Samuel Johnson and Voltaire: “The Pursuit of Happiness?”

Abstract

With their widely different backgrounds, attitudes and beliefs, no two eighteenth-century writers could be so wide apart as Voltaire and Johnson. Yet, the coincidence of Candide and Rasselas belonging to the same genre, of sharing many structural and thematic features, of their being published in the same year has often led the works to being compared for both similarities and dissimilarities. In this paper, I attempt to show that, though the values these two works endorse are very different, they come closer together than is often thought. I focus on how both Candide and Rasselas take up the theme of the “pursuit of happiness” and show that it is the pursuit, not the attainment, that is of importance in both writers’ understanding of human happiness. Although both Voltaire and Johnson were skeptical of human happiness, they nevertheless concur in their acceptance of man’s restless pursuit of happiness as an inescapable human condition. It is upon recognition of this that they try to find some answer to the question of human happiness, although the only tangible thing that remains at the end of each tale is a small community of friends.