“No Romantick Absurdities or Incredible Fictions”: The Relation of Johnson's Rasselas to Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia

Abstract

There is a measure of incongruity in seeing the translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Jerome Lobo at the head of the lists of the works of Samuel Johnson, who seems of all writers the one least likely to be swept away by the glamor of the orient. His casting his own philosophical reflections in the form of an oriental tale in Rasselas is less remarkable since in doing so he was following a convention of which the actual representation of oriental life formed no part. He could very well have written Rasselas without having any particular interest in the East, for in spite of Boswell's enthusiastic claim that “this Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life,” it is a commonplace of criticism that the scenes of human life displayed are not really linked to the scene of Abyssinia and that the Cairo of Rasselas is as actually London as the sage of the story is Johnson himself. The reader who goes to Rasselas seeking “the charms of oriental imagery” is doomed to disappointment. Yet the feeling persists that the spell which was cast on the mind of the youthful Johnson by the Abyssinia of Lobo must have reasserted itself when the mature man came to set down his somber reflections on human life at the time of his mother's death. W. P. Courtney and D. Nichol Smith, discussing the composition of Rasselas, comment that “very little of the Oriental life of Lobo is reproduced in Rasselas, though that narrative, as his first labour in literature, must have been embedded in the author's mind.” The mystery of Johnson's being attracted to the work of Lobo in the first place and of its relation, tentatively suggested by Courtney and Smith, to his own oriental tale is resolved by an examination of A Voyage to Abyssinia and its accompanying dissertations.