Edward Gibbon
1737–94
Edward Gibbon, one of the greatest of English historians was born in Putney
on 27 April 1737, the son of a country gentleman. He suffered much in childhood from a strange nervous affliction, which caused excruciating pain;
his studies were desultory, and two miserable years at Westminster was all the regular schooling he received. He entered Magdalen College Oxford
in 1752, where he spent fourteen idle and unprofitable months, and was converted to Catholicism. Accordingly he was sent to Lausanne to board for
nearly five years with a Calvinist minister, M. Pavilliard, who, by judiciously suggesting books and arguments, converted him to Protestantism.
He here began and carried out those studies in French literature and the Latin classes which, aided by his prodigious memory, made him a master
of erudition without a superior and with hardly an equal. Here, also, he fell in love with Suzanne Curchod, daughter of the minster of Crassy,
who lived to become the wife of the great French minister, M. Necker, and mother of Mme. De Stael. But his father would not hear of the
‘strange alliance’ and Gibbon yielded to his fate. He returned to England in 1758, bringing with him the first pages of a little book
which he published in 1761 in French, the Essai sur L’Etude de la
Litterature. For two and a half years a captain in the Hampshire militia, he meantime revolved within his mind many projects for a historical work,
and visited Paris, Lausanne and Italy. ‘It was in Rome’ he tells us,
‘on 15th October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capital, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,
that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my
mind’. With his friend Deyverdun, he planned and printed Memoires Litteraires de la Grande
Bretagne (1767–68); another work was his anonymous Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the
Aeneid. In 1770 his father died, and Gibbon settled in London; in 1774 he entered parliament as member for Liskeard. He sat, afterwards, also for
Lymington, altogether for eight sessions, without ever summoning courage to speak. His constant support of government was rewarded in 1779 by the post
of a Lord Commissioner of Trade and Plantations – a post worth
£700,but suppressed in 1782. After the labours of seven years he published the first volume of his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in February 1776. Its success was immediate, but soon the religious world awoke to the dangerous attack
upon Christianity in the 15th and 16th chapters, which, while not formally denying the
‘convincing evidence of the doctrine itself,’ accounted for the rapid growth of the early Christian church by
‘secondary’ or merely human causes. Gibbon was assailed by a loud discharge of
‘ecclesiastical ordnance’ but he only deigned to produce a vindication when Henry E Davies of Oxford impugned,
‘not the faith, but the fidelity of the historian’ Two more volumes of his great work were ready in 1781. And now, having lost office and
finding it difficult to live in London upon his income, he accepted
Deyverdun’s invitation to settle down with him in Lausanne, and started in September 1783. He had nearly completed the fourth volume before
leaving London, the fifth was finished in twenty-one months, the sixth in little more than a year, in June 1787. A month later he started for England
to supervise the printing of the work, and the last two volumes were issued in May 1788. He returned immediately to Lausanne. His last years were not
happy; good living and want of exercise brought on burdensome corpulence, he began to be racked with gout, and the death of several friends left him
sorrowing. On a visit to London he was seized with dropsy, and two months later he died 16th January 1794.
Gibbon’s monumental work is likely to remain our masterpiece in history. The magnitude of the subject is nobly sustained by the dignity of the treatment.
