Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the greatest English historian of his time and author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). Despite the availability of new factual data and a recognition of Gibbon's Western bias, which placed moral judgments on the material decadence of Roman times, Decline and Fall is still read and enjoyed.

Gibbon was born in Putney (now part of London). He was a sickly child and had almost no formal schooling. He was, however, an avid reader. As he approached age 15, his health suddenly improved, and his father entered him in Magdalen College, University of Oxford. However, Gibbon hated Oxford. Study of early Christianity led him to convert to Roman Catholicism in June 1753, thus barring him from the university, which at that time admitted only Anglicans. His father sent Gibbon to Lausanne, Switzerland, in care of a Calvinist pastor, who by Christmas, 1754, had reconciled him to Protestantism.

Gibbon remained in Switzerland for nearly five years. He rounded out his classical education, adding the study of logic and Greek to his Latin. He conversed with savants, did some writing in French, and, for the first and only time, fell in love. On his return to England in 1758, however, his father put an end to the engagement. By that time Gibbon had determined to devote his life to scholarship and writing. After two years in the Hampshire militia, he left again for Europe. In 1764, while visiting Rome, Gibbon decided to write about the city's history. In another two years his project was clear, and he began to set down on paper 1300 years of history.

The first volume of Decline and Fall appeared in 1776. Gibbon was praised for the skill and beauty of his writing. He ignored outcries against his religious skepticism (he had dealt rather coolly with early Christianity), but he stoutly defended all attacks on his facts. The next two volumes, which bring to an end the period of the Western Empire (to about ad480), came out in 1781. The final 1000 years of the empire in the East unfold in his last three volumes, completed in Lausanne in 1787 and published in 1788.

Gibbon was often ridiculed for his vanity, style of dress, and physical appearance. London's intellectual circles, however, admired his clear mind and absolute control of emotion. Gibbon also served in Parliament for 12 years, beginning in 1774. Memoirs of My Life and Miscellaneous Works were published posthumously in 1796.