The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (review)

Broadview Press has earned the gratitude of academics by issuing editions of eighteenth-century novels long out of print but important to scholars; one thinks of Eliza Haywood’s Eovaai, Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice, Robert Bage’s Hermsprong. At the same time, the press has produced familiar texts—Frances Burney’s Evelina, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk—in well-edited teaching editions that include useful generic and historical contexts. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, edited by Jessica Richard, surely belongs in the latter category, since the tale has remained in print and is available in multiple forms, from Gwin Kolb’s scholarly edition for the Yale University Press Johnson series to paperback anthologies published by Rinehart and Oxford University Press [and a recent standalone scholarly edition for Oxford University Press, edited by Thomas Keymer]. Arriving just in time for the tercentenary celebration of Samuel Johnson’s birth and the 250th anniversary of its first publication, Richard’s edition is a welcome addition to the Broadview list of good teaching texts, and one that should find a home in many eighteenth-century syllabi.

While clearly aimed at students, this edition also seeks to contribute to the continuing scholarly conversation regarding the tale’s generic roots and affiliations. As Richard says in her introduction, her volume “aims to reposition Rasselas not just as a philosophical but also as an oriental tale” and to demonstrate the “utility of the oriental tale for exposing English enjoyment of—and concern about—the material luxuries and existential contingencies of an increasingly global culture” (13). The claim of repositioning may be somewhat overstated, since Kolb’s introduction carefully traces Rasselas ’s orientalist sources and analogues, from Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia (which Johnson translated from Joachim Le Grand’s French version) to Hiob Ludolf ’s A New History of Ethiopia to Johnson’s own earlier forays into the writing of an “eastern” tale. Moreover, having examined the multiple classifications imposed on the text, Kolb concludes that “the application of so many differentiae suggests ... that Johnson’s book is a complex mixture of elements,” and settles on the inclusive term “oriental moral tale” (xxxiv–xxxv). Richard’s category may thus be both less innovative and more limiting than the introduction acknowledges.

On the other hand, Richard provides a thoughtful analysis of Johnson’s discomfort with European imperialist ambitions, discovering in Rasselas a “detailed universalism” that speaks to Johnson’s respect for cultural diversity; in this, Richard echoes Thomas Keymer’s contention that “the environment of Johnson’s story is never presented according to the ‘orientalist’ stereotype as a desirable arena or legitimate target for colonial appropriation” (Keymer, “Samuel Johnson’s Message to America: What a Novel Written in Despondency Says about the Pursuit of Happiness,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 2009). Situating Rasselas within the conventions of oriental romance also aligns the text with accounts that seek to displace the agenda of commercial exploitation. As Ros Ballaster notes, “Oriental narratives often claim to be a more ‘moral’ traffic than the acquisitive traffic in goods” (Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 18). Richard argues that Johnson uses the formal apparatus of eastern tales “to show that the restlessness of human desire cannot be sated by all that power, money, and imagination can provide” (23) and to undermine (as in the episode set in the Arab’s harem) stereotypical fantasies surrounding oriental culture. These are productive insights, especially for twenty-first-century students who are alert to globalism and multiculturalism; an instructor could easily supply elements—satiric, epigrammatic modes, for example—that are omitted in this reading.

Indeed, one of the pleasures of re-reading Rasselas in a version uncluttered by one’s own jottings or by voluminous explanatory notes is a re-engagement with this compressed and always provocative text. I noted afresh Johnson’s representation of the multiple technologies of surveillance...