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] At the age of fifty, 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 including Ethiopia.[2] He had translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jerónimo Lobo in 1735 and used it as the basis for a "philosophical romance".[3] 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. Rasselas questions his choices in life and what new choices to make in order to achieve this 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, and the characters are flat. Rasselas, son of the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), is shut up in a beautiful valley called The Happy Valley, "till the order of succession should call him to the throne".[4] Rasselas enlists the help of an artist who is also known as an engineer to help with his escape from the Valley by plunging themselves out through the air, though is unsuccessful in this attempt. 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 by digging under the wall of the valley. They are to see the world and search for happiness in places such as Cairo and Suez. 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 after none of their hopes for happiness are achieved.[5]

Local color is almost nonexistent and the main story is primarily episodic.[5]

Character list

  • Rasselas – protagonist
  • The Emperor – ruler of Rasselas and The Happy Valley
  • Nekayah – the sister of Rasselas, travels with Rasselas
  • The Master – teacher of Rasselas
  • The Artist – engineer, creates flying contraption
  • Imlac – philosopher, travels with Rasselas

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 anti-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.[6][7] Other scholars have argued that Johnson was influenced, at least in part, by other texts, including works by Herodotus [8] and Paradise Lost.[9][10][11][12][13][14]

Radio adaptation

A radio adaptation of Rasselas by Jonathan Holloway was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 24 May 2015,[15] with Ashley Zhangazha as Rasselas, Jeff Rawle as Samuel Johnson, and Lucian Msamati as the poet Imlac. Cynthia Erivo made her BBC radio drama debut as Princess Nekayah.[16]

The drama was recorded at Dr Johnson's House, 17 Gough Square, in the City of London.[17] The same place where Johnson wrote his famous dictionary 260 years ago and also wrote Rasselas there in 1759.[18] Sound design was by David Chilton, and the drama was introduced by Celine Luppo McDaid, Curator, Dr Johnson's House.[19] It was produced and directed by Amber Barnfather.[16]

Cast

Legacy

Continuations

Rasselas was a popular jumping-off point for continuations in the latter 18th century:[20]

Literature

Inés Joyes y Blake translated The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (on left) and it included the one of the first feminist essays in Spain (on the right)[22]

Rasselas is mentioned numerous times in later notable literature:

  • Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen – Fanny Price refers to Dr. Johnson's celebrated judgment when she is comparing Mansfield Park and Portsmouth.
  • Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë – Helen Burns reads it.
  • Cranford (1851) by Elizabeth Gaskell – Captain Brown (who is reading 'The Pickwick Papers') denigrates Rasselas, thus offending Miss Jenkyns (who is a great admirer of Johnson).
  • The House of the Seven Gables (1851) by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Rasselas is read by Hepzibah Pyncheon.
  • The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot – Maggie reads it.
  • Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott – the book is dropped on the floor by Jo March as she talks to Mr Laurence about his Grandson Laurie's prank.
  • Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot – the book is enjoyed by Lydgate as a child, along with Gulliver's Travels, the dictionary, and the Bible.
  • Rasselas was read by explorer Henry Stanley when he was a young man recently released from a Victorian workhouse, working as a school teacher in Wales. This is recorded in Tim Jeal's biography Stanley – The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer.
  • The Mountains of Rasselas by Thomas Pakenham – The title of Pakhenham's account of exploring Ethiopia to find the original royal mountaintop royal prisons alludes to Johnson's work. Pakenham explicitly mentions Johnson's work in this book.
  • Sirak Heruy, son of Ethiopian intellectual Heruy Welde Sellase, translated Rasselas into Amharic, one of the major languages of Ethiopia. (Published in 1946/47.)[23]
  • C.S. Lewis mentions Rasselas in a footnote to the second of his Riddell Memorial lectures on values and natural law, later published as The Abolition of Man: "Let us hope that Rasselas, chap. 22, gives the right picture of what [Dr. C. H. Waddington's] philosophy amounts to in action. ('The philosopher, supposing the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present system.')"[24] — Retrieved from The Columbia University Augustine Club.
  • Rasselas is mentioned significantly in two of Ursula Dubosarsky's novels – Zizzy Zing and Abyssinia.[25]
  • In The Book of Sequels by Henry Beard, Christopher Cerf, Sarah Durkee and Sean Kelly, "Wrassle-Ass" appears in a section called "Adult Sequels".
  • The description of the Happy Valley is very similar to the poem "Kubla Khan" written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge around a century later.
  • "Rasselas was too happy and went out to seek unhappiness." Line in Morning Mist, a short story by Japanese author Tatsuo Nagai (translated by Edward Seidensticker in ISBN 978-0804812269).

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.[26]

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.[27]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Keymer 2009.
  2. ↑ Kurtz, Roger. "Research in African Literatures". Project Muse.
  3. ↑ Quote attributed to John Robert Moore in Edward Tomarken's Johnson, Rasselas, and the Critics, pg. 20.
  4. ↑ Johnson 1819, p. 2.
  5. 1 2 Trent 1920.
  6. ↑ Belcher 2012.
  7. ↑ Nassir 1989.
  8. ↑ Arieti 1981.
  9. ↑ Rees 2010.
  10. ↑ Wasserman 1975.
  11. ↑ Kolb 1949.
  12. ↑ Tillotson 1942.
  13. ↑ Weitzman 1969.
  14. ↑ Gray 1985.
  15. ↑ Chisholm 2015.
  16. 1 2 "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, Drama". BBC Radio 4. 30 May 2015. Retrieved 19 September 2016.
  17. ↑ Dr Johnson's House
  18. ↑ "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia". BBC.
  19. ↑ McDaid.
  20. ↑ Richard 2003.
  21. 1 2 Johnson, Samuel (2008). Richard, Jessica, ed. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Broadview Press. p. 176. ISBN 9781770480582.
  22. ↑ "Inés Joyés y Blake" (in Spanish). arteHistoria. Retrieved 11 August 2018.
  23. ↑ Zewde 2002, p. 87.
  24. ↑ Lewis 1943.
  25. ↑ Dubosarsky.
  26. ↑ Brown 1922.
  27. ↑ LINC Tasmania staff, Rasselas Valley (Photograph) State Library of Tasmania, LINC Tasmania

References

  • Arieti, James A. (1981), "A Herodotean Source for Rasselas, Ch. 6", Notes and Queries, 28 (3): 241
  • Belcher, Wendy Laura (2012), Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author, Oxford University Press .
  • 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 .
  • Chisholm, Kate (30 May 2015), "When Dr Johnson went to Tahrir Square", The Spectator, retrieved 19 September 2016 .
  • Dubosarsky, Ursula, Ursula Dubosarsky, archived from the original on 7 February 2012
  • Gray, Stephan (1985), "Johnson's Use of Some Myths in Rasselas", Standpunte, 38 (2): 16–23 .
  • Johnson, Samuel (1819), Rasselas, London: H. McLean .
  • Keymer, Thomas (2009), Introduction, Rasselas, by Johnson, Samuel, Oxford World Classics , earlier published as "Samuel Johnson's message to America". Times Literary Supplement. 25 March 2009. Archived from the original on 16 June 2011.
  • Kolb, Gwin J. (1949), "Johnson's 'Dissertation on Flying' and John Wilkins' 'Mathematical Magick'", Modern Philology, 47 (1): 24–31
  • Lewis, C.S. (1943), "Chapter 2:The Way", The Abolition of Man, Oxford University Press, archived from the original on 3 August 2002
  • McDaid, Celine, interviewee, "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia", BBC Radio 4, retrieved 19 September 2016 .
  • Nassir, Ghazi Q. (1989), A History and Criticism of Samuel Johnson's Oriental Tales (Ph.D.), Florida State University .
  • Rees, Christine (2010), "Rasselas: A Rewriting of Paradise Lost?", Johnson's Milton, Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–81 .
  • Richard, Jessica (2003), "'I Am Equally Weary of Confinement': Women Writers and Rasselas from Dinarbas to Jane Eyre", Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 22 (2): 336–337, doi:10.2307/20059156, JSTOR 20059156 .
  • Tillotson, Geoffrey (1942), "Rasselas and the Persian Tales", Essays in Criticism and Research, Cambridge University Press, pp. 111–116
  •  Trent, William P. (1920). "Rasselas". In Rines, George Edwin. Encyclopedia Americana. .
  • Wasserman, Earl R. (1975), "Johnson's Rasselas: Implicit Contexts", JEGP, 74: 1–25 .
  • Weitzman, Arthur J. (1969), "More Light on Rasselas: The Background of the Egyptian Episodes", Philological Quarterly, 48: 44–58 .
  • Zewde, Bahru (2002), Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia, Oxford: James Currey, p. 87 .

Further reading

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