Edward Gibbon
British historian
born May 8 [April 27, old style], 1737, Putney, Surrey, Eng.
died Jan. 16, 1794, London
Main
English rationalist historian and scholar best known as the author of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), a
continuous narrative from the 2nd century ad to the fall of
Constantinople in 1453.
Life.
Gibbon’s grandfather, Edward, had made a considerable fortune and his
father, also Edward, was able to live an easygoing life in society and
Parliament. He married Judith, a daughter of James Porten, whose family
had originated in Germany. Edward, too, had independent means throughout
his life. He was the eldest and the only survivor of seven children, the
rest dying in infancy.
Gibbon’s own childhood was a series of illnesses and more than once
he nearly died. Neglected by his mother, he owed his life to her sister,
Catherine Porten, whom he also called “the mother of his mind,” and
after his mother’s death in 1747 he was almost entirely in his aunt’s
care. He early became an omnivorous reader and could indulge his tastes
the more fully since his schooling was most irregular. He attended a day
school in Putney and, in 1746, Kingston grammar school, where he was to
note in his Memoirs “at the expense of many tears and some blood, [he]
purchased a knowledge of Latin syntax.” In 1749 he was admitted to
Westminster School. He was taken in 1750 to Bath and Winchester in
search of health and after an unsuccessful attempt to return to
Westminster was placed for the next two years with tutors from whom he
learned little. His father took him on visits to country houses where he
had the run of libraries filled with old folios. He noted his 12th year
as one of great intellectual development and says in his Memoirs that he
had early discovered his “proper food,” history. By his 14th year he had
already covered the main fields of his subsequent masterpiece, applying
his mind as well to difficult problems of chronology. The keynote of
these early years of study was self-sufficiency. Apart from his aunt’s
initial guidance, Gibbon followed his intellectual bent in solitary
independence. This characteristic remained with him throughout his life.
His great work was composed without consulting other scholars and is
impressed with the seal of his unique personality.
In his Memoirs Gibbon remarked that with the onset of puberty his
health suddenly improved and remained excellent throughout his life.
Never a strong or active man, he was of diminutive stature and very
slightly built and he became corpulent in later years. The improvement
in his health apparently accounts for his father’s sudden decision to
enter him at Magdalen College, Oxford, on April 3, 1752, about three
weeks before his 15th birthday. He was now privileged and independent.
Any expectations of study at Oxford were soon disappointed. The
authorities failed to look after him intellectually or spiritually or
even to note his absences from the college. Left to himself, Gibbon
turned to theology and read himself into the Roman Catholic faith. It
was a purely intellectual conversion. Yet he acted on it and was
received into the Roman Catholic Church by a priest in London on June 8,
1753.
His father, outraged because under the existing laws his son had
disqualified himself for all public service and office, acted swiftly,
and Edward was dispatched to Lausanne and lodged with a Calvinist
minister, the Rev. Daniel Pavillard. Though the change was complete, and
Gibbon was under strict surveillance, in great discomfort, and with the
scantiest allowance, he later spoke of this period with gratitude. To
Pavillard he owed kindly and competent instruction and the formation of
regular habits of study. He mastered the bulk of classical Latin
literature and studied mathematics and logic. He also became perfectly
conversant with the language and literature of France, which exercised a
permanent influence on him. These studies made him not only a man of
considerable learning but a stylist for life. He began his first work,
written in French, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761; An Essay
on the Study of Literature, 1764). Meanwhile, the main purpose of his
exile had not been neglected. Not without weighty thought, Gibbon at
last abjured his new faith and was publicly readmitted to the Protestant
communion at Christmas 1754. “It was here,” Gibbon says somewhat
ambiguously, “that I suspended my religious enquiries, acquiescing with
implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the
general consent of Catholics and Protestants.”
In the latter part of his exile Gibbon entered more freely into
Lausanne society. He attended Voltaire’s parties. He formed an enduring
friendship with a young Swiss, Georges Deyverdun, and also fell in love
with and rashly plighted himself to Suzanne Curchod, a pastor’s daughter
of great charm and intelligence. In 1758 his father called Gibbon home
shortly before his 21st birthday and settled an annuity of £300 on him.
On the other hand, he found that his father and his stepmother were
implacably opposed to his engagement, and he was compelled to break it
off. (“I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”) He never again thought
seriously of marriage. After a natural estrangement he and Curchod
became lifelong friends. She was well known as the wife of Jacques
Necker, the French finance minister under Louis XVI. During the next
five years Gibbon read widely and considered many possible subjects for
a historical composition. From 1760 until the end of 1762, his studies
were seriously interrupted by his service on home defense duties with
the Hampshire militia. With the rank of captain he did his duty
conscientiously and later claimed that his experience of men and camps
had been useful to him as a historian.
Gibbon left England on Jan. 25, 1763, and spent some time in Paris,
making the acquaintance of several Philosophes, Denis Diderot and Jean
Le Rond d’Alembert among others. During the autumn and winter spent in
study and gaiety at Lausanne, he gained a valuable friend in John Baker
Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield), who was to become his literary executor.
In 1764 Gibbon went to Rome, where he made an exhaustive study of the
antiquities and, on Oct. 15, 1764, while musing amid the ruins of the
Capitol, was inspired to write of the decline and fall of the city. Some
time was yet to pass before he decided on the history of the empire.
At home, the next five years were the least satisfactory in Gibbon’s
life. He was dependent on his father and although nearly 30 had achieved
little in life. Although bent on writing a history, he had not settled
on a definite subject. Impressed by the supremacy of French culture in
Europe, he began in that language a history of the liberty of the Swiss,
but was dissuaded from continuing it. He and Deyverdun published two
volumes of Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne (1768–69). In 1770
he sought to attract some attention by publishing Critical Observations
on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid.
His father died intestate in 1770. After two years of tiresome
business, Gibbon was established in Bentinck Street, London, and
concentrated on his Roman history. At the same time he entered fully
into social life. He joined the fashionable clubs and was also becoming
known among men of letters. In 1775 he was elected to the Club, the
brilliant circle that the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds had formed round
the writer and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson’s
biographer, James Boswell, openly detested Gibbon, and it may be
inferred that Johnson disliked him, Gibbon took an active part in the
Club and became intimate with Reynolds and the actor David Garrick. In
the previous year he had entered Parliament and was an assiduous, though
silent, supporter of Lord North.
The “Decline and Fall.” The first quarto volume of his history,
published on Feb. 17, 1776, immediately scored a success that was
resounding, if somewhat scandalous because of the last two chapters in
which he dealt with great irony with the rise of Christianity. Reactions
to Gibbon’s treatment of Christianity have displayed various phases.
Both in his lifetime and after, he was attacked and personally ridiculed
by those who feared that his skepticism would shake the existing
establishment. In the 19th century he was hailed as a champion by
militant agnostics. Gibbon himself was not militant. He did not cry with
Voltaire, “Écrasez l’Infâme!” (“Crush the Infamy!”) because in his
England and Switzerland he saw no danger in the ecclesiastical systems.
His concern was past history. One may say, however, with confidence,
that he had no belief in a divine revelation and little sympathy with
those who had such a belief. While he treated the supernatural with
irony, his main purpose was to establish the principle that religions
must be treated as phenomena of human experience. In this his successors
have followed him and added to the collateral causes of Christianity’s
growth those that he had overlooked or could not know of, such as the
various mystery religions of the empire and particularly the Mithraic
cult. Although Gibbon’s best known treatment of Christianity is found
mainly in the 15th and 16th chapters, no less significant are later
chapters in which he traced the developments of theology and
ecclesiasticism in relation to the breakup of the empire.
Gibbon went on to prepare the next volumes. Meanwhile, he was
assailed by many pamphleteers and subjected to much ridicule. His
ugliness and elaborate clothes made him an easy target. For the most
part he ignored his critics. The historians David Hume and William
Robertson recognized him as their equal if not their superior. Only to
those who had accused him of falsifying his evidence did he make a
devastating reply in A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779).
In the same year he obtained a valuable sinecure as a commissioner of
trade and plantations. Shortly after that he composed Mémoire
justificatif (1779; a French and English version, 1780), a masterly
state paper in reply to continental criticism of the British
government’s policy in America. In 1781 he published the second and
third volumes of his history, bringing the narrative down to the end of
the empire in the West. Gibbon paused at this point to consider
continuing his history. In 1782, however, Lord North’s government fell,
and soon Gibbon’s commission was abolished. This was a serious loss of
income. To economize he left England and joined Deyverdun in a house at
Lausanne. There he quietly completed his history in three more volumes,
writing the last lines of it on June 27, 1787. He soon returned to
England with the manuscript, and these volumes were published on his
51st birthday, May 8, 1788. The completion of this great work was
acclaimed on all sides.
The Decline and Fall is thus comprised of two divisions, equal in
bulk but inevitably different in treatment. The first half covers a
period of about 300 years to the end of the empire in the West, about ad
480. In the second half nearly 1,000 years are compressed. Yet the work
is a coherent whole by virtue of its conception of the Roman Empire as a
single entity throughout its long and diversified course. Gibbon imposed
a further unity on his narrative by viewing it as an undeviating decline
from those ideals of political and, even more, intellectual freedom that
he had found in classical literature. The material decay that had
inspired him in Rome was the effect and symbol of moral decadence.
However well this attitude suited the history of the West, its
continuance constitutes the most serious defect of the second half of
Gibbon’s history and involved him in obvious contradictions. He
asserted, for example, that the long story of empire in the East is one
of continuous decay, yet for 1,000 years Constantinople stood as a
bulwark of eastern Europe. The fact is that Gibbon was not only out of
sympathy with Byzantine civilization; he was less at home with Greek
sources than with Latin and had no access to vast stores of material in
other languages that subsequent scholars have assembled. Consequently
there are serious omissions in his narrative, as well as unsatisfactory
summaries.
Nevertheless, this second half contains much of Gibbon’s best. With
all its shortcomings, it marshals with masterly lucidity the successive
forces that eventually overthrew Constantinople. Many of his most famous
chapters occur there. These include sections on Justinian, the
Trinitarian controversies, the rise of Islām, and the history of Roman
law. There is, in addition, a brilliant and moving story of the last
siege and capture of Constantinople and, finally, the epilogue of
chapters describing medieval and Renaissance Rome, which gives some hope
that the long decline is over and that mankind has some prospect of
recovering intellectual freedom. The vindication of intellectual freedom
is a large part of Gibbon’s purpose as a historian. When toward the end
of his work he remarks, “I have described the triumph of barbarism and
religion,” he reveals epigrammatically his view of the causes of the
decay of the Greco-Roman world. They can hardly be disputed. But there
is the further question of whether the changes brought about are to be
regarded as ones of progress or retrogression. Writing as a
mid-18th-century “philosopher,” Gibbon saw the process as retrogression,
and his judgment remains of perpetual interest.
Returning to Lausanne, Gibbon turned mainly to writing his memoirs.
His happiness was broken first by Deyverdun’s death in 1789, quickly
followed by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the subsequent
apprehension of an invasion of Switzerland. He had now become very fat
and his health was declining. In 1793 he suddenly returned to England on
hearing of Lady Sheffield’s death. The journey aggravated his ailments,
and he died in a house in St. James’s Street, London. His remains were
placed in Lord Sheffield’s family vault in Fletching Church, Sussex.
Assessment.
Modern knowledge of history, in Gibbon’s field alone, has increased
conspicuously. Economic, social, and constitutional history have grown
up. The study of coins, inscriptions, and archaeology generally has
brought in a great harvest. Above all, the scientific examination of
literary sources, so rigorously practiced now, was unknown to Gibbon.
Yet he often exhibits a flair and an acumen that seem to anticipate
these systematic studies. He had genius in large measure, as well as
untiring industry and accuracy in consulting his sources. Though he was
unsympathetic to Christianity, his sense of fairness and probity made
him respectful of honest opinion and true devotion, even among those
with whom he disagreed. These qualities, expressed with his command of
historical perspective and his incomparable literary style, justify a
modern historian’s dictum that “whatever else is read Gibbon must be
read too,” or the conclusion of the great Cambridge historian J.B. Bury:
That Gibbon is behind date in many details and in some departments of
importance, simply signifies that we and our fathers have not lived in
an absolutely incompetent world. But in the main things he is still our
master above and beyond “date.”
David Morrice Low
