A startling illustration of the contiguity of book and life is Imlac's anticipation of Johnson's actual homecoming — both the real and the imaginary occurring after an absence of twenty years. Imlac's words are, of course, Johnson's indirect discharge of feelings of guilt for never having gone home to visit during that period. Describing his return (Rasselas, Chapter XII), Imlac tells the Prince:
"I now expected the caresses of my kinsmen, and the congratulations of my friends . . . But I was soon convinced that my thoughts were vain ... of my companions the greater part was in the grave, of the rest some could with difficulty remember me, and some considered me as one corrupted by foreign manners."
Three years after this was published, Johnson penned the following sardonic account of his subsequent return to Lichfield, in a letter to Joseph Baretti, of 20 July, 1762:
"Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young ... I wandered about for five days, and look the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is, at least, such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart."
Though London is not the Happy Valley, it is the best available surrogate.