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TITLE DEED HOW DID CELEBRATED BOOKS GET THEIR NAMES? Continuing our series, we look at the story behind Samuel Johnson's Rasselas

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20050417
Author:By GARY DEXTER

RASSELAS (1759) was an important landmark in Samuel Johnson's 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 ...

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