Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

By David Morrice Low

Edward Gibbon, (born May 8 [April 27, Old Style], 1737, Putney, Surrey, England—died January 16, 1794, London), 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 CE to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

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 January 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 October 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 February 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 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 thus comprises 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 480 CE. 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 Islam, 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.

Legacy

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.”