The History of Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia."

So begins The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, a short philosophical novel written by Samuel Johnson in 1759.  Dr. Johnson is perhaps best known today for being the subject of the lengthy classic biography The Life of Samuel Johnson, written by the devoted Boswell.  He was, in fact. an eminent man of letters, having written poetry, plays, essays, sermons, biographies, a travel book about the western islands of Scotland, and a Dictionary of the English Language.  His reputation loomed large over the field of English letters for decades, and allusions to him in literature abound.  Even if still known by reputation, readers of his work seem to have diminished.  Truthfully, I'm not sure if Rasselas would have been on my radar had it not been mentioned by Charlotte Mason, and in turn found its way onto the booklists of Ambleside Online.  I've known about Johnson for many years; I haven't read Johnson until now.

Attempting to approach reading Rasselas as one would a conventional novel is likely going to lead to confusion and possibly disappointment.  Sometimes referred to as a moral fable or philosophical romance,  Rasselas may be best considered as an apologue: "a short fable or allegorical story, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for some moral doctrine or to convey some useful lesson."  In an apologue, the narrative details and characters are subordinate to the moral truth the author wants to convey.  Some scholars don't like to call Rasselas a "novel" at all.  Once we understand all this, we're in a better position to appreciate Rasselas and what Dr. Johnson was trying to do with this book.

How should we live?  What mode of life will foster happiness?  These are the fundamental human questions at the heart of Rasselas' quest.  Rasselas' story begins when he is a young man, a wealthy Prince of Abyssinia, living a sequestered life in Happy Valley, where "all the diversities of the world were brought together, the blessings of nature were collected, and its evils extracted and excluded."  Life is devoted to pleasure and amusement, delicacies and comforts. "Every art was practised to make them pleased with their own condition."  Happy Valley is surrounded by a mountain fastness, and communication with the outside world is barred by an iron gate, only to be opened once a year for an eight-day festival. "Thus every year produced new scenes of delight, and new competitors for imprisonment."    This is not the only time Happy Valley is likened to a prison.  This Pleasure Garden is a False Eden, a bubble of artificial happiness which depends on shutting out the miseries of the world and keeping its residents in ignorance.  Ignorance is bliss - or is it?

Rasselas feels a sense of discontent, a longing for more, and a curiosity about the wider world.  "Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification; or he has some desire distinct from sense, which must be satisfied before he can be happy," he muses.  He befriends Imlac, a poet and engineer who has come to Happy Valley from the outside world during one of the festivals.  The two plot their escape, and tunnel their way upwards and outwards, accompanied by Rasseslas' sister Nekayah and her maid Pekuah.  

The quest begins, and adventures follow, with each short chapter encapsulating some mode or station in life to be evaluated.  Rasselas has told us: "I am resolved to judge with mine own eyes of the various conditions of men, and then to make deliberately my choice of life.”  The choice of life is a phrase which recurs throughout the book.  We meet Epicureans, Stoics, the wealthy, the poor.  We muse about the life lived according to nature, and the life pastoral.  We discuss the merits of marriage and the life of solitude.  Does youth afford the greatest happiness?  Is old age free from vexation?  

The final destination of their travels is the catacombs near Cairo.  They descend and wander in labyrinthine subterraneous passages, discoursing on the nature of the soul.  Confronted with mortality, their thoughts turn to the shortness of their present state.  Is this endless searching after the choice of life really profitable?  “To me,” said the Princess, “the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity.”  In the end, they determine to return home to Abyssinia.  Perhaps the most important sentence in the book was spoken by our poet-engineer: “It seems to me,” said Imlac, “that while you are making the choice of life you neglect to live."

Since some refer to Rasselas as a "philosophical romance," I wanted to consider the romance elements of the story, so I turned to The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance by Northrop Frye.  Frye tells us that ascent and descent are the primary narrative movements in literature.  In the beginning of Rasselas, we have an ascent from a lower world when Rasselas & co. tunnel upwards out of the prison of Happy Valley.  Frye points out that "the lower world is sometimes a world of cruelty and imprisonment; sometimes an oracular cave."  In Rasselas we do have this prison imagery, and a sense of an enclosed space that must be tunneled out of.  Frye says, "We found that in descent narratives the central image is that of metamorphosis, the freezing of something human and conscious into an animal or plant or inanimate object.  Ascent themes introduce us to the opposite kind of metamorphosis, the growing of identity through the casting off of whatever conceals or frustrates it.  The simplest form of such ascending metamorphosis is the removal of enchantment, in which an animal disguise or something parallel is replaced by the original human form."  The inhabitants of Happy Valley are under a sort of enchantment.  Rasselas makes several comparisons of his own state to those of the beasts there, and while he sees certain similarities, he ultimately concludes that he is something more than they are.  He goes on an identity quest.  For when he seeks to make his choice of life, when he wonders how man should live, the true underlying question is not only Who am I? but What is man?  When the group visits the catacombs, this is a descent into the underworld.  Like the shades in Classical Hades, the bones of the dead in the catacombs impart their own wisdom:  Man is a mortal creature whose earthly time is limited.  His physical body will decay, but his immortal soul is eternal.  The group return to their homeland, their quest complete.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is considered the first Gothic novel.  It was first published on Christmas Eve 1764, in the guise of ancient manuscript, "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and claimed to have been printed in Naples in 1529 (though undoubtedly composed at some earlier date).  Walpole kept his own identity a secret, even adopting a pseudonym for the personage of the translator of this ancient Italian work: William Marshal, Gent.  Walpole went a step further with this fabricated air of authenticity, suggesting that while "the machinery is invention, and the names of the actors imaginary, I cannot but believe that the groundwork of the story is founded on truth.  The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle."  

Undoubtedly.  But the castle in question was not a crumbling stronghold in southern Italy, but a villa in Twickenham on the outskirts of London called Strawberry Hill, which Walpole had purchased in 1747.  Strawberry Hill was an ordinary country cottage at this point, a nice enough place, but lacking in the requisite "gloomth" to suit Walpole's tastes.  He spent the next 25 years adding turrets, towers, cloisters, pointed arches, stained glass, and finials, transforming the house into a Gothic castle in miniature.  Walpole now had a fitting backdrop for his eccentric antiquarian collections and his medieval imagination.

The Castle of Otranto had its dark genesis in a dream of its author, steeped as he was in this atmosphere of medieval Romance and Gothic architecture:

"I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.  In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.  The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it..."

The imaginative background of Otranto is a Gothic story in itself.  Its publishing history gave us the trope of the "found manuscript," it was composed in a Gothic revival "castle," its ghostly armored giant came to the author in a dream.  

Medieval Romance was out of favor in the neoclassical 18th century.  Anything medieval was considered barbaric and uncouth by the aesthetic standards of the time.  We see the first stirrings of Romanticism in the "Gothic Revival" - a sort of pre-Romanticism, if you will, that will lead us on to the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Byron, and the Shelleys.  But that day was not yet come when Walpole first published The Castle of Otranto - he was helping to create this new movement in literature and the arts.  Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry on the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful had appeared in 1757 (seven years before Otranto).  Burke's new twist on the concept of the sublime  divorced it from mere classical notions of beauty instilling pleasure.  Burke maintained that awe and a sense of horror could also evoke a pleasurable emotional response - as long as the horror concerned was fictitious.  And so we add another ingredient to the simmering cauldron of Gothic literature.  Eye of newt, toe of frog, Burke's sublime, neo-medieval architecture... The Castle of Otranto is taking shape in the rising vapors.

Along with lizard's leg and howlet's wing, we must not forget to toss the plays of William Shakespeare into the cauldron.  Consider the witchcraft present in Macbeth, the chanting and prophecies of the three Weird Sisters, the omens, the dramatic weather reflecting dark deeds.  Think of the ghost in Hamlet.  Think of ancient kings and castle settings, revenge, murder, and high dramatic style.  Shakespearean elements abound in The Castle of Otranto - Walpole explicitly acknowledges his debt to the Bard in the preface to the second edition.  Even the five chapter structure of the novel echoes the five acts of a Shakespearean drama.

This post has not even touched on the plot of the novel in question - rather, its focus has been on setting the scene and the building up of a Gothic atmosphere, which I believe are crucial to the enjoyment of the book.  It can't be read like a modern novel with well-developed characters.  It isn't that sort of book.  It reads like a fast-paced drama peopled with stock characters who speak in elevated style, as one would find in the theater.  In Walpole's story, he sought to blend the imaginative elements of the medieval romance with the more naturalistic touches of the modern novel: and thus, the Gothic genre was born.  This may not be the best Gothic novel, but it was the first.  If we suspend our disbelief, spectres, prophecies, trapdoors, maidens in distress, dark secrets, and subterraneous passages await.   

Edited to add: My review of the 1977 short film version of The Castle of Otranto can be found HERE.

Evelina by Frances Burney

I was eager to read Evelina because I knew Jane Austen considered it a favorite.  Somehow I thought that reading Evelina would be like reading Jane Austen:  a humorous novel of manners set in a rational and moral universe.  Well.  Evelina was not what I expected.  If Jane Austen is a genteel Regency ballroom, Evelina is a wild night at Vauxhall Gardens.  With a monkey.

Evelina Anville is the legitimate, though unacknowledged, daughter of an English aristrocrat.  Upon the death of her mother, Evelina was raised in rural seclusion by her guardian, the Reverend Villairs.  Eventually, Evelina's maternal grandmother, the ridiculous Mme Duval, learns of Evelina's existence and seeks to claim her and whisk her off to France.  To keep her from Mme Duval, the Rev. Villairs sends her to Howard Grove, the country home of friends.  Little did he know that Mme Duval would find her anyway, and a trip to London would soon follow. Most of the novel revolves around humorous situations in which poor, sheltered Evelina tries to navigate her way through society.  She eventually gets a happy ending with Lord Orville. 

The tone of this book was quite surprising.  Sometimes riotous and madcap, the book's wild humor was unexpected.  At one point, two of the characters dressed up like highwaymen just so they could terrorize an obnoxious Frenchwoman.  Then there is the time when some of the characters are bored because they have nothing to gamble on, so they get two eighty-year-old women to race just so they can bet on them.  The plots can be a bit over the top, with some truly wild coincidences and situations occurring.

Evelina has very little personality - despite this being an epistolary novel, with most of the letters written by her.  Her letters are more of a vehicle to deliver the plot rather than to give us her private thoughts.  We have some glimpses, of course, but it's almost like Evelina the character is a pawn to showcase every type of ill-mannered person in London.

In truth, it is the "bad" characters who seem to dominate this novel.  Between fending off the unwanted attentions of the rogue Sir Clement Willoughby, the incessant fighting between Mme Duval and Captain Mirvan, and the crass behavior of the Branghtons, Evelina gets very little peace - and neither does the reader.

I found the character of Madame Duval extremely tiresome.  A little of her would have gone a long way.  She is so over the top, so insufferably rude, tyrannical, and obnoxious, that while one or two scenes of this woman would have been funny, her behavior is so predictably horrid that it becomes boring.  By the same token, the relentless rudeness of the Captain is wearying.  Jane Austen may have learned from this.  Her boorish characters are diverting because she allows them to season her narratives, rather than overwhelm them.

The dubious tastes and want of care of Evelina's relations and their hangers-on land her in many awkward and unsavory situations, and Evelina's own want of social competence and street smarts always makes things worse.  One night Evelina finds herself dragged out to Vauxhall Gardens.  These London pleasure gardens were popular in the 18th through the mid-19th century, and were filled with entertainments and attractions.  At night they were lit up by thousands of lamps.  Spectacle abounded, with fireworks, hot air balloons, and a giant metal waterfall which seemed to flow thanks to a clever trick of the lights.  Poor Evelina becomes separated from her party and ends up in the infamous dark walks - there's a hint of danger in this scene that lends a somber note to the lack of care being taken of her.

Vauxhall Gardens

Evelina as Cinderella 

Evelina has distinct echoes of Cinderella.  Evelina is poor and simple, marked by beauty and inner goodness.  She has a dead mother, and an ineffectual/absent actual father, and a retiring/absent surrogate father.  Mme Duval can be seen as her wicked stepmother, and the Miss Branghtons the obnoxious stepsisters.  She moves from country seclusion into high society, and catches the eye of her prince, Lord Orville.

Evelina and Jane Austen

It's a strange sensation, reading Evelina, feeling that one has met with so many little scenes already.  We have a Willoughby - and the scene where Sir Clement Willoughby carries Evelina from the wrecked coach is a bit like when Willoughby carried Marianne Dashwood.  The carriage seen with Sir Clement reminds me of Emma and Mr. Elton.  Evelina and her low connections are so similar to Elizabeth and the Bennets (though Mme Duval makes Mrs. Bennet look like the epitome of grace and refinement).  Evelina, like Lizzy Bennet, has a "passion for solitary walking."  Evelina and Lord Orville foreshadow  Elizabeth and Darcy.  In her juvenile novel Love & Friendship, Jane Austen hilariously parodies the more ludicrous parts of novels like Evelina - in her more mature work, Austen takes the best of Frances Burney and refines it.

Evelina as a Sentimental Novel

A sentimental novel relies on emotion, both in the response of the characters and the response of the reader.  The capacity to feel, and to show feelings, was thought to be a mark of high moral character.  Sentimentalism as a philosophy favored the untutored "naturalness" of the country person over the cultivated "civilized" nature of the society person.  We often think of the 18th century as the Age of Reason, characterized by rationalism.  Sentimentalism is a countercurrent - one that led to Romanticism later in the century.  Evelina, raised in rural seclusion, exhibits sensitivity, natural goodness, fine feeling, and distress at the misfortunes of others.  Thus she is the perfect sentimental "type," and her character is used by Burney to satirize and critique "cultured" society.   

Evelina was a wild ride!  I'm glad I read it, and look forward to reading more by Frances Burney, and more 18th century novels.  I haven't spent a lot of time in this century, and reading Evelina has helped me to find my feet.  I'm learning as I go!

 

Read for the Epistolary Novel category in the Tea and Ink Society 2024 Classics Reading Challenge and for the Classics Club.