The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia (Oxford World's Classics)

204 Pages·2009·0.73 MB·English

by  Samuel Johnson

oxford world’s classics
RASSELAS
Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 in Lichfield, Staffordshire.
The son of an impecunious bookseller, he experienced poverty
throughout the first part of his life, and, in spite of his formidable
mental endowments, was able to attend Pembroke College, Oxford,
for only a year. After moving to London in 1737, he earned his living
by miscellaneous journalism for many years, until his Rambler essays
of1750 – 2 and the first historical dictionary of the English language
(1755) brought him fame. Rasselas, Johnson’s one extended work of
prose fiction, was published towards the end of this decade, and
from1762 a government pension of £300 a year relieved him from
necessity. In the later part of his life, marked especially by his 1765
edition of Shakespeare’s plays and The Lives of the Poets (1779 – 81),
he came to be regarded as the greatest literary figure of his time in
England. Also among his most celebrated works are the verse satires
London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, his periodical essays in
the Adventurer and Idler, and A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland, which records his celebrated tour of the Hebrides in 1773
with his friend and later biographer, James Boswell. Johnson died in
1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at
the University of Toronto and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s
College, Oxford. His books include Richardson’s Clarissa and the
Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992),Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel
(2002),The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to
1830 (co-edited with Jon Mee, 2004), and the Oxford World’s
Classics editions of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Shamela (1999),
Richardson’sPamela (2001), and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2007).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The History of Rasselas
Prince of Abissinia
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
THOMAS KEYMER
1
1
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Samuel, 1709–1784.
[Rasselas]
The history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia / Samuel Johnson ; edited with an
introduction and notes by
Thomas Keymer. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Oxford World’s Classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN978–0–19–922997–0
1. Happiness—Fiction. I. Keymer, Tom. II. Title.
PR3529.A2H3752009
823′.6—dc22
2009005383
T ypeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN 978–0–19–922997–0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix
Note on the Text xxxv
Select Bibliography xxxviii
A Chronology of Samuel Johnson xliv
THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS,
PRINCE OF ABISSINIA 1
Explanatory Notes 111
Glossary 153
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Modern editions of Samuel Johnson rest on the learning and labour
of generations of scholars, and I am indebted to two previous editors
of Rasselas, J. P. Hardy and the late Gwin J. Kolb, and to the many
contributors to the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.
Isobel Grundy, Heather Jackson, Jack Lynch, Jim McLaverty, Adam
Potkay, and Peter Sabor gave valuable advice and information at just
the right moments, and Darryl Domingo and Erin Parker have been
exemplary research assistants. Eva Guggemos and Laurie Klein kindly
facilitated access to the Kern and other early copies of Rasselas at the
Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the title page reproduced from
Johnson’sfirst edition was generously supplied by Carl Spadoni from
the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections,
McMaster University Library. I am grateful as ever to Judith Luna
and her colleagues at Oxford University Press for their enthusiasm and
expertise, and for trusting that things would in time be finished,
though not concluded.
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION
Rasselas is a book about happiness, and for all the famous
despondency of its author it caught the mood of its time. Three
London editions and a Dublin reprint were in circulation within
a year of first publication in 1759, and translations into Dutch,
French, German, Italian, and Russian followed over the next
five years. No early edition so clearly reflects the practical as
well as philosophical importance that early readers found in
Johnson’s theme as the first American edition, brought out in
1768 by Robert Bell, a radical Irish bookseller who had moved to
Philadelphia on the bankruptcy of his business in Dublin. Bell’s
Rasselas was a noisily transatlantic, democratizing affair (‘america:
printed for every purchaser’, screams the imprint), and his
title page features a further appeal to the common reader by
inserting a maxim from the seventeenth-century moralist
La Rochefoucauld: ‘The Labour or Exercise of the Body, freeth
Men from Pains of the Mind; and ’tis this that constitutes the
Happiness of the Poor.’1 Never mind that the narrative to follow
was conspicuously less sanguine than this about the blessings of
poverty, and indeed about everything else. Bell’s choice of
Rasselas as the inaugural publication of his new career in a new
world, and as a text that might open the way to felicity for even
the humblest of his fellow colonists, was inspired. At a time when
the pursuit of happiness was shortly to be defined by Thomas
Jefferson as an inalienable individual right and a collective polit-
ical goal, here was a work that directly addressed, with formidable
wisdom and eloquence, the most enduring yet also the most
pressing of human concerns.
Johnson was quick to grasp the implications of Bell’s edition on
seeing a copy some years later, and he expressed pleasure ‘because
the Printer seems to have expected that it would be scattered
1 See J. D. Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson,2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000), i, 793. Bell probably adapted his maxim from the English trans-
lation published by Andrew Millar in 1749: see La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims, ed.
Irwin Primer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003),169.