1759 Samuel Johnson – the ‘Great Cham’ – was, in one of his minor parts, a novelist. In 1759 his 90-year-old mother was dying. His father had gone to his reward in 1731. To cover the expense of his mother’s last days, Johnson wrote, in the evenings of one week, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
The ingénu hero leaves the comfort of his palace in Ethiopia to range the world, seeking the secret of a happy life. He is accompanied by his sister and a philosopher, Imlac (alias Samuel Johnson). There is, Rasselas discovers, no happiness to be found. Life is, as Johnson said elsewhere, a condition in which much is to be endured and little enjoyed. ‘Patience is all’ with Christian patience.
Few novelists, one imagines, could produce the statutory happy-ever-after with the Dead March from Saul playing, incessantly, in their ears and their mother’s corpse genteelly decomposing at the undertaker’s.
Rasselas is no page-turner – sermons on the human condition seldom are. But it is a valuably informative novel about novels. It brought Johnson £100 and £25 for a prompt second edition. In terms of hourly rate, for a week’s scribbling, it was the best money of his writing career.
None but a blockhead, Johnson said, writes for anything but money. Fifty such tales a year (giving himself a fortnight’s annual holiday) would have yielded the total of £6,250: a princely sum.
But having no more parents to inter he wrote no more fiction. The fact was, Johnson regarded such work as unworthy. He registered the existence and popularity of the genre in his 1750 essay, ‘The Modern Novel’ (Johnson coined that compound). But his personal view is summed up in his uncompromising dismissal of Sterne’s great novel: ‘Nothing odd will last – Tristram Shandy did not last.’ He was wrong, of course. Rasselas, too, has lasted.