At the age of fifty, Johnson wrote the piece in only one week to help pay the costs of his mother's funeral, intending to complete it on 22 January 1759 (the eve of his mother's death).[1] Johnson is believed to have received a total of £75 for the copyright. Though this is still popular belief, Wharton and Mayerson's book, "Samuel Johnson and the Theme of Hope," explains how James Boswell, the author of Johnson's biography, was "entirely wrong in supposing that Rasselas was written soon after his mother's death".[2] It wasn't a way of "defraying" the expenses of the funeral. In fact, Johnson wrote Rasselas instead of going to see his mother while she was still alive. It was written in anticipation of her funeral.[2] Edward Tomarken writes in his book, Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism, that this belief was not questioned until 1927 as “...the tradition of the gloomy, funereal tone of the choice of life motif in Rasselas remained unopposed: the question of whether or not the genesis of Rasselas involved a literal funeral was not considered important. Moreover, the assumption of a gloomy genesis served to keep religion in the background, for any theological difficulty could be attributed to the fact that the author was mourning the death of his mother".[3]
Following in the footsteps of Voltaire's Zadig and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Johnson was influenced by the vogue for exotic locations including Ethiopia.[4] He had translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jerónimo Lobo in 1735 and used it as the basis for his "philosophical romance".[5] Ten years before he wrote Rasselas he published The Vanity of Human Wishes in which he describes the inevitable defeat of worldly ambition.
This idea of a prince condemned to a happy imprisonment has resonance – Johnson himself was probably ignorant of it – in the legend of Buddha, though it would have reached him through the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, adopted as the subject of one of Lope de Vega's comedies: the idea of a prince who has been brought up surrounded with artificial happiness.
— Jorge Luis Borges[6]
Although many have argued that the book Rasselas had nothing to do with Abyssinia, and that Samuel Johnson chose Abyssinia as a locale for no other reason than wanting to write an anti-orientalist fantasy, some have begun to argue that the book has a deep tie to Ethiopian thought due to Johnson's translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia and his lifelong interest in its Christianity.[7][8] Other scholars have argued that Johnson was influenced, at least in part, by other texts, including works by Herodotus[9] and Paradise Lost.[10][11][12][13][14][15]
According to Wendy L. Belcher, when Johnson sent his manuscript to the publisher he titled the work "The History of – - – - Prince of Abissinia," which suggests that he had still not decided on the name of his protagonist.[16] It is Belcher's argument that "Johnson coined the name 'Rasselas' for its symbolic meaning, not its phonetic relation to the Catholic prince Ras Sela Christos. Since ras means 'prince' and sela means 'portrait', Johnson may have invented the term 'portrait of a prince' as an evocative name for his main character."[16]
