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Legacy

Literature

Rasselas is mentioned numerous times in later notable literature.

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - Helen Burns reads it.
• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell - Captain Brown (who is reading 'The Pickwick Papers') denigrates Rasselas, thus offending Miss Jenkyns (who is a great admirer of Johnson).
• Rasselas is read by Hepzibah Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.
• Rasselas was read by Henry Stanley, the explorer, when he was a young man recently released from a Victorian workhouse, working as a school teacher in Wales. This is recorded in Tim Jeal's biography Stanley - The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer.
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - the book is dropped on the floor by Jo March as she talks to Mr Laurence about his Grandson Laurie's prank.
• Middlemarch by George Eliot - the book is enjoyed by Lydgate as a child, along with Gulliver's Travels, the dictionary, and the Bible.
• The Mountains of Rasselas by Thomas Pakenham - The title of Pakhenham's account of exploring Ethiopia to find the original royal mountaintop royal prisons alludes to Johnson's work. Pakenham explicitly mentions Johnson's work in this book.

Locations

The community of Rasselas, Pennsylvania, located in Elk County, was named after Rasselas Wilcox Brown, whose father, Isaac Brown, Jr., was fond of Johnson's story.^[13]

The Vale (or Valley) of Rasselas is located in Tasmania within the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park Latitude (DMS): 42° 34' 60 S Longitude (DMS): 146° 19' 60 E^[14]