The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (review)

Rasselas has been well served by its editors and critics. Since its publication 250 years ago, it has never been out of print, and it has attracted some of the most thoughtful criticism of any of Samuel Johnson's works. Both scholarly and teaching editions of Rasselas have been particularly good. G.B. Hill's Clarendon Press edition of 1887 (reprinted many times), R.W. Chapman's Clarendon Press edition of 1927, and Gwin Kolb's Yale edition of 1990 all set high bibliographical standards. Among the many mass-market editions of Rasselas, J.P. Hardy's World's Classics edition (1966 and 1988) surpassed others in identifying its philosophical interests, and Jessica Richard's excellent Broadview edition (2008) has created a context for the tale in relation to British Orientalism.

Thomas Keymer's new World's Classics edition of Rasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern focus. Like Chapman and Hardy, it prints the text of the second, corrected edition of 1759 and maintains first-edition readings in some cases of compositional error. It has a chronology, a useful (though obvious) bibliography, and a helpful glossary of unfamiliar words that draws on Johnson's Dictionary. Keymer's introduction is an excellent critical essay in its own right. Highlighting the enlightened nature of Johnson's text, he deftly describes several intersecting biographical, historical, and intellectual narratives. Especially interesting, Keymer associates Johnson's account of the pursuit of happiness with Thomas Jefferson's writings, suggesting that they "may have been closer to one another in their thinking about the pursuit of happiness, if not about equality or slavery" (x). Johnson, of course, was more liberal than the early Americans on the subject of slavery, as his parenting of Francis Barber and his advocacy of Joseph Knight indicate (in discussing Knight with Boswell [23 September 1777] Johnson states, "It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal ... [slavery] is injurious to the rights of mankind").

Keymer links these enlightened views with Johnson's critique of imperialism, directly argued in his Introduction to the World Displayed (1759) and deployed in Rasselas in his rewriting of the popular form of the oriental tale. Keymer's explanatory notes track Johnson's familiarity with contemporary historiography of Abyssinia and the Ottoman Empire, identifying extensive echoes in the text from Aaron Hill's A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709), Stephen Whatley's A Complete System of Geography (1747), Familiar Letters from a Gentleman at Damascus to His Sister in London (1750), and other works. The notes are very helpful in suggesting the complexity of the tale's contexts.

Keymer goes further by arguing that Johnson uses "oriental" themes, images, and settings to criticize British colonialism: "Far from being an 'orientalist' in the Saidian sense, one for whom lush new worlds were alluring fair game, Johnson was notorious in the year of Rasselas—the 'Year of Victories,' in which the war turned decisively in Britain's favour—as a prophet against empire, doggedly resistant to the opportunities for domination of the globe from Asia to America that were suddenly opening up" (xxviii). Johnson taps the generic commonplaces of "orientalist" fiction in order to challenge the political and historicist views associated with that genre (xxiv-xxv).

Furthermore, Keymer argues that Johnson's critique of colonialism is supplemented in Rasselas by his interest in the contemporary debate about fiction and truth. Its ambiguous consideration in Rambler no. 4 (1750) is less about Fielding's "wicked characters" than the power of Richardson's realism (xxvi), which Johnson admires, but whose ideological and moral effects he doubts: "the power of [Richardsonian] example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will." In the right hands, realism can disable the memory...