The Prince of Abissinia ["Rasselas"]
By
Samuel Johnson
Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup by Students and Staff at Texas A&M University and the University of Virginia
AbissiniaThe Prince of Abyssinia, now often referred to as Rasselas after its central character, became one of the most popular works of fiction of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reprinted again and again in the English-speaking world. Which might surprise a modern reader, for whom Samuel Johnson’s tale of a prince meditating on his future does not come across at first blush as the most exciting and absorbing subject matter for a novel. But Rasselas picks up many streams of thought and literature from this period so fully and deftly, and with such sincerity, that it remains a fascinating book, one that can still prompt the reader to think about its central concerns, which remain relevant: how should we think about our desires? is our imagination a good thing or potentially a dangerous thing? what is the task of an artist? how should we go about deciding what to do with our lives? The story goes that Samuel Johnson wrote this book quickly because he needed money to pay for his mother’s funeral, and there is clearly truth to that. But it was only possible for him to write Rasselas so quickly because the book built upon ideas that Johnson had been thinking about for a long time, and picked up strategies for incorporating those ideas into fiction that had developed over the previous few decades, a period that we can now see as crucial to the emergence of the English novel.
One of those strategies was to move the action of the story to the area of the world that eighteenth-century Europeans called “the Orient.” For Europeans in this period, the “Orient” designated an area of the world that we would now call the middle and near East, an area embracing east Africa, as well as the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Abyssinia, the central location for Johnson’s story, is now the modern state of Ethiopia, and had been a place that fascinated Johnson for a long time. His first published work was a translation and abridgment of a seventeenth-century travel narrative by the Portuguese Jesuit priest and missionary Jerome Lobo, a book that was one very few accounts in that period by a European that attempted to describe an African culture and the area’s natural resources. Johnson’s version was published as A Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735, when he was twenty-six years old. With Rasselas, Johnson was returning in his imagination to an area of the world that had long fascinated him, but that he could not realistically visit himself. Writing what was would become known as an “Oriental tale” freed Johnson and other writers of this period who used the form to write about moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues without having to engage directly with European politics and culture. An “Oriental” place like this was in effect a clean slate that a writer could use to imagine a way of being in the world that contrasted with the culture that the readers of the story lived in. Rasselas did not aim to present anything like a faithful representation of Abyssinian culture, but it also avoids either overly romanticizing or dismissing that culture. Rather, European and Oriental societies are put in constant tension with each other, each seen as places where happiness is wished for but elusive, and where human accomplishment is potentially both monumental but also fleeting.
Rasselas is also what we might now call a young adult novel, a work of fiction expressly aimed at younger readers, and consciously shaped to offer positive and complex examples of other young people for readers to model themselves on. Johnson famously worried about the effects of novels on younger readers, and dedicated Rambler #4 to what is now a famous critique of the novel for its potential effects on the “young, the ignorant, and the idle” readers, who might easily be misled into taking some of the roguish protagonists of contemporary works of fiction like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as models for their own behavior. The eighteenth century didn’t have a name such as ours for “young adult” fiction, but there was a rich body of works of fiction and nonfiction that aimed to teach young readers how to conduct themselves. There was also in this period a growing interest in books written for children and young people that were both educational and entertaining; scholars trace the origin of children’s literature to this period. Rasselas is Johnson’s attempt to write the kind of fiction for young people that will help rather than harm them by offering positive models—Rasselas and his sister Nekayah—as its protagonists, and complicated moral and aesthetic ideas to contemplate.
For all of these reasons, Johnson’s publishers knew that there was a ready market for a book like this, and they were right. Rasselas was a best-seller almost immediately, and was translated into all of the major European languages in just a few years. It’s a book that opens up more questions than it answers, but leaves us with the hope that human intelligence can discover meaning in the world. workThat is, whether the tunnel was a natural formation or made by people.daintiesdelicacies; treatssingularitytendency towards seclusionlutanistlute-playerdiseaseIn the 1755 edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defines "disease" as "Distemper; malady; sickness; morbid state." That is, this is not a mental illness in the modern sense, but a kind of uneasiness.kidsbaby goatsrepastTime for supper, sleep, and other refreshment.feignedimaginedpartThe language here is confusing. Earlier, Johnson writes that Rasselas was twenty-six. After spending twenty months musing, he would have to be at least twenty-seven by this point. Is Rasselas saying that he became cognizant of his thoughts at age three, or is this just an error on Johnson's part?kidThat is, the baby goats have left their mothers and learned to climb the mountains for food.torridthe tropicsredThe Red Sea is the body of water that divides the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa. Modern nations that border the Red Sea include Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan.rapacityJohnson defines "rapacity" as "Addictiveness to plunder; exercise of plunder; ravenousness."grossnessignoranceSuratA district within the state of Gujarat in India. This state is on the western coast of India so Imlac would have crossed the Arabian Sea to travel there. In the eighteenth century, Surat was a major sea port.AgraThe city of Agra was the capital of the Mughul empire that dominated the Indian subcontinent from the early 1500s until the eighteenth century, when the British East India Company systematically dismantled it. The "great Mogul" was the ruler of the empire. Agra is perhaps most famous now as the site of the Taj Mahal, built by the emperor Jahan as a tomb for his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal in the seventeenth century.PersiaNow known as the modern state of Iran.ArabiaThe Arabian peninsula, now divided into the modern states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates.SyriaIn Johnson's era (and Imlac's), not the modern state of Syria, but a somewhat larger and slightly amorphous region of the Middle East on the eastern short of the Mediterranean that included the modern state but also at times parts of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. PalestineIn this era, the region in the eastern Mediterranean comprising the modern state of Israel, but also Gaza and the West Bank of the Jordan river. SuezAn Egyptian port on the Red Sea, now close to the southern end of the Suez Canal, which was named for it when it was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.coniesRabbits or hares.circumferencePrecise measurements of the circumference of the Earth was new information in Johnson’s time. The Geodesic Mission to the Equator, which involved Spanish and French scientists, was an international expedition to find the Earth’s circumference, which began in 1735.cataractwaterfallprefermentsThat is, the preferential treatement extended towards the younger officer by their superiors.artificierscraftsmenBassa"The earlier form of the Turkish title pasha," meaning a military commmander or a provincial governor. Oxford English Dictionarycontrivanceskillful plotting or planningscrupulosityextremely scrict moral and ethical standardscaprice"Freak; fancy; whim; sudden change of humour." Johnson's Dictionary.querulouspetulant, exaggeratedintestineinternal, domesticconnubialmaritalcasuists"One that studies and settles cases of conscience." Johnson's Dictionarycavillers"A man fond of making objections; an unfair adversary; a captious disputant." Johnson's Dictionarytrain"A retinue; a number of followers or attendants." Johnson's Dictionary.adventitiousaccidental, coming about by chance rather than designmonasteryAn ancient Christian monastery in eastern Egypt, whose origins go back to around the year 350. It was founded in honor of St. Anthony (born around 251 AD), a hermit whose simple and ascetic life became a template for Christian monasticism. It is still a religious center, with a community of monks practicing the Captic Christian faith. emersionemergence; they are watching one of Jupiter's moons emerge from being hidden behind the planetecliptickthe plane taken by the earth as it orbits the sunexcogitationdiscovery or invention; mental effortpreternatural"Outside the ordinary course of nature; differing from or surpassing what is natural; unnatural." Oxford English Dictionary
One of those strategies was to move the action of the story to the area of the world that eighteenth-century Europeans called “the Orient.” For Europeans in this period, the “Orient” designated an area of the world that we would now call the middle and near East, an area embracing east Africa, as well as the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Abyssinia, the central location for Johnson’s story, is now the modern state of Ethiopia, and had been a place that fascinated Johnson for a long time. His first published work was a translation and abridgment of a seventeenth-century travel narrative by the Portuguese Jesuit priest and missionary Jerome Lobo, a book that was one very few accounts in that period by a European that attempted to describe an African culture and the area’s natural resources. Johnson’s version was published as A Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735, when he was twenty-six years old. With Rasselas, Johnson was returning in his imagination to an area of the world that had long fascinated him, but that he could not realistically visit himself. Writing what was would become known as an “Oriental tale” freed Johnson and other writers of this period who used the form to write about moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues without having to engage directly with European politics and culture. An “Oriental” place like this was in effect a clean slate that a writer could use to imagine a way of being in the world that contrasted with the culture that the readers of the story lived in. Rasselas did not aim to present anything like a faithful representation of Abyssinian culture, but it also avoids either overly romanticizing or dismissing that culture. Rather, European and Oriental societies are put in constant tension with each other, each seen as places where happiness is wished for but elusive, and where human accomplishment is potentially both monumental but also fleeting.
Rasselas is also what we might now call a young adult novel, a work of fiction expressly aimed at younger readers, and consciously shaped to offer positive and complex examples of other young people for readers to model themselves on. Johnson famously worried about the effects of novels on younger readers, and dedicated Rambler #4 to what is now a famous critique of the novel for its potential effects on the “young, the ignorant, and the idle” readers, who might easily be misled into taking some of the roguish protagonists of contemporary works of fiction like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as models for their own behavior. The eighteenth century didn’t have a name such as ours for “young adult” fiction, but there was a rich body of works of fiction and nonfiction that aimed to teach young readers how to conduct themselves. There was also in this period a growing interest in books written for children and young people that were both educational and entertaining; scholars trace the origin of children’s literature to this period. Rasselas is Johnson’s attempt to write the kind of fiction for young people that will help rather than harm them by offering positive models—Rasselas and his sister Nekayah—as its protagonists, and complicated moral and aesthetic ideas to contemplate.
For all of these reasons, Johnson’s publishers knew that there was a ready market for a book like this, and they were right. Rasselas was a best-seller almost immediately, and was translated into all of the major European languages in just a few years. It’s a book that opens up more questions than it answers, but leaves us with the hope that human intelligence can discover meaning in the world. workThat is, whether the tunnel was a natural formation or made by people.daintiesdelicacies; treatssingularitytendency towards seclusionlutanistlute-playerdiseaseIn the 1755 edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defines "disease" as "Distemper; malady; sickness; morbid state." That is, this is not a mental illness in the modern sense, but a kind of uneasiness.kidsbaby goatsrepastTime for supper, sleep, and other refreshment.feignedimaginedpartThe language here is confusing. Earlier, Johnson writes that Rasselas was twenty-six. After spending twenty months musing, he would have to be at least twenty-seven by this point. Is Rasselas saying that he became cognizant of his thoughts at age three, or is this just an error on Johnson's part?kidThat is, the baby goats have left their mothers and learned to climb the mountains for food.torridthe tropicsredThe Red Sea is the body of water that divides the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa. Modern nations that border the Red Sea include Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan.rapacityJohnson defines "rapacity" as "Addictiveness to plunder; exercise of plunder; ravenousness."grossnessignoranceSuratA district within the state of Gujarat in India. This state is on the western coast of India so Imlac would have crossed the Arabian Sea to travel there. In the eighteenth century, Surat was a major sea port.AgraThe city of Agra was the capital of the Mughul empire that dominated the Indian subcontinent from the early 1500s until the eighteenth century, when the British East India Company systematically dismantled it. The "great Mogul" was the ruler of the empire. Agra is perhaps most famous now as the site of the Taj Mahal, built by the emperor Jahan as a tomb for his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal in the seventeenth century.PersiaNow known as the modern state of Iran.ArabiaThe Arabian peninsula, now divided into the modern states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates.SyriaIn Johnson's era (and Imlac's), not the modern state of Syria, but a somewhat larger and slightly amorphous region of the Middle East on the eastern short of the Mediterranean that included the modern state but also at times parts of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. PalestineIn this era, the region in the eastern Mediterranean comprising the modern state of Israel, but also Gaza and the West Bank of the Jordan river. SuezAn Egyptian port on the Red Sea, now close to the southern end of the Suez Canal, which was named for it when it was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.coniesRabbits or hares.circumferencePrecise measurements of the circumference of the Earth was new information in Johnson’s time. The Geodesic Mission to the Equator, which involved Spanish and French scientists, was an international expedition to find the Earth’s circumference, which began in 1735.cataractwaterfallprefermentsThat is, the preferential treatement extended towards the younger officer by their superiors.artificierscraftsmenBassa"The earlier form of the Turkish title pasha," meaning a military commmander or a provincial governor. Oxford English Dictionarycontrivanceskillful plotting or planningscrupulosityextremely scrict moral and ethical standardscaprice"Freak; fancy; whim; sudden change of humour." Johnson's Dictionary.querulouspetulant, exaggeratedintestineinternal, domesticconnubialmaritalcasuists"One that studies and settles cases of conscience." Johnson's Dictionarycavillers"A man fond of making objections; an unfair adversary; a captious disputant." Johnson's Dictionarytrain"A retinue; a number of followers or attendants." Johnson's Dictionary.adventitiousaccidental, coming about by chance rather than designmonasteryAn ancient Christian monastery in eastern Egypt, whose origins go back to around the year 350. It was founded in honor of St. Anthony (born around 251 AD), a hermit whose simple and ascetic life became a template for Christian monasticism. It is still a religious center, with a community of monks practicing the Captic Christian faith. emersionemergence; they are watching one of Jupiter's moons emerge from being hidden behind the planetecliptickthe plane taken by the earth as it orbits the sunexcogitationdiscovery or invention; mental effortpreternatural"Outside the ordinary course of nature; differing from or surpassing what is natural; unnatural." Oxford English Dictionary
THE
PRINCE
OF
ABISSINIA.AbissiniaAbissiniaThe Prince of Abyssinia, now often referred to as Rasselas after its central character, became one of the most popular works of fiction of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reprinted again and again in the English-speaking world. Which might surprise a modern reader, for whom Samuel Johnson’s tale of a prince meditating on his future does not come across at first blush as the most exciting and absorbing subject matter for a novel. But Rasselas picks up many streams of thought and literature from this period so fully and deftly, and with such sincerity, that it remains a fascinating book, one that can still prompt the reader to think about its central concerns, which remain relevant: how should we think about our desires? is our imagination a good thing or potentially a dangerous thing? what is the task of an artist? how should we go about deciding what to do with our lives? The story goes that Samuel Johnson wrote this book quickly because he needed money to pay for his mother’s funeral, and there is clearly truth to that. But it was only possible for him to write Rasselas so quickly because the book built upon ideas that Johnson had been thinking about for a long time, and picked up strategies for incorporating those ideas into fiction that had developed over the previous few decades, a period that we can now see as crucial to the emergence of the English novel.
One of those strategies was to move the action of the story to the area of the world that eighteenth-century Europeans called “the Orient.” For Europeans in this period, the “Orient” designated an area of the world that we would now call the middle and near East, an area embracing east Africa, as well as the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Abyssinia, the central location for Johnson’s story, is now the modern state of Ethiopia, and had been a place that fascinated Johnson for a long time. His first published work was a translation and abridgment of a seventeenth-century travel narrative by the Portuguese Jesuit priest and missionary Jerome Lobo, a book that was one very few accounts in that period by a European that attempted to describe an African culture and the area’s natural resources. Johnson’s version was published as A Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735, when he was twenty-six years old. With Rasselas, Johnson was returning in his imagination to an area of the world that had long fascinated him, but that he could not realistically visit himself. Writing what was would become known as an “Oriental tale” freed Johnson and other writers of this period who used the form to write about moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues without having to engage directly with European politics and culture. An “Oriental” place like this was in effect a clean slate that a writer could use to imagine a way of being in the world that contrasted with the culture that the readers of the story lived in. Rasselas did not aim to present anything like a faithful representation of Abyssinian culture, but it also avoids either overly romanticizing or dismissing that culture. Rather, European and Oriental societies are put in constant tension with each other, each seen as places where happiness is wished for but elusive, and where human accomplishment is potentially both monumental but also fleeting.
Rasselas is also what we might now call a young adult novel, a work of fiction expressly aimed at younger readers, and consciously shaped to offer positive and complex examples of other young people for readers to model themselves on. Johnson famously worried about the effects of novels on younger readers, and dedicated Rambler #4 to what is now a famous critique of the novel for its potential effects on the “young, the ignorant, and the idle” readers, who might easily be misled into taking some of the roguish protagonists of contemporary works of fiction like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as models for their own behavior. The eighteenth century didn’t have a name such as ours for “young adult” fiction, but there was a rich body of works of fiction and nonfiction that aimed to teach young readers how to conduct themselves. There was also in this period a growing interest in books written for children and young people that were both educational and entertaining; scholars trace the origin of children’s literature to this period. Rasselas is Johnson’s attempt to write the kind of fiction for young people that will help rather than harm them by offering positive models—Rasselas and his sister Nekayah—as its protagonists, and complicated moral and aesthetic ideas to contemplate.
For all of these reasons, Johnson’s publishers knew that there was a ready market for a book like this, and they were right. Rasselas was a best-seller almost immediately, and was translated into all of the major European languages in just a few years. It’s a book that opens up more questions than it answers, but leaves us with the hope that human intelligence can discover meaning in the world.
A
TALE.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
THE SECOND EDITION.
LONDON: Printed for R. and J. DODSLEY, in Pall-Mall;
and W. JOHNSTON, in Ludgate-Street. MDCCLIX.
PRINCE
OF
ABISSINIA.AbissiniaAbissiniaThe Prince of Abyssinia, now often referred to as Rasselas after its central character, became one of the most popular works of fiction of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reprinted again and again in the English-speaking world. Which might surprise a modern reader, for whom Samuel Johnson’s tale of a prince meditating on his future does not come across at first blush as the most exciting and absorbing subject matter for a novel. But Rasselas picks up many streams of thought and literature from this period so fully and deftly, and with such sincerity, that it remains a fascinating book, one that can still prompt the reader to think about its central concerns, which remain relevant: how should we think about our desires? is our imagination a good thing or potentially a dangerous thing? what is the task of an artist? how should we go about deciding what to do with our lives? The story goes that Samuel Johnson wrote this book quickly because he needed money to pay for his mother’s funeral, and there is clearly truth to that. But it was only possible for him to write Rasselas so quickly because the book built upon ideas that Johnson had been thinking about for a long time, and picked up strategies for incorporating those ideas into fiction that had developed over the previous few decades, a period that we can now see as crucial to the emergence of the English novel.
One of those strategies was to move the action of the story to the area of the world that eighteenth-century Europeans called “the Orient.” For Europeans in this period, the “Orient” designated an area of the world that we would now call the middle and near East, an area embracing east Africa, as well as the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Abyssinia, the central location for Johnson’s story, is now the modern state of Ethiopia, and had been a place that fascinated Johnson for a long time. His first published work was a translation and abridgment of a seventeenth-century travel narrative by the Portuguese Jesuit priest and missionary Jerome Lobo, a book that was one very few accounts in that period by a European that attempted to describe an African culture and the area’s natural resources. Johnson’s version was published as A Voyage to Abyssinia in 1735, when he was twenty-six years old. With Rasselas, Johnson was returning in his imagination to an area of the world that had long fascinated him, but that he could not realistically visit himself. Writing what was would become known as an “Oriental tale” freed Johnson and other writers of this period who used the form to write about moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and political issues without having to engage directly with European politics and culture. An “Oriental” place like this was in effect a clean slate that a writer could use to imagine a way of being in the world that contrasted with the culture that the readers of the story lived in. Rasselas did not aim to present anything like a faithful representation of Abyssinian culture, but it also avoids either overly romanticizing or dismissing that culture. Rather, European and Oriental societies are put in constant tension with each other, each seen as places where happiness is wished for but elusive, and where human accomplishment is potentially both monumental but also fleeting.
Rasselas is also what we might now call a young adult novel, a work of fiction expressly aimed at younger readers, and consciously shaped to offer positive and complex examples of other young people for readers to model themselves on. Johnson famously worried about the effects of novels on younger readers, and dedicated Rambler #4 to what is now a famous critique of the novel for its potential effects on the “young, the ignorant, and the idle” readers, who might easily be misled into taking some of the roguish protagonists of contemporary works of fiction like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as models for their own behavior. The eighteenth century didn’t have a name such as ours for “young adult” fiction, but there was a rich body of works of fiction and nonfiction that aimed to teach young readers how to conduct themselves. There was also in this period a growing interest in books written for children and young people that were both educational and entertaining; scholars trace the origin of children’s literature to this period. Rasselas is Johnson’s attempt to write the kind of fiction for young people that will help rather than harm them by offering positive models—Rasselas and his sister Nekayah—as its protagonists, and complicated moral and aesthetic ideas to contemplate.
For all of these reasons, Johnson’s publishers knew that there was a ready market for a book like this, and they were right. Rasselas was a best-seller almost immediately, and was translated into all of the major European languages in just a few years. It’s a book that opens up more questions than it answers, but leaves us with the hope that human intelligence can discover meaning in the world.
A
TALE.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
THE SECOND EDITION.
LONDON: Printed for R. and J. DODSLEY, in Pall-Mall;
and W. JOHNSTON, in Ludgate-Street. MDCCLIX.
Page