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Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737 (O.S.) (May 8, 1737 (N.S.)) - January 16, 1794) was arguably the most influential historian since the time of Tacitus. His magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in 1776, is a groundbreaking work whose influence endures to this day.
Life
Gibbon was born at Putney-on-Thames, near London, England, and came from a family of ancient descent, with six tory principles in Hampshire. His grandfather had made and lost the family fortune in the South Sea Bubble. Gibbon was the only child, and he described himself as "a weakly child" in his memoirs. After his mother died while he was 10 years old, he attended Kingston Grammar School, and stayed at the boarding house of his favorite "Aunt Kitty." At the age of 14, he was sent away by his father to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he enrolled as a gentleman-commoner.
Gibbon was ill-suited to Oxford, and the most memorable event of his time at the University was his conversion to Roman Catholicism on June 8, 1753. Religious controversies raged on the Oxford campus, and while their intellectual standards were sometimes described as bleak, obsolete, and barren, the 16 year-old Gibbon was not immune to this controversial religous trend. Within weeks, the elder Gibbon removed young Edward from Oxford, and sent him instead to M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist pastor and private tutor in Lausanne, Switzerland. As Gibbon remarked years later with his flair for sarcastic understatement, "from my childhood, I had been fond of religious disputation."
He studied with a Calvinist preacher in Lausanne for five years, and this would have a profound and impact throughout Gibbon's life. He quickly reconverted back to Protestantism, but more importantly, his time in Lausanne enriched enriched Gibbon's immense aptitude for scholarship and erudition. In addition, he met the one romance in his life: the pastor's daughter, a young woman named Suzanne Curchod, who would later be the wife of Jacques Necker, the French finance minister, and mother of Mme de Staël. Once again, his father intruded in his son's life by vetoing the marriage proposal and demanding the young Gibbon's immediate return to England. Gibbon would write: "I sighed like a lover, I obeyed like a son."
Upon his return to England, Gibbon published his first book, Essai sur l'Etude de la Littérature in 1758. From 1759 to 1763, Gibbon spent four years in service with the Hampshire militia. Later that year, he embarked on a Grand Tour to Europe, which included a visit to Rome. It was here, in 1764, that Gibbon first conceived the idea of writing avout the history of the Roman Empire:
- It was on the fifteenth of October, in the gloom of evening, as I sat musing on the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were chanting their litanies in the temple of Jupiter, that I conceived the first thought of my history (Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1966], p. 304).
By 1772, his father died, and after tending to the estate, which was by no means in good condition, there was nevertheless enough for Gibbon to settle comfortably in London. He began writing his history in 1773 and the first quarto of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776.
Gibbon's dubious religious backround contributed to his interpretation of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Many of his ancient Roman characters were under great danger and faced hostility for expressing the unorthodoxy of their religious views. In this light, modern historians allude to Gibbon's constant assurances that his approach is balanced from the perspective of times, is also a means of detaching himself from his own past. This is not a unique literary device among Eighteenth Century writers; there are many comparable analogies in Eighteenth Century narrative. For Gibbon, however, this insistence on fact operates as a regulating device when weighed against his own disappointment in his life.
Gibbon suffered from a malady now believed to be hydrocele, according to the Merck Manual. This condition caused his testicles to swell with fluid to extraordinary proportions. Gibbon underwent numerous procedures to have the fluid removed during his later years, but as his condition worsened, it became both more painful and an embarassment. His doctor, who actually measured the contents, once drew five quarts of liquid from the protuberance.
This chronic inflammation caused Gibbon great physical discomfort in a time when men wore close-fitting breeches. He refers to this indirectly in his Memoirs, with comments: "I can recall only fourteen truly happy days in my life," and "I am never so content when writing in solitude." Personal hygiene during the Eighteenth Century was optional at best; for Gibbon, it was marginal by any standard. The social humiliation Gibbon endured as a result of his hygiene and his protuberance is chronicled. In an age when a man's stature was measured not merely by the "cut of his breeches," but by his riding, Gibbon was a lonely figure. In one incident, he bent down on one knee to propose to a lady of society. She demurred, "Sir, please, stand up." Gibbon replied: "Madam, I cannot."
Assessment
Gibbon's literary art, the sustained excellence of his style, his piquant epigrams and his brilliant irony, would perhaps not secure for his work the immortality which it seems likely to enjoy, if it were not also marked by ecumenical grasp, extraordinary accuracy and striking acuteness of judgment. It is needless to say that in many points his statements and conclusions must now be corrected. He was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible; I have always endeavoured, he says, to draw from the fountainhead; my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend.
Gibbon's verdict on the history of the Middle Ages is contained in the famous sentence, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion. It is important to understand clearly the criterion which he applied; it is frequently misapprehended. He was a son of the 18th century; he had studied with sympathy Locke and Montesquieu; no one appreciated more keenly than he did political liberty and the freedom of an Englishman. The criterion by which Gibbon judged civilization and progress was the measure in which the happiness of men is secured, and of that happiness he considered political freedom an essential condition. He was essentially humane; and it is worthy of notice that he was in favour of the abolition of slavery, while humane men like his friend Lord Sheffield, Dr Johnson and Boswell were opposed to the antislavery movement.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains most celebrated work, even if the Duke of Gloucester, brother of George III, did once exclaim, "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" His other writings continue to find readers as well. Gibbon is still a source of inspiration to historians, and books on the man and his writings continue to comment on his views and literary style as well as his life.
Works by Gibbon
- Essai sur létude de la littérature (1761).
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume I, 1776; Volumes II and III, 1781; Volumes IV, V, and VI, 1788).
- A vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1779).
- Mémoire justificatif pour servir de réponse à lexposé, &c de la cour de France (1779).
- Memoirs of My Life (1796, at the beginning of the posthumous Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq. published two years after the author's death by his friend and literary executor John Holroyd, first Earl of Sheffield); cf. Georges A. Bonnard's critical edition (1966).
External links
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