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THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller, and was educated at Lichfield Grammar School and, for a short time, at Pembroke College, Oxford. He taught for a while, after which he worked for a Birmingham printer, for whom he translated Jerónimo Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia. In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter and with her money opened a boarding school. It was a failure, and in 1737 Johnson left for London. There, he became a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine and struggled to earn a living from writing – it was not until the award of a government pension in 1762 that Johnson gained financial security.

PAUL GORING lectures on eighteenth-century literature and culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

He has previously edited Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy for Penguin Classics, and his other publications include The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2005).

SAMUEL JOHNSON

The History of Rasselas

Prince of Abissinia

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

PAUL GORING

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group

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