Edward Gibbon biography

Dromo's Den

Edward Gibbon Biography

GIBBON, EDWARD (1737–94). The historian of the Roman Empire, eldest son of Edward Gibbon and Judith Porten. He was born at Putney on the Thames, April 27 (O. S.), 1737. Of his five brothers and one sister none survived infancy. The story of his life Gibbon told in his autobiography, published after his death under the title Memoirs of my Life and Writings (1796). Like most thinkers, his actions are inseparable from his thoughts and the growth of his mind. He spent a sickly childhood in occasional lessons and desultory reading and discussion with his mother's sister, a woman of strong understanding and warm heart, whom he calls "the mother of my mind," and to whose kindness he ascribes not only the bringing out of his intellectual faculties, but the preservation of his life, in these critical early years. Though his education was interrupted by illness, he read enormously. From various tutors and schools he passed to Magdalen College, Oxford (1752). Here he spent 14 idle months, the chief result of which was that in his incursions into controversial theology he became a convert to the Catholic church and found himself shut out from Oxford. His father then placed him under the care of David Mallet, poet and deist, by whose philosophy Gibbon was "rather scandalized than reclaimed." He was then sent to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to board in the house of M. Pavilliard, a Cal-vinist minister, who judiciously suggested books and arguments to the young Gibbon and had the satisfaction of seeing him reconverted to Protestantism in the course of 18 months (1754). Subsequently his mature meditations led him away from all religions. With M. Pavilliard, whom he greatly respected, he lived for nearly five years. It was here that he began and carried out those private studies which, aided by his enormous memory, made him a master of erudition without a superior and with hardly an equal. Here, also, he fell in love with Susanne Curchod, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of a humble minister at Crassy, who afterward became Madame Necker, the mother of Madame de Staël. Gibbon's father disapproved of this "strange alliance," and Gibbon yielded to his fate.

Returning to England in 1758, he continued his studies with some interruptions. At the request of his father he finished a little work in French, begun at Lausanne, and published it under the title Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (1761; Eng. version, 1764). In 1759 he became a captain in the Hampshire militia and afterward major and colonel. The militia being disbanded, he revisited the Continent, crossing the Alps and going on to Rome, where first came to him the thought of his great work. His plan, originally circumscribed to the decay of the city, grew, by years of reading and reflection and delay, to embrace the Empire. On the death of his father (1770) Gibbon came into possession of a comfortable fortune, settled in London (1772), and at once began writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1774 he joined the famous Literary Club of Dr. Johnson and entered Parliament, where he sat "a mute" for eight years. In 1776 the first volume of the History was published, and its success was immediate. Indeed, the reputation of the author was established before the religious world had time to consider and attack the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, in which, while not denying the "convincing evidence of the doctrine itself" and "the ruling providence of its great Author," Gibbon proceeds to account for the rapid growth of the early Christian Church by "secondary" or human causes. He proceeded with the history, publishing two more volumes in 1781. Two years later he returned to Lausanne, where the great work was completed. The last three volumes were published in 1788. In 1793 he returned to England to visit his friend Lord Sheffield, whose wife had just died. While in London, Gibbon died, Jan. 16, 1794, and was buried among the Sheffields in the church at Fletching in Sussex. Under the direction of the Royal Historical Society the centenary of his death was commemorated in London, November, 1894.

It is not easy to characterize, in a few or in many phrases, a man of so gigantic and cultivated an intellect. The Decline and Fall is one of the greatest achievements of human thought and erudition. It is virtually a history of the civilized world for 13 centuries, during which paganism was breaking down and Christianity was taking its place. The new facts which have come to light since Gibbon's time have shown that he was mistaken on many points; but the truth of his picture in the main has never been successfully impeached. The work also possesses style. No one today would imitate, if he could, the balanced structure of Gibbon's sentences. But in Gibbon, as in the Elizabethan writers, the charm lies precisely in this stately march of phrase and sentence. Byron rightly called Gibbon "the lord of irony." Of this characteristic of his genius, which gives piquancy to his style, the historian himself was aware; and he claimed to have learned it from Pascal, whose Provincial Letters he read almost every year. After all, Gibbon is at his best where he is most himself, as in the dignity and measured melancholy of his autobiography.

Lord Sheffield published Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works (2 vols., 1796; 5 vols., 1814). The autobiography contained therein was pieced together from six different manuscripts, with omissions and some additions. These six manuscripts have been published by a grandson of the elder Lord Sheffield (London, 1896). Excellent editions of the Memoirs have also been edited by O. F. Emerson (Boston, 1898), by Hill (London, 1900), and by H. Morley (New York, 1914). All editions of the Decline and Fall have been superseded by that of Bury (7 vols., ib., 1896–1900; new ed., 1909–12). Consult also The Letters of Gibbon, ed. by Prothero (ib., 1896), and J. A. C. Morrison, Gibbon ("English Men of Letters," New York, 1901).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. IX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 739.