Edward Gibbon
 |
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). |
Edward Gibbon (
May 8,
1737[Gibbon's birthday is on May 8 1737 according to the Gregorian calendar, and on April 27 of the same year according to the Julian calendar, which was in use in England at the time of his birth.] –
January 16,
1794) is arguably the most influential
historian to write in English. His magnum opus,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between
1776 and
1788, is a groundbreaking work whose influence endures to this day.
Gibbon was born in
Putney, then a town by the river
Thames, near
London,
England. His grandfather had made and lost the family fortune in the
South Sea Bubble. Gibbon was the only child, and he described himself as "a weakly child" in his memoirs. His mother died when he was 10 years old, after which he attended
Kingston Grammar School, staying at the boarding house of his favorite "Aunt Kitty", followed by
Westminster School at the age of 11. At the age of 14, he was sent by his father to
Magdalen College at the
University of Oxford, where he enrolled as a gentleman-commoner.
Gibbon was ill-suited to the college atmosphere and later wrote of his 14 months there as "the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." The most memorable event of his time at Oxford was his conversion to
Roman Catholicism on
June 8,
1753. Religious controversies raged on the Oxford campus, and while their intellectual standards were sometimes described as bleak, obsolete, and barren, the 16 year-old Gibbon was not immune to this controversial religious trend and he later remarked, with his flair for sarcastic understatement, "from my childhood, I had been fond of religious disputation".
Within weeks of his conversion, the elder Gibbon removed the younger from Oxford, and sent him to M. Pavilliard, a
Calvinist pastor and private tutor in
Lausanne,
Switzerland, where he remained for five years, a time which would have a profound impact upon Gibbon's later character and life. He quickly reconverted back to
Protestantism, but more importantly, his time in Lausanne enriched Gibbon's immense aptitude for scholarship and erudition. In addition, he met the one romance in his life: the pastor's daughter, a young woman named Suzanne Curchod, who would later be the wife of
Jacques Necker, the French finance minister, and mother of
Mme de Staël. Once again, his father intruded in his son's life by vetoing the marriage proposal and demanding the young Gibbon's immediate return to England. Gibbon would write: "I sighed like a lover, I obeyed like a son."
Upon his return to England, Gibbon published his first book,
Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature in
1758. From
1759 to
1763, Gibbon spent four years in service with the Hampshire militia. Later that year, he embarked on a Grand Tour to Europe, which included a visit to
Rome. It was here, in
1764, that Gibbon first conceived the idea of writing about the history of the
Roman Empire:
It was on the fifteenth of October, in the gloom of evening, as I sat musing on the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were chanting their litanies in the temple of Jupiter, that I conceived the first thought of my history. (Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1966], p. 304)
By
1772, his father died, and after tending to the estate, which was by no means in good condition, there was nevertheless enough for Gibbon to settle comfortably in London. He began writing his history in
1773 and the first quarto of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in
1776.
Gibbon suffered from a malady now believed to be
hydrocele testis, according to the
Merck Manual. This condition caused his testicles to swell with fluid to extraordinary proportions. Gibbon underwent numerous procedures to have the fluid removed during his later years, but as his condition worsened, it became both more painful and an embarrassment. His doctor, who actually measured the contents, once drew five quarts (5.7 litres) of liquid from the protuberance.
This chronic inflammation caused Gibbon great physical discomfort in a time when men wore close-fitting breeches. He refers to this indirectly in his
Memoirs, with comments: "I can recall only fourteen truly happy days in my life," and "I am never so content when writing in solitude." Personal hygiene during the Eighteenth Century was optional at best; for Gibbon, it was marginal by any standard. The social humiliation Gibbon endured as a result of his hygiene and his protuberance is chronicled. In an age when a man's stature was measured not merely by the "cut of his breeches," but by his riding, Gibbon was a lonely figure. In one incident, he bent down on one knee to propose to a lady of society. She demurred, "Sir, please, stand up." Gibbon replied: "Madam, I cannot."
Gibbon's literary art, the sustained excellence of his style, his piquant epigrams and his brilliant irony, would perhaps not secure for his work the immortality which it seems likely to enjoy, if it were not also marked by an accuracy of judgment which has rarely been equalled.
Churchill memorably noted,
I set out upon Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [and] was immediately dominated by both the story and the style. I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end. Churchill later went on to mimic Gibbon's prose style, although at a marginally less elevated level.
Unusual for the 18th century, Gibbon was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible.
I have always endeavoured, he says,
to draw from the fountainhead; my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend. In this insistence upon the importance of primary sources, Gibbon is considered by many to be one of the first modern historians.
Gibbon's verdict on the history of the
Middle Ages is contained in the famous sentence,
I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. As a son of the
Enlightenment, who had studied
Locke and
Montesquieu with sympathy, he measured the progress of civilization by the criterion of political liberty, which he regarded as an essential precondition of human happiness.
Decline and Fall has had its detractors too, almost invariably in the form of religious commentators and religious historians who detested his querying not only of official church history, but also of the saints and scholars of the church, their motives and their accuracy. In particular, the Fifteenth Chapter, which documents the reasons for the rapid spread of
Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, was particularly vilified and resulted in the banning of the book in various countries until quite recently, with Ireland, for example, lifting the ban on sale in the early 1970's.
Despite this official opposition,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains surprisingly popular and arguably one of the finest histories in the English language.
The subject of Gibbon's writing as well as his ideas and style have influenced other writers. Besides his influence on Churchill, discussed above, Gibbon was also a model for
Isaac Asimov in his writing of
The Foundation Trilogy. In addition, the band
The Kinks have an album named
Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire).
*
Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (
1761).
*
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume I,
1776; Volumes II and III,
1781; Volumes IV, V, and VI,
1788).
*
A vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (
1779).
*
Mémoire justificatif pour servir de réponse à l'exposé, &c de la cour de France (1779).
*
Memoirs of My Life (1796, at the beginning of the posthumous
Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq. published two years after the author's death by his friend and
literary executor John Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield); cf. Georges A. Bonnard's critical edition (1966).
*
Extensive Biography in 1911 Encyclopedia*
Edward Gibbon, Historian of the Roman Empire - Part 1 : The Man and his Book*
Edward Gibbon, Historian of the Roman Empire - Part 2 : A closer look at The Decline and Fall*
Tom Moran's Edward Gibbon page*
Free ebook of Edward Gibbon at
Project Gutenberg*
Free ebook of Gibbon, by James Cotter Morison at
Project Gutenberg
