Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 1737O.S. 27 April. Gibbon's birthday is 27 April 1737 of the old style (O.S.) Julian calendar; England adopted the new style (N.S.) Gregorian calendar in 1752, and thereafter Gibbon's birthday was celebrated on 8 May 1737 N.S.16 January 1794) was a British essayist, historian and politician. His most important and influential work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, to critical and commercial success. It is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organised religion.The most recent and also the first critical edition, in three volumes, is that of David Womersley. For commentary on Gibbon's irony and insistence on primary sources whenever available, see Womersley, "Introduction". While the larger part of Gibbon's caustic view of Christianity is declared within the text of chapters XV and XVI, Gibbon rarely neglects to note its baleful influence throughout the remaining volumes of the Decline and Fall.
Early life: 1737–1752 Edward Gibbon was born in 1737, the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon, at Lime Grove in the town of Putney, Surrey. He had five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy. His grandfather, also named Edward, had lost his assets as a result of the South Sea bubble stock-market collapse in 1720 but eventually regained much of his wealth. Gibbon's father thus inherited a substantial estate.D. M. Low, Edward Gibbon. 1737–1794 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), p. 7. His paternal grandmother, Catherine Acton, was granddaughter of Sir Walter Acton, 2nd Baronet.Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 106th edition, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mosley, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 1999, p. 28 Gibbon described himself as "a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse." At age nine, he was sent to Dr. Woddeson's school at Kingston upon Thames (now Kingston Grammar School), shortly after which his mother died. He then took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house, owned by his adored "Aunt Kitty", Catherine Porten. Soon after she died in 1786, he remembered her as rescuing him from his mother's disdain, and imparting "the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which is still the pleasure and glory of my life".Norton, Letters, vol. 3, 10/5/86, 45–48. From 1747 Gibbon spent time at the family home in Buriton. By 1751, Gibbon's reading was already extensive and pointed toward his future pursuits: Laurence Echard's Roman History (1713), William Howel(l)'s An Institution of General History (1680–85), and several of the 65 volumes of the acclaimed Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (1747–1768).Stephen, DNB, p. 1130; Pocock, Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 29–40. At age 14, Gibbon was "a prodigy of uncontrolled reading"; Gibbon himself admitted an "indiscriminate appetite". p. 29.
Career Oxford, Lausanne, and a religious journey: 1752–1758
Following a stay at Bath in 1752 to improve his health at the age of 15, Gibbon was sent by his father to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was enrolled as a gentleman-commoner. He was ill-suited, however, to the college atmosphere, and later rued his 14 months there as the "most idle and unprofitable" of his life. Because he says so in his autobiography, it used to be thought that a penchant from his aunt for "theological controversy" bloomed under the influence of the deist or rationalist theologian Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), the author of Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (1749). In that tract, Middleton denied the validity of such powers; Gibbon promptly objected, or so the argument used to run. The product of that disagreement, with some assistance from the work of Catholic Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), and that of the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546–1610), yielded the most memorable event of his time at Oxford: his conversion to Roman Catholicism on 8 June 1753. He was further "corrupted" by the 'free thinking' deism of the playwright and poet David Mallet;Pocock, Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon. for Middleton, see pp. 45–47; for Bossuet, p. 47; for the Mallets, p. 23; Robert Parsons [or Persons], A Christian directory: The first booke of the Christian exercise, appertaining to resolution, (London, 1582). In his 1796 edition of Gibbon's Memoirs, Lord Sheffield claims that Gibbon directly connected his Catholic conversion to his reading of Parsons. Womersley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, p. 9. and finally Gibbon's father, already "in despair," had had enough. David Womersley has shown, however, that Gibbon's claim to having been converted by a reading of Middleton is very unlikely, and was introduced only into the final draft of the "Memoirs" in 1792–93.Womersley, Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and His Reputation, 1776–1815 (Oxford University Press, 2002), as cited by G. M. Bowersock in The New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, p. 56.
Within weeks of his conversion, he was removed from Oxford and sent to live under the care and tutelage of Daniel Pavillard, Reformed pastor of Lausanne, Switzerland. There, he made one of his life's two great friendships, that of Jacques Georges Deyverdun (the French-language translator of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther), and that of John Baker Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield). Just a year and a half later, after his father threatened to disinherit him, on Christmas Day, 1754, he reconverted to Protestantism. "The various articles of the Romish creed," he wrote, "disappeared like a dream".John Murray (ed.). The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. (London: John Murray, 1896), p. 137.
Thwarted romance
He also met the one romance in his life: the daughter of the pastor of Crassy, a young woman named Suzanne Curchod, who was later to become the wife of Louis XVI's finance minister Jacques Necker, and the mother of Madame de Staël. The two developed a warm affinity; Gibbon proceeded to propose marriage,Norton, Biblio, p. 2; Letters, vol. 1, p. 396. a concise summary of their relationship is found at 396–401. but ultimately this was out of the question, blocked both by his father's staunch disapproval and Curchod's equally staunch reluctance to leave Switzerland. Gibbon returned to England in August 1758 to face his father. No refusal of the elder's wishes could be allowed. Gibbon put it this way: "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son."Murray, p. 239. The phrase, "sighed [etc.]" alludes to the play Polyeucte by "the father of French tragedy," Pierre Corneille. Womersley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, p. 11. He proceeded to cut off all contact with Curchod, even as she vowed to wait for him. Their final emotional break apparently came at Ferney, France, in early 1764, though they did see each other at least one more time, a year later.Womersley, 11–12.
First fame and the Grand tour: 1758–1765
Upon his return to England, Gibbon published his first book, Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature in 1761, which produced an initial taste of celebrity and distinguished him, in Paris at least, as a man of letters.In the Essai, the 24-year-old boldly braved the reigning philosoph[e]ic fashion to uphold the studious values and practices of the érudits (antiquarian scholars). Womersley, p. 11; and The Miscellaneous Works, 1st ed., vol. 2.
On 12 June 1759 Gibbon was commissioned as a Captain in the South Hampshire Militia when that regiment was embodied during the Seven Years' War (his father served as the regiment's Major). For the next three years he commanded the regiment's Grenadier Company in home defence. The militia was disembodied in December 1762 but he remained an officer in the regiment, resigning as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1770. Gibbon later credited his militia service with providing him "a larger introduction into the English world." There was further, the matter of a vast utility: "The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire."Murray, p. 190.Lloyd-Verney, pp. 144, 151, 164–74.Womersley, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, pp. 11, 12.
In 1763 he returned, via Paris, to Lausanne, where he made the acquaintance of a "prudent worthy young man" William Guise. On 18 April 1764, he and Guise set off for Italy, crossed the Alps, and after spending the summer in Florence arrived in Rome, via Lucca, Pisa, Livorno and Siena, in early October.Edward Chaney, "Reiseerlebnis und 'Traumdeutung' bei Edward Gibbon und William Beckford", Europareisen politisch-sozialer Eliten im 18.Jahrhundert, eds. J. Rees, W. Siebers and H. Tilgner (Berlin 2002), pp. 244–245; cf. Chaney, "Gibbon, Beckford and the Interpretation of Dreams," pp. 40–41. In his autobiography, Gibbon vividly records his rapture when he finally neared "the great object of [my] pilgrimage":
...at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.Chaney, p. 40 and Murray, pp. 266–267.
Here, Gibbon first conceived the idea of composing a history of the city, later extended to the entire empire, a moment he described later as his "Capitoline vision":Pocock, "Classical History," ¶ #2.
It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars 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.Murray, p. 302.
Womersley notes the existence of "good reasons" to doubt the statement's accuracy. Elaborating, Pocock ("Classical History," ¶ #2) refers to it as a likely "creation of memory" or a "literary invention", given that Gibbon, in his autobiography, claimed that his journal dated the reminiscence to 15 October, when in fact the journal gives no date.
Late career: 1765–1776 Work In June 1765, Gibbon returned to his father's house, remaining there until the latter's death in 1770.Cecil, Algernon. Six Oxford thinkers: Edward Gibbon, John Henry Newman, R.W. Church, James Anthony Froude, Walter Pater, Lord Morley of Blackburn. London: John Murray, 1909, p. 59. These five years were considered by Gibbon as the worst of his life, but he tried to remain busy by making early attempts at full histories. His first historical narrative, known as the History of Switzerland, representing Gibbon's love for Switzerland, was never finished nor published. Even under the guidance of Deyverdun, his German translator, Gibbon became too self-critical and completely abandoned the project after writing only 60 pages of text.Cecil, Algernon. Six Oxford thinkers: Edward Gibbon, John Henry Newman, R.W. Church, James Anthony Froude, Walter Pater, Lord Morley of Blackburn. London: John Murray, 1909, p. 60.