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Samuel Johnson's message to America
What a novel written in despondency says about the pursuit of happiness
Rasselas is a book about happiness, and for all the famous despondency of its author it caught the mood of its time. It was published 250 years ago next month, but no early edition so well reflects the practical as well as philosophical importance that early readers found in Johnson’s theme as the first American edition, published in 1768 by Robert Bell, a radical Irish bookseller who had moved to Philadelphia following 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 makes a further appeal to common readers with a tag from 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”.
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 World career, 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 a natural individual right and a collective political aim, here was a work that directly addressed the most enduring, yet also the most pressing, of human concerns.
Johnson was quick to grasp the implications of Bell’s edition when he was sent a copy five years later, and expressed pleasure “because the Printer seems to have expected that it would be scattered among the People”. He would have deplored any attempt to find common ground, however, between Rasselas and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, with its well-known insistence “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”. Duties, not rights, were at the centre of Johnson’s ethics, and as a staunch conservative (though also a vocal abolitionist) he became the foremost British polemicist against the American Continental Congress in the 1770s. Pieties about equality for all enraged him especially, and in his most scathing denunciation of congressional proceedings, Taxation No Tyranny, he demands to know, with thunderous frankness, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”. Yet Johnson and Jefferson may have been closer in their thinking about the pursuit of happiness, if not about equality or slavery, than either would have cared to admit.
Even before Rasselas, Johnson was writing about social as well as personal felicity as an imperative for the American colonies, no less than for the mother country. “Every society is intitled to all the happiness that can be enjoyed with the security of the whole community”, he declared in 1756, as war for colonial supremacy broke out between Britain and France, and “from this general claim the Americans ought not to be excluded.” For his part, Jefferson seems to have shared with Johnson the central insight of Rasselas that, although pursuing happiness was a necessary endeavour, obtaining it was something else. A standard formula about “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” is common to several documents in the swirl of republican rhetoric from which the Declaration emerged, but it was “pursuit” only that entered the text prepared by Jefferson and adopted by the Congress. No mention was made of secure possession, and, as historians of American independence have observed, to speak of pursuit alone was to render problematic our relationship to the happiness we seek, and to emphasize our distance from it.
In his recent book Happiness: A history, Darrin McMahon quotes the unsettling definition of pursuit that Johnson included in his Dictionary of 1755 – “The act of following with hostile intention” – and notes the etymological links with prosecution and persecution. Further connotations are called to mind by the alternative spelling, persuit, favoured in early editions of Rasselas, and in this context – “Yet what, said Nekayah, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when . . . happiness itself is the cause of misery?” – it becomes clear that perseverance, and persistent self-persuasion, must also form part of the quest. As Johnson implies in his final chapter, headed “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”, the pursuit may derive more meaning from the activity itself than from its prospects of reaching fruition.
In personal terms no less than philosophical outlook, happiness was far from Johnson’s reach when Rasselas was composed. Ten years earlier, in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”, he had produced a monumental yet also heartfelt statement about the inevitable defeat of worldly ambition. Life in the poem is a condition of relentless struggle, in which mankind “Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, / That life protracted is protracted woe”. This resonant couplet, with its equation between living and suffering, set the tone of Johnson’s writing for a decade. Closer in time to Rasselas, he famously declared (in his pulverizing review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, a fatuous Panglossian treatise on the benevolence of Providence) that “the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”. Here was a formula that would re-emerge in Rasselas, in even more grimly antithetical style, with the poet Imlac’s account of life as “every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed”.
Though writing might alleviate the miseries of life, in Johnson’s individual case the benefit was hard to locate. After eight years at work on the Dictionary, he concludes his preface with an arresting shift from the instability of language and meaning to the painful mutability of life, not least his own. In the “gloom of solitude” that afflicted him as the Dictionary went through the press, fulfilment seemed further than ever beyond reach, and his own condition one of mere joyless endurance. “I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds”, reads Johnson’s plangent envoy to the Dictionary: “I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise”.
If censure and praise were of no account, however, other kinds of compensation continued to matter. At the height of his fame Johnson liked to shock admirers by posing as a mercenary hack – a man in whose gruff opinion, as James Boswell reports with conspicuous dismay, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”. With Rasselas, however, money really was a driving motive. The myth of a masterpiece dashed off to defray the costs of his mother’s last illness and death was exaggerated by early biographers, but Johnson tells essentially the same story himself in a letter to his printer William Strahan, dated Saturday, January 20, 1759, and now sandwiched in editions of his correspondence between a valedictory letter to his mother and a grief-stricken note to his stepdaughter three days later. “I shall send a bill of twenty pounds in a few days, which I thought to have brought to my mother; but God suffered it not”, he tells Lucy Porter on January 23; “I have not power or composure to say much more.” Instead the power and composure were channelled into Rasselas, which Johnson had been hoping to complete and deliver on January 22 (the eve of his mother’s funeral, as things turned out) and as he may, even in the circumstances, have managed to do. The eventual date of completion remains uncertain, but it is not unreasonable to imagine Johnson writing the final chapters of Rasselas, including the visit to the catacombs and his magisterial dialogue on death and the soul, as he waited for confirmation of his bereavement to reach London from Lichfield. “When I was with you last night I told you of a thing which I was preparing for the press”, begins the letter to Strahan. “The title will be The choice of Life or The History of — Prince of Abissinia.” Then Johnson moves on to the money:
The bargain which I made with Mr. Johnston was seventy five pounds (or guineas) a volume, and twenty five pounds for the second Edition. I will sell this either at that price or for sixty, the first edition of which he shall himself fix the number, and the property then to revert to me, or for forty pounds, and share the profit that is retain half the copy. I shall have occasion for thirty pounds on Monday night when I shall deliver the book which I must entreat you upon such delivery to procure me . . . . Get me the money if you can.
In the event, Rasselas did not appear in print for three more months, and later stages of Johnson’s negotiations with Strahan and his bookseller colleagues (William Johnston, mentioned in the letter, and the fashionable Pall Mall publisher Robert Dodsley) remain obscure. The likelihood is that Johnson finally sold the copyright of both volumes together for £75, with a further £25 to be paid on publication of a second edition. Boswell gives a larger total, but these are the figures recorded in recently discovered legal proceedings arising from a magazine piracy of Rasselas, and documentary evidence appears to have been shown in court. This was solid remuneration for fiction at the time, but it evidently signified a climbdown on Johnson's part, and it looks disappointing alongside the £250 that Dodsley’s brother James was shortly to pay Laurence Sterne for the opening two volumes of Tristram Shandy. One hard-nosed observer, Giuseppe Baretti, was of the opinion that “any other person with the degree of reputation he then possessed would have got [£]400 for that work”, and it seems clear that Johnson’s need to make money from books was more acute than his skill in negotiating for it with booksellers.
That said, Johnson’s note to Strahan shows in other respects the hand of a seasoned professional. Like the serene surface of Rasselas itself, the unruffled, no-nonsense tone of the letter gives little hint of the emotional turmoil behind it, and Johnson’s robust manner effectively screens what he elsewhere calls the “invisible riot of the mind”. Instead he focuses on practicalities such as the form, precisely envisaged, of his title page. Critics often comment on the difficulty of classifying Rasselas as a novel, and in proposing his title Johnson firmly privileges the rational and discursive aspects of his work over its imaginative content. The title will be “The Choice of Life”, a bold statement of philosophical theme, and only with his proposed subtitle does Johnson identify his manuscript as narrative fiction. Even the name of his hero is undecided or unimportant, and although the broadly novelistic nature of Rasselas was reasserted on publication (The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale is the published title, perhaps at the booksellers’ insistence), the working title neatly catches Johnson’s rigorous thematic structure. That theme returns several times as the narrative unfolds, beginning with the hero’s regret that the imprisoning paradise of the Happy Valley denies him “the choice of life”, and progressing through different critiques of his pursuit of happiness, as voiced by his companions. Before the visit to the pyramids, Rasselas’s mentor Imlac offers the worldly advice that “while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live”; after the catacombs episode comes the otherworldly renunciation of his sister Nekayah, for whom at last “the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity”.
In the decades following publication, readers were struck by the gloom with which Johnson darkened this theme of happiness and choice, and William Hayley called the work a “black diamond”: a jewel disfigured by an inherited condition of “malevolent melancholy” that its author could not throw off. For Boswell’s rival biographer Sir John Hawkins, Rasselas was a work in which Johnson “poured out his sorrow in gloomy reflection, and being destitute of comfort himself, described the world as nearly without it”. Others have taken this line a stage further, sensing a unique psychobiography at loose in Rasselas, present as a more or less unconscious side-effect of rapid, anguished composition. From this perspective, the acts of repression involved for Johnson in transforming private agonies of guilt and loss into generalizing exploration of large abstractions – the nature of happiness, the immortality of souls – left traces of specific trauma in the text, or triggered a return of the repressed.
For the twentieth-century critic Irvin Ehrenpreis, Rasselas’s exile from the Happy Valley expressed an ageing Londoner’s rueful sense of lost provincial youth; Imlac was an unconscious anagram of Michael, the long-dead father whose memory still haunted Johnson when, years after Rasselas, he returned to the market town (Uttoxeter) where he had once refused to work on his father’s bookstall and stood in penance at the scene for hours, bare-headed in the driving rain. For Hester Piozzi, who knew the tormented private Johnson more intimately than anyone else, an alternative identification was in play where Imlac describes the lacerating rejection of his courtship by a class-conscious social superior. “Poor Imlac!”, wrote Piozzi in the margin of her copy sixty years later. “He meant Imlac as his own Representative to his own feelings; The Lady was Miss Molly Aston . . . .” There would be little mileage, however, in reading Rasselas as a roman-à-clef, and in the year of Johnson’s tercentenary and the anniversary of publication in 1759 – “the year Britain became master of the world”, as the subtitle of Frank McLynn’s recent book 1759 puts it – more is to be gained by considering the surprising geopolitics of Johnson’s work. For Rasselas repeatedly implies, and sometimes makes explicit, real hostility to the imperial project that was opening up as Johnson wrote. Though exotic and despotic in the usual manner of eighteenth-century Eastern tales, the environment of Johnson’s story is never presented according to the “orientalist” stereotype as a desirable arena or a legitimate target for colonial appropriation, and from the start of his career Johnson had been satirizing just those assumptions that were to be attacked by Edward Said and his followers in the twentieth century. As early as 1738, in the Gentleman’s Magazine, he borrowed Swift’s Gulliver persona to target the self-serving “imaginary sovereignty” of European states, which “have made Conquests, and settled Colonies in very distant Regions, the Inhabitants of which they look upon as barbarous, though in Simplicity of Manners, Probity, and Temperance superior to themselves”. He intensified his rhetoric on the outbreak of the Seven Years War, provocatively likening the Anglo-French struggle for dominion in North America to “the quarrel of two robbers for the spoils of a passenger”. Far from being an orientalist in Said’s sense, one for whom lush new worlds were alluring fair game, Johnson had made himself notorious by the year of Rasselas – the “Year of Victories” – as a prophet against empire, fiercely resistant to the opportunities for global supremacy that were now to hand.
Implicitly, Rasselas recognizes the future of European domination that awaited many of the lands it describes, imminently so in the case of India. Like Gulliver in Lilliput, the would-be aviator of Johnson’s tale envisages with alarm the exploitation of his inventions in the cause of imperial annexation, and his vision of a conquering “flight of northern savages” evokes not only the Ottoman Empire to the north of Abyssinia, or the northern tribes who sacked ancient Rome, but also the potent expansionist forces of modern Europe. A few chapters later, the threat of technological advance in “the northern and western nations of Europe, the nations which are now in possession of all power and all knowledge; whose armies are irresistible, and whose fleets command the remotest parts of the globe”, is given salient discussion. But tyranny and oppression are also closer to hand, and from the despotism of the Abyssinian emperor, whose rule Rasselas dreams of replacing with enlightened autocracy, to the exploitation of Egypt by a corrupt Ottoman bureaucracy, the narrative unfolds against a constant backdrop of political injustice. As Gerald MacLean has recently argued, the Ottoman Empire provided an established model, both energizing and cautionary, for thinking about questions of imperial domination that the victories of 1759 were now making urgent. In the speech of Johnson’s Arab bandit against Turkish usurpation, or in Imlac’s story of the fall of the Bassa in Cairo, imperial overreach and misrule are Ottoman in immediate context, but always with wider implications.
Even against this political backdrop, however, there remained readers for whom Rasselas could continue to express the hopeful pursuit of autonomy and happiness. This may have been especially true for African readers in the century following publication, when the name of Johnson’s hero was occasionally adopted by emancipated slaves. Traceable individuals such as Rasselas Belfield (c1790–1822) and Rasselas Morjan (c1820–1839), both former slaves who lived as free men in England, took the name not only because Rasselas was one of the very few eligible Africans in English literature (one would hardly pick Oroonoko, or Othello), and not only because Johnson was revered among abolitionists for his public declarations against slavery. Rasselas is among much else an ingenious variation on the standard eighteenth-century captivity narrative, documenting the hero’s liberation or escape from imprisonment, and in this sense the name also connoted deliverance into a world of potential fulfilment, confronted in freedom.
“Rescued from a state of slavery in this life and enabled by God’s grace to become a member of his church he rests here in the hope of a greater deliverance hereafter”, reads the headstone of Rasselas Morjan’s grave in Wanlip, Leicestershire. At Bowness on Windermere, Rasselas Belfield is memorialized in more secular style, and in first-person verse: “A Slave by birth I left my native Land / And found my Freedom on Britannia’s Strand: / Blest Isle! Thou Glory of the Wise and Free, / Thy Touch alone unbinds the Chains of Slavery”. We cannot know the relationship between these rather conventional inscriptions and the lives and aspirations of their subjects, and it is clear that despite their manumission both men continued to work as domestic servants. That said, the expensiveness and quality of the surviving monuments to Rasselas Morjan and Rasselas Belfield make clear that both were valued upper servants in enlightened households. Whatever questions there might be about the completeness of their emancipation, we can safely assume that they had better chances of pursuing happiness than their still enslaved contemporaries across the Atlantic. Life itself still had to be lived, but like Johnson’s hero they could at least choose how to endure and even enjoy it.
This is an edited version of the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Rasselas, which will be published in June.
Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His books include, as co-editor, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830, 2004, and as co-author, “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary controversy and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, 2005.
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