Edward Gibbon

• 1. Introduction

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  It was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between eleven and midnight, that Edward Gibbon wrote the last lines of his life's great work in a summer-house in his garden. He felt joy at recovering his freedom. Then a sober melancholy settled over him. He had taken his everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion. Gibbon, the British essayist and historian who lived from 1737 to 1794, had spent years writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Six volumes appeared between 1776 and 1789, to critical and commercial success. How did a self-described puny child grow into the figure one admirer called the English giant of the Enlightenment? Why did his pages on the early church get the book banned in several countries? And how did a captain of grenadiers become the historian of the Roman empire? The answers run through Oxford, Lausanne, a thwarted romance, and a vision among the ruins of the Capitol.

• 2. A Neglected Childhood

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  Edward Gibbon was born in 1737 at Lime Grove in Putney, Surrey, the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon. He had five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy. He alone survived. His grandfather, also named Edward, had lost his assets in the South Sea bubble collapse of 1720, yet eventually regained much of his wealth, so Gibbon's father inherited a substantial estate. Gibbon remembered himself harshly as a puny child, neglected by his mother and starved by his nurse. At age nine he was sent to Dr. Woddeson's school at Kingston upon Thames, now Kingston Grammar School, and shortly after, his mother died. He then took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house owned by his aunt Catherine Porten, the adored figure he called Aunt Kitty. He credited her with rescuing him from his mother's disdain. She imparted, he wrote, the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which was still the pleasure and glory of his life. By 1751 his reading already pointed toward his future. He worked through Laurence Echard's Roman History and dipped into several of the 65 volumes of the acclaimed Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time.

• 3. Oxford And Conversion

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  At fifteen, after a stay at Bath in 1752 to improve his health, Gibbon was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, enrolled as a gentleman-commoner. He was ill-suited to the place and later called his 14 months there the most idle and unprofitable of his life. The most memorable event of that time was his conversion to Roman Catholicism on the 8th of June 1753. Gibbon's own account credited a reading of the rationalist theologian Conyers Middleton, whose Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers denied the validity of such powers. He also drew on the Catholic bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons. The scholar David Womersley has shown that this account is very unlikely, and that the Middleton story was introduced only into the final draft of the Memoirs in 1792 to 1793. Gibbon's father, already in despair, had had enough. Within weeks the young convert was removed from Oxford and sent to Switzerland, into the care of Daniel Pavillard, the Reformed pastor of Lausanne.

• 4. Lausanne And Suzanne Curchod

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  In Lausanne, under Pavillard's tutelage, Gibbon formed two of his life's great friendships: Jacques Georges Deyverdun, who translated Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther into French, and John Baker Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield. A year and a half after his arrival, his father threatened to disinherit him, and on Christmas Day 1754 he reconverted to Protestantism. The articles of the Romish creed, he wrote, disappeared like a dream. There too he met the one romance of his life, Suzanne Curchod, the daughter of the pastor of Crassy. She would later marry Jacques Necker, the finance minister of Louis XVI, and become the mother of Madame de Stael. Gibbon proposed marriage, but it was blocked by his father's disapproval and by Curchod's reluctance to leave Switzerland. He returned to England in August 1758 to face his father and yield. I sighed as a lover, he wrote, I obeyed as a son. He cut off all contact with her, even as she vowed to wait. Their final emotional break came at Ferney, France, in early 1764, though they saw each other at least once more a year later.

• 5. Grenadiers And The Grand Tour

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  On the 12th of June 1759, Gibbon was commissioned a captain in the South Hampshire Militia, embodied during the Seven Years' War, with his father serving as the regiment's major. For three years he commanded the Grenadier Company in home defence. The militia was disembodied in December 1762, but he remained an officer, resigning as a lieutenant-colonel in 1770. He later judged the experience useful in an unexpected way. The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion, he wrote, gave him a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers had not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire. In 1763 he returned via Paris to Lausanne, where he met a prudent worthy young man named William Guise. On the 18th of April 1764 the pair set off for Italy, crossed the Alps, and after a summer in Florence reached Rome in early October. Gibbon recorded his rapture at entering the eternal City, treading the ruins of the Forum where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell. There the idea first stirred. By his account, it was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as he sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while barefooted friars sang vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall first started to his mind. Scholars including Womersley and Pocock doubt the precise date, calling it a likely creation of memory, since Gibbon's own journal gives no date for the moment.

• 6. False Starts And A Settled Life

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  In June 1765, Gibbon returned to his father's house and stayed until the elder's death in 1770. He considered these five years the worst of his life, yet he kept busy with attempts at full histories. His History of Switzerland was never finished. Even with Deyverdun's guidance, Gibbon grew too self-critical and abandoned it after only 60 pages. A second project, the two-volume Memoires Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne, described the literary and social conditions of England, treating works such as Lord Lyttelton's history of Henry II and Nathaniel Lardner's The Credibility of the Gospel History. It failed to gain notoriety and was considered a flop. After tending his father's estate, enough remained for Gibbon to settle fashionably in London at 7 Bentinck Street, free of financial concern. By February 1773 he was writing in earnest. He took easily to London society, joined Dr. Johnson's Literary Club, and succeeded Oliver Goldsmith at the Royal Academy as professor in ancient history, an honorary post. In late 1774 he was initiated as a Freemason of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. That same year his patron Edward Eliot returned him to the House of Commons for Liskeard, Cornwall. There Gibbon became the archetypal back-bencher, benignly mute and indifferent, his support of the Whig ministry invariably automatic.

• 7. Decline And Fall

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  After several rewrites, with Gibbon often tempted to throw away the labours of seven years, the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published on the 17th of February 1776. Through 1777 the reading public consumed three editions, and Gibbon was rewarded with two-thirds of the profits, around 1,000 pounds. Volumes two and three appeared on the 1st of March 1781. Volume four was finished in June 1784, and the final two were completed during a second Lausanne stay from September 1783 to August 1787, where Gibbon reunited with Deyverdun. The final three volumes reached the press in May 1788, their publication delayed from March to coincide with a dinner celebrating Gibbon's 51st birthday on the 8th. Praise came from Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Camden, and Horace Walpole. Smith told Gibbon that by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning, it set him at the very head of the whole literary tribe then existing in Europe. In November 1788 Gibbon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, his good friend Lord Sheffield the main proposer.

• 8. The Church And The Verdict

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  Chapters fifteen and sixteen of the History contained a scathing view of the Christian church, and the book was banned in several countries. Gibbon was accused of treating the church as a phenomenon of general history rather than a special case beyond criticism. He expected some church-inspired backlash, but the harshness exceeded anything he or his friends anticipated. Detractors such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Watson stoked the fire, and the most severe attack came from the young cleric Henry Edwards Davis. In 1779 Gibbon published a Vindication of those two chapters. A view often attributed to him, that Rome fell because it embraced Christianity, is not widely accepted by scholars today. Many argue he did not blame Christianity at all, but the effects of luxury and the erosion of the Romans' martial character, an outlook echoing the Greek historian Polybius. Gibbon's secularism shaped his famous verdict on the Middle Ages: I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. His insistence on primary sources marks him for many as one of the first modern historians. I have always endeavoured, he wrote, to draw from the fountain-head. That method outlived him. Winston Churchill devoured the Decline and Fall and modelled his own style on it, and Isaac Asimov admitted that his Foundation Trilogy involved a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon.