by Samuel Johnson · 1759
Classics
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Prince Rasselas lives in a perfect, closed valley in Abyssinia, where every wish is met, yet he is restless. He escapes with his sister and a wise teacher to look for what a happy life really is. A short moral tale by the English writer Samuel Johnson, set in Ethiopia.
Rasselas was written by Samuel Johnson in the year 1759, when his age was fifty. He had written his London in 1738; his Vanity of Human Wishes in 1740; his Rambler between March, 1750, and March, 1752. In 1755 his Dictionary had appeared, and Dublin, by giving him its honorary LL.D., had enabled his friends to call him “Doctor” Johnson. His friends were many, and his honour among men was great. He owed them to his union of intellectual power with unflinching probity. But he had worked hard, battling against the wolf without, and the black dog within—poverty and hypochondria. He was still poor, though his personal wants did not exceed a hundred pounds a year. His wife had been seven years dead, and he missed her sorely. His old mother, who lived to the age of ninety, died poor in January of this year, 1759. In her old age, Johnson had sought to help her from his earnings. At her death there were some little debts, and there were costs of burial. That he might earn enough to pay them he wrote Rasselas.
Rasselas was written in the evenings of one week, and sent to press while being written. Johnson earned by it a hundred pounds, with twenty-five pounds more for a second edition.
