11. Rasselas by Samuel Johnson

Rasselas (1759) was an important landmark in Johnson’s writing life. It was composed in his 50th year, but recalled work done in his 23rd, when as a literary hack he had translated from the French a book by Father Jerome Lobo called A Voyage in Abyssinia. Among that book’s characters was one Rassela Christos, a general to the Sultan Sequed; Johnson borrowed the name for Prince Rasselas, his baffled seeker after happiness. Rasselas expounds the Johnsonian philosophy that in life ‘much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed’; certainly the book itself was a feat of endurance, written in the evenings of a single week to defray his mother’s funeral expenses. Its publication was a turning point. The slim volume became Johnson’s most widely-circulated work, and in 1762, in recognition of his services to literature, he received a £300-a-year pension. He never had to do hack-work for money again.

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