Samuel Johnson goes abroad

Claude Rawson

• A Voyage to Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson, edited by Joel Gold
  Yale, 350 pp, £39.50, July 1985, ISBN 0 300 03003 7
• Rasselas, and Other Tales by Samuel Johnson, edited by Gwin Kolb
  Yale, 290 pp, £24.50, March 1991, ISBN 0 300 04451 8
• A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) by Samuel Johnson
  Longman, 1160 pp, £195.00, September 1990, ISBN 0 582 07380 4
• The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746-1773 by Allen Reddick
  Cambridge, 249 pp, £30.00, October 1990, ISBN 0 521 36160 5
• Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts by Morris Brownell
  Oxford, 195 pp, £30.00, March 1989, ISBN 0 19 812956 4
• Johnson’s Shakespeare by G.F. Parker
  Oxford, 204 pp, £25.00, April 1989, ISBN 0 19 812974 2

‘In all my dealings with the Moors, I have always discover’d in them an ill-natur’d cowardise, which makes them insupportably insolent, if you shew them the least respect, and easily reduced to reasonable terms, when you treat them with a high hand.’ The words read like something from Said’s Orientalism, the sentiments of a Balfour or Cromer, as parroted by a barrackroom sage or vainglorious subaltern, without the bland solvent of self-righteous statesmanship. In fact, they’re from Samuel Johnson’s first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), an excellent and little-noticed edition of which, by Joel Gold, appeared in 1985. They come at the conclusion of a distressing episode in which an ‘old Mahometan troublemaker, ‘the master of our camels’, is caught stealing some tent cords. When the travellers seek to retrieve them, he and the other drivers offer resistance and are subdued by ‘our soldiers’. ‘None receiv’d any hurt,’ except the original culprit: ‘He was knock’d down by one of our soldiers, who had cut his throat, but that the fathers prevented it, he then restor’d the cords, and was more tractable ever after.’