Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the greatest English historian of his time, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon was born on April 27, 1737, in Putney (now part of London), the eldest of seven children in an upper middle-class family; the other six all died in infancy. Gibbon himself was a sickly child and had almost no formal schooling. He was, however, an avid and omnivorous reader. By the time he was approaching age 15, his health suddenly improved, and his father enrolled him in Magdalen College, Oxford, for what he later called in his Memoirs “the most idle and unprofitable 14 months of my life”. Study of early Christianity led him to embrace Roman Catholicism in June 1753, thus barring him from the university. His father swiftly packed him off to Lausanne, in the care of a Calvinist pastor, who by Christmas, 1754, had reconciled him to Protestantism. (The Memoirs termed it acquiescence.)

Gibbon remained in Switzerland for nearly five years. He rounded out his classical education, adding the study of logic and Greek to his Latin. He conversed with savants, did some writing in French, and for the first and only time he fell in love. On his return to England in 1758, however, his father put an end to the engagement. By this time he had determined to devote his life to scholarship and writing. After two dreary years in the Hampshire militia, he left again for Europe, and conceived the idea for his great book: “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind”. In another two years his project was clear, and he began to set down on paper 1,300 years of history.

Gibbon was elected to Parliament in 1774, where he sat for 12 speechless years. Excessively obese, short (less than five feet), overdressed, and vain, he was often the butt of ridicule. London's intellectual circles, however, admired his clear mind and absolute control of emotion. Those qualities, together with the skill and beauty of his writing, were acclaimed when the first volume of Decline and Fall appeared in 1776. He ignored outcries against his religious scepticism (he had dealt rather coolly with early Christianity), but he stoutly defended all attacks on his facts. The next two volumes, which bring to an end the period of the Western Empire (to about ad 480), came out in 1781. The final 1,000 years of the empire in the East unfold in his last three volumes, completed in Lausanne in 1787 and published in 1788. Gibbon died on January 16, 1794, in London.

Despite the availability of new factual data and a recognition of Gibbon's Western bias, Decline and Fall is still read and enjoyed, more for its insight into and shrewd assessment of human nature than its historical accuracy. Gibbon's verdict on the Roman historian Tacitus, whose writings, he said, “will instruct the last generation of mankind”, applies equally to his own work.