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.

[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.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.

[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.

Rasselas grows weary of the factitious entertainments of the place and, after much brooding, escapes with his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah and his poet-friend Imlac by digging under the wall of the valley.

After a sojourn in Egypt, where they encounter various classes of society and undergo a few adventures, they perceive the futility of their search and return to Abyssinia after none of their hopes for happiness are achieved.

There is not a single sentence that ends abruptly, and we find a monotonous, but very agile, music, and this is what Johnson wrote while he was thinking about the death of his mother, whom he loved so much".

[6] Irvin Ehrenpreis sees an aged Johnson reflecting on lost youth in the character of Rasselas, who is exiled from Happy Valley.

Writing as a devout Christian, Johnson makes through his characters no blanket attacks on the viability of a religious response to this question, as Voltaire does, and while the story is in places light and humorous, it is not a piece of satire, as is Candide.

The title page of this edition carried a quotation, inserted by the publisher Robert Bell from La Rochefoucauld: "The labour or Exercise of the Body, freeth Man from the Pains of the Mind; and this constitutes the Happiness of the Poor".

[30] Sound design was by David Chilton, and the drama was introduced by Celine Luppo McDaid, Curator of Dr Johnson's House.