Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon an English historian and man of letters of the eighteenth century (1737-1794), whose monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire transformed the writing of history in the English language and remains one of the great achievements of Enlightenment prose.

Life and Formation

Edward Gibbon was born on 27 April 1737 at Putney, near London, the only child of a prosperous landed gentleman to survive infancy. His health was delicate throughout childhood, and long periods of illness left him largely self-educated, so that he read widely and at random among classical and modern authors while his formal schooling was repeatedly interrupted. This early and indiscriminate reading gave him a store of learning and a taste for the great historians of antiquity that shaped all his later work and gave him the habit of learning from books rather than from teachers.

In 1752 his father sent him to Magdalen College, Oxford, but his time there was brief and, by his own account, idle and unprofitable. While at Oxford he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, a step that alarmed his Protestant family, and he was soon removed and sent to Lausanne in Switzerland, where he was placed in the household of a Calvinist pastor, Daniel Pavillard. There he was instructed in theology and in the classics, and after some months of study and reflection he returned to the Protestant faith and to the sober habits of English life.

The years at Lausanne were decisive for his development. He mastered French, read widely in the literature and philosophy of the continent, and fell deeply in love with Suzanne Curchod, whom he was ultimately not permitted to marry. He returned to England in 1758, served for a time as a captain in the Hampshire militia, an experience that taught him something of men and discipline, and then devoted himself in earnest to scholarship and to the composition of his first book, an essay on the study of literature that announced his ambition to the world of letters.

The Decline and Fall

Gibbon conceived the design of his great history while sitting among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, listening to friars singing vespers in a nearby church, a moment he later described with great vividness in his autobiography. The first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776 and met with immediate and widespread acclaim. Its subject was the slow collapse of the greatest empire of antiquity and the growth of the Christian church within it, and it drew upon years of reading in the ancient historians, the poets and the fathers of the church.

The famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, which treated the rise of Christianity in natural and human terms, provoked a storm of controversy that lasted for years. Gibbon explained the growth of the new religion by secondary causes such as the zeal of believers, the promise of an afterlife, and the organisation of the church, rather than by divine intervention, and numerous clergymen wrote replies attacking his irony, his learning and his method. He answered his critics with a spirited and dignified vindication that many thought the finest of his shorter works and a model of controversial writing.

Subsequent volumes followed in 1781 and in 1788, carrying the narrative through the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the capture of Rome in 1527. The completed work surveyed more than a thousand years of history across Europe, Asia and the Mediterranean world, and joined the power of narrative to a vast erudition drawn from the ancient sources. Its scope and its artistry made it a landmark of historical literature and a model for later writers, who have measured their own labours against its massive achievement and its sustained and unfaltering design.

Method and Historical Vision

Gibbon combined the antiquarian learning of his age with a literary art that few historians have equalled. He worked chiefly from the original texts, assembling his notes with painstaking care, and he judged his sources with a critical shrewdness that anticipated the methods of later scholarship. His footnotes, as much as his text, display an immense command of the literature of antiquity and of the modern commentaries upon it, and they reveal a mind equally at home in Greek, Latin, French and Italian learning and in the numismatic and antiquarian evidence that lay beneath the surface of his narrative.

His vision of history was philosophical and comparative. He sought to explain events by the operation of general causes, by the balance of power, by the effects of climate and commerce, and above all by the influence of manners and institutions. He had little patience with providential explanations that treated prosperity or disaster as a direct reward or punishment, and he preferred to trace the consequences of human choice within a framework of natural probability and observable tendency, leaving to others the task of discerning in the record of events the hand of a governing providence.

His prose is celebrated for its balance, its irony and its cadences, modelled in part upon classical Latin authors and refined by long practice. Yet the elegance of his style conceals a controlled and often sombre judgement, and his narrative of decline and fall has been read as a meditation on the fragility of civilisations. He wrote, in effect, both as a scholar and as a moralist examining the fortunes of a great civilisation and the hidden causes of its decay, and his sentences carry the weight of a lifetime spent among the ruins of the ancient world.

Religion and the Enlightenment

Gibbon stood at the confluence of the classical learning of the Renaissance and the critical spirit of the Enlightenment. He admired the civic virtues and intellectual achievements of pagan antiquity, and he regarded the spread of Christianity with an ambivalent eye, acknowledging its civilising influence while blaming it for a certain softening of the martial spirit of Rome and for the loss of much ancient literature that perished with the world in which it had flourished. His sympathies lay with the tolerant and urbane culture of the ancient world and with the freedom of thought that he believed it had fostered.

His treatment of religion was rationalistic and tolerant rather than militant. He exposed the credulity of believers and the ambitions of the clergy with a famous irony, but he did not deny the sincerity of faith or the benefits it could confer upon a society. His sympathies lay with a moderate and humane religion that could coexist with philosophy, and he reserved his sharpest criticism not for belief itself but for superstition, fanaticism and the political power of priests, which he regarded as a perpetual danger to the peace and the liberty of nations.

This combination of scepticism and erudition made him a central figure in the intellectual culture of his day, and it placed his history in the serried ranks of the great works of the Enlightenment. His portrait of a civilisation dissolving through internal decay and external pressure offered his contemporaries a lesson they applied, rightly or wrongly, to the fortunes of their own nations and to the stability of the empires of Europe. He wrote, moreover, with a detachment that allowed him to admire what was admirable in every age while exposing the follies and the cruelties that accompanied even the highest achievements of the human mind.

Later Career and Legacy

Gibbon served briefly in politics as a member of Parliament for Liskeard and later for Lymington, sitting in the House of Commons during the years of the American crisis. He held a post as a commissioner of trade and plantations, a position that gave him a modest independence and some insight into the workings of government, and he spoke rarely and without distinction in the House. He preferred the company of scholars and the quiet of his study to the conflicts of political life, and he made no secret of his preference for the library over the lobby and for the calm of letters over the heat of debate.

After the completion of his history he retired to Lausanne, where he lived in comfort among his books and corresponded with the learned of Europe. He wrote an elegant autobiography, the Memoirs of My Life, in which he described his education, his conversion and his literary labours with characteristic poise and candour. He died at his lodgings in London on 16 January 1794, in the midst of arranging his papers for publication, and was buried in the churchyard at Fletching in Sussex, leaving behind him a reputation that has never since been eclipsed.

His influence upon historiography has been immense. The Decline and Fall set a standard of narrative and analysis that generations of historians have sought to match, and its central theme, the fate of a great civilisation in decline, has proved inexhaustible. His scholarship, his irony and his majestic prose have kept his work alive for readers who have never shared his premises, and it endures as a classic of the English language and a permanent possession of the historical imagination and of the literature of the world.

See also

• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Ancient Rome
• Byzantine Empire
• Enlightenment historiography