevitable defeat of worldly ambition. Early readers considered Rasselas to be a work of philosophical and practical importance and critics often remark on the difficulty of classifying it as a novel.[1] Johnson was a staunch opponent of slavery, revered by abolitionists, and Rasselas became a name adopted by emancipated slaves.[1]

Overview

While the story is thematically similar to Candide by Voltaire, also published early in 1759 – both concern young men travelling in the company of honoured teachers, encountering and examining human suffering in an attempt to determine the root of happiness – their root concerns are distinctly different. Voltaire was very directly satirising the widely read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may perceive it, is necessarily the "best of all possible worlds". In contrast the question Rasselas confronts most directly is whether or not humanity is essentially capable of attaining happiness. Writing as a devout Christian, Johnson makes through his characters no blanket attacks on the viability of a religious response to this question, as Voltaire does, and while the story is in places light and humorous, it is not a piece of satire, as is Candide.

Plot

The plot is simple in the extreme. Rasselas, son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne".[3] He grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place, and after much brooding escapes with his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah and his poet-friend Imlac. They are to see the world and search for happiness, but after some sojourn in Egypt, where they encounter various classes of society and undergo a few mild adventures, they perceive the futility of their search and abruptly return to Abyssinia.[4]

Local color is almost nonexistent and episodic elements, e.g. the story of Imlac and that of the mad astronomer, abound. There is little of incident, no love-making, with few endeavours to charm the fancy, and with but slight recognition of the claims of sentiment.[4]

Influences

Irvin Ehrenpreis sees an aged Johnson reflecting on lost youth in the character of Rasselas who is exiled from Happy Valley. Rasselas' has also been viewed as a reflection of Johnson's melancholia projected on to the wider world, particularly at the time of his mother's death. Hester Piozzi saw in part Johnson in the character of Imlac who is rejected in his courtship by a class-conscious social superior.[1] Thomas Keymer sees beyond the conventional Roman à clef interpretations to call it a work that reflects the wider geo-political world in the year of publication (1759): the year in which "Britain became master of the world".[1] Rasselas is seen to express hostility to the rising imperialism of his day and to reject stereotypical "orientalist" viewpoints that justified colonialism. Johnson himself was regarded as a prophet who opposed imperialism, who described the Anglo-French war for America as a dispute between two thieves over the proceeds of a robbery.[1] Although many have argued that the book Rasselas had nothing to do with Abyssinia, and that Samuel Johnson chose Abyssinia as a locale for no other reason than wanting to write an orientalist fantasy, some have begun to argue that the book has a deep tie to Ethiopian thought due to Johnson's translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia and his lifelong interest in its Christianity.[5] Other scholars have argued that Johnson was influenced, at least in part, by other texts, including works by Herodotus,[6] Paradise Lost,[7] as well as other texts.[8]

Legacy

Literature

Rasselas is mentioned numerous times in later notable literature.

The description of the Happy Valley is very similar to the poem "Kubla Kahn" written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge around a century later.

Locations

The community of Rasselas, Pennsylvania, located in Elk County, was named after Rasselas Wilcox Brown, whose father, Isaac Brown, Jr., was fond of Johnson's story.[12]

A Vale (or Valley) named after Rasselas is located in Tasmania within the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park Latitude (DMS): 42° 34' 60 S Longitude (DMS): 146° 19' 60 E.[13]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 "Samuel Johnson's message to America" at the Wayback Machine (archived June 16, 2011), Thomas Keymer, edited version of intro to Oxford World's Classic edition of Rasselas pub June 2009, Times Literary Supplement 25 March 2009
  2. ↑ Quote attributed to John Robert Moore in Edward Tomarken's Johnson, Rasselas, and the Critics, pg. 20.
  3. ↑ Johnson 1819, p. 2.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Trent 1920.
  5. ↑ Wendy Laura Belcher, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. See also Ghazi Q. Nassir, “A History and Criticism of Samuel Johnson’s Oriental Tales” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1989).
  6. ↑ James A. Arieti, “A Herodotean Source for Rasselas, Ch. 6,” Notes and Queries 28, no. 3 (June 1981): 241
  7. ↑ Christine Rees, “Rasselas: A Rewriting of Paradise Lost?” in Johnson’s Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–81
  8. ↑ See Earl R. Wasserman, “Johnson’s Rasselas: Implicit Contexts,” JEGP 74 (1975): 1–25; Gwin J. Kolb, “Johnson’s ‘Dissertation on Flying’ and John Wilkins’ ‘Mathematical Magick,’ ” Modern Philology 47.1 (August 1949): 24–31; Geoffrey Tillotson, “Rasselas and the Persian Tales,” in Essays in Criticism and Research (Cambridge U Press, 1942), 111–116; Arthur J. Weitzman, “More Light on Rasselas: The Background of the Egyptian Episodes,” Philological Quarterly 48 (January 1969): 44–58; Stephan Gray, “Johnson’s Use of Some Myths in Rasselas,” Standpunte 38, no. 2 (1985): 16–23.
  9. ↑ Zewde, Bahru (2002), Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia, Oxford: James Currey, p. 87
  10. ↑ Lewis, C.S. (1943), "Chapter 2:The Way", The Abolition of Man, Oxford University Press, retrieved July 2013 — Retrieved from The Columbia University Augustine Club.
  11. ↑ , Ursula Dubosarsky, www.ursuladubosarsky.com, retrieved July 2013
  12. ↑ Brown, Issac Brownell (1922), Genealogy of Rasselas Wilcox Brown and Mary Potter Brownell Brown, their descendants and ancestral lines, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Evangelical Publishing Co., p. 13
  13. ↑ LINC Tasmania staff, Rasselas Valley (Photograph) State Library of Tasmania, LINC Tasmania, retrieved July 2009

References

External links

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Further reading