[In the following essay, Sherburn argues that, contrary to the assumption of earlier critics, Rasselas and his party do not end their journey with an optimistic return to the Happy Valley. Instead, according to Sherburn, the travellers return to Abissinia only to find the Happy Valley closed to them forever.]

Since Rasselas is this year two hundred years old, it is natural for us all to write about it. But it is painful to find people misinterpreting one important fact of the work. In Philological Quarterly for January, 1959, William Kenney optimistically represents the travellers, Rasselas, Imlac, et al. as returning improved, and even hopeful, to the Happy Valley. Such an interpretation—and Kenney is not alone in the error—is totally unwarranted and contrary to Dr. Johnson's intention. The travellers return to Abissinia, but not under the circumstances represented. They do not return to the Happy Valley.

The abrupt conclusion of the book is carefully prepared for in its first chapters. In Chapter I Dr. Johnson tells us that "those, on whom the iron gate [of the Valley] had once closed, were never suffered to return" (Chapman ed. [1927], p. 10). Added preparation for an unhappy ending is found in Chapters VIII to XII in which Imlac tells of his own travels—and his return to Abissinia. His barren return, prophetic for Rasselas, is described (Chapter XII) as follows:

My father had been dead fourteen years, having divided his wealth among my brothers, who were removed to some other provinces. Of my companions the greater part was in the grave, and of the rest some could with difficulty remember me, and some considered me as one corrupted by foreign manners. (ed. cit., p. 60)

It was a cold Abissinia and not the Happy Valley in which returning Rasselas could, as Kenney incisively suggests, "begin the practice of orderly diversification" (PQ, XXXVIII [1959], 89). The work ends in almost complete frustration. The travellers are now in the condition in which Imlac had formerly found himself before he achieved the Happy Valley, now closed to him and his companions. In the Valley, he had told Rasselas, "I am less unhappy than the rest because I have a mind replete with images.… "So Rasselas and his sister will have to fortify themselves with memories, but not with the now forbidden delights of the Happy Valley. One may regret Dr. Johnson's pessimism, but must face it.