Notes on Samuel Johnson (1709-84), Rasselas (1759)

• Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfeld as the son of a bookseller. His childhood was marred by ill health: a tubercular infection affected both his sight and hearing and his face was scarred by scrofula. Johnson was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. His father died in 1731 and left the family in poverty. Johnson's studies were cut short and he returned to Lichfield, affected by depression, which haunted him for his life.
• He worked as a teacher at the grammar school in Market Bosworth and published his first essays in the Birmingham Journal. In 1735 he married Elisabeth Porter, a widow 20 years his senior. They started a school, but it did not prosper. Johnson's lack of formal education and convulsive mannerisms hindered his success as a teacher.
• Two years later they moved to London where Johnson worked for Edward Cave, the founder of The Gentleman's Magazine. When he applied to a publisher for employment, he was found unfit for the job. "You had better get a porter's knot and carry trunks," he was advised. He then began working on a major English dictionary.
• A Dictionary of the English Language was published finally in 1755, and the abridged edition in 1756. Johnson's financial situation was weak, although the work as a whole remained without rival until the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928). Johnson wrote the definitions of over 40,000 words, illustrating them with about 114,000 quotations drawn from every field of learning. Jack Lynch has recently published an abridged edition of Johnson's dictionary.
• Johnson was an extremely prolific writer; in addition to Rasselas, he also published essays on a variety of topics including political satire; he also published poetry, drama, criticism, and journalism.
• The new monarch George III awarded Johnson in 1762 an annual pension, which improved his circumstances. He spent his time in coffee houses in conversation and in idleness. In 1763 he met the young Scot James Boswell, who became later his biographer and with whom he formed one of the most famous friendships in literary history. With Boswell he traveled in 1773 in Scotland and published his observations in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). Though Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is perhaps the most famous biography ever written, it severely distorted Johnson's personality, life, and literary influence, perhaps inadvertently depriving him of a much more distinguished standing in the literary canon.
• For example, Boswell depicts Johnson as an egregious misogynist. According to one critic, however, Johnson's biographical materials, considered on their own, show him to be "an individual who has a talent for intimate, Platonic friendship with women--a demanding mentor, collaborator, and editor, whose rigor was a form of respect and who encouraged women to stake their claim in eighteenth-century literary society" (Geller 82). On the occasion of the publication of Charlotte Lennox's first novel, Harriet Stuart, Johnson threw an all-night part to celebrate, "crowning her with a laurel of bay leaves" (83). Additionally, John "effusively praised [Francis] Burney's 1778 novel Evelina, and he also encouraged her to learn Latin, write drama, publish under her own name, and assert herself publicly in conversation" (83). These relationships and others show that Johnson had an extensive network of female friends and colleagues whom he encouraged and supported throughout his lifetime.
• Johnson spent the summer of 1784 visiting Lichfield, Birmingham, and Oxford and returned to London depressed. He died during the night of 13 December and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Although Johnson's celebrity at that time was phenomenal, views about him as a pedantic and pompous writer came to dominate the 19th century. Not until writers of the Modern period such as Ford Madox Ford and T. S. Eliot did Johnson again begin to be appreciated as an important, influential author.

• Some Themes in Rasselas:
• Destructive capacities of the human imagination: imagination is the wellspring of vice.
• Humans need to labor, engage in the world.
• The text ostensibly takes the form of a travel adventure set in an "exotic" location, but the narrative turns into a platonic dialogue between genderless individuals, which reflects the didactic nature of Johnson's project. In this sense it can be seen as a satire of 18th-century travel narratives and of "novels" in general.
• Imlac's theory about poetry: it's the highest literary form. Poetry communicates a knowledge that no one today really believes in. We have inherited the idea of the lyric from Wordsworth, which is usually very personal. Imlac's theory of poetry is that it embraces everything from the high to the low. Remember that lots of novels have come out by this time and have begun to replace the epic in the hierarchy of literary forms. Johnson's defense of poetry is almost anachronistic in a sense. Imlac says that the poet has to know everything, but Rasselas says, then no one could ever be a poet. Johnson's point is that we should not get lost in "the streaks of the tulip": don't get caught up in the minor details and be blinded to the larger truths. If something is going to be effective as art, it has to speak to the universal, the human condition in some way, deal with general truths in some way. Today we wouldn't agree, but in the eighteenth century, that's still the idea. That's what Clarissa is saying to Belinda. The romantics turn that on its head, saying that you can see general truths in the particular. You can see larger truths in the streaks of the tulip.
• Rasselas is on a quest to find his "choice in life," the one that will make him happy. Even before we get to the mid-point of the novel, however, we can see that he isn't going to find it. Along his journey, we hear a number of very interesting conversations. What do they seem to be saying in general about the pursuit of knowledge and/or happiness?
• The astronomer in Rasselas is a direct link to Swift's flying island in Gulliver's Travels. But Johnson sees the astronomer as the lot of all of us who become so introspective and isolated that we lose sight of living in the world. Johnson is very modern in his assertion that individuals must pour their energy into the external world; otherwise, the imagination festers inside and creates inner demons and imaginary problems. Left to oneself, with no specific purpose, the imagination preys upon one's mind. Life in the Happy Valley, where no labor is necessary, is not condusive to a productive, meaningful life.
  
• Johnson's views on marriage expressed in Rasselas are quite notable within the context of 18th-century British literature as a whole. Rasselas says, "Marriage is evidently the dictate of nature; men and women were made to be companions of each other, and therefore I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness." Johnson uses a male character to vocalize these beliefs and expose their naïveté. Rasselas describes marriage in a series of "ideal pictures," the kind of sentimental images that one would expect to hear from a young girl saturated with conduct books and romantic novels from this period.
• Nekayah's argument, on the other hand, is that (1) the basis of conjugal life is power rather than affection; (2) that marriage is not necessary for the propagation of the species; (3) and that maturity does not improve domestic relationships. Her descriptions of marital discord mirror actual characters in many 18th-century novels. Notice what Nekayah's final goal is as the end of the novel--how does it relate to the views she has expressed in this chapter?
• How do the attitudes toward gender and marriage in Rasselas compare to those in The Rape of the Lock? Some Reflections Upon Marriage? The Country Wife? Other works we have read?
  

Sources

• Clingham, Greg, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
• Geller, Jaclyn. "The Unnarrated Life: Samuel Johnson, Female Friendship, and the Rise of the Novel Revisited." Johnson Re-Visioned. Ed. Philip Smallwood. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2001. 80-98.
• Johnson, Samuel. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Ed. J. P. Hardy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
• "Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784." Books and Writers. 2000. 3 Mar. 2004. < http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/samuelj.htm>.

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