A short life of the author
Edward Gibbon wrote the greatest work of history in the English language — a judgment that was near-universal when the last volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1788 and that has not been seriously challenged in the two and a half centuries since. The Decline and Fall is not merely a great work of history; it is one of the supreme achievements of English prose literature, a narrative of over a million words that traces the fate of Roman civilisation from the height of its power in the second century AD through the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, a span of thirteen centuries covered with a comprehensiveness, a consistency of vision, and a sustained magnificence of style that no other historian has ever matched.
The Indolent Youth
Gibbon was born in Putney, Surrey, in 1737, into a family of comfortable but not aristocratic means. His childhood was sickly, his education irregular, and his father’s efforts to direct him were spectacularly unsuccessful. He was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, at fifteen, where — by his own account — the fourteen months he spent were “the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.” The dons were lazy, the curriculum moribund, and the young Gibbon, left to his own devices, converted to Roman Catholicism.
His horrified father dispatched him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to board with a Calvinist minister, Daniel Pavillard, who restored him to Protestantism and gave him the rigorous intellectual discipline that Oxford had not. In Lausanne, Gibbon educated himself systematically in the classics, in French literature, and in philosophy. He became fluent in French — so fluent that his first published work, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), was written in French — and acquired the cosmopolitan, Francophone, Enlightenment sensibility that would distinguish his historical writing.
The Inspiration
The genesis of the Decline and Fall is one of the most famous moments in literary history. On October 15, 1764, Gibbon was sitting among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, listening to barefoot Franciscan friars singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, when — as he later wrote — “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” The contrast between the grandeur of ancient Rome and the poverty and superstition of modern Rome crystallised a project that would occupy the next twenty-three years of his life.
The Decline and Fall
The first volume appeared in 1776 — the same year as the American Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations — and was an immediate sensation. It covered the period from the Antonines (the second century AD) through the rise of Christianity and the barbarian invasions to the fall of the Western Empire in 476.
The most controversial chapters were the fifteenth and sixteenth, which treated the rise of Christianity not as a divine event but as a historical phenomenon explicable by natural causes — including the intolerance, zeal, and fanaticism of the early Christians. The chapters provoked furious attacks from the clergy, but Gibbon defended himself with devastating wit in his Vindication (1779), and the controversy only increased the book’s readership.
Volumes II and III (1781) continued the narrative through the age of Justinian and the rise of Islam. Volumes IV, V, and VI (1788) brought the story to its conclusion with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, encompassing the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, the career of Tamerlane, and the final destruction of the Byzantine Empire.
The Prose Style
Gibbon’s prose is one of the great achievements of English literature. His characteristic mode was irony — a tone of urbane, detached, faintly amused superiority that allowed him to describe the most terrible events (massacres, persecutions, the collapse of civilisations) with a composure that was simultaneously chilling and deeply humane. His sentences were elaborately balanced, their rhythms modelled on Cicero and the French classical tradition, but they were never ponderous; they moved with a lightness and precision that made the most complex historical analysis seem effortless.
His treatment of religion was the most distinctive feature of his style. He never attacked Christianity directly; he described its history with such meticulous accuracy and such polite irony that the effect was more devastating than any polemic.
Memoirs
Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and Writings (published posthumously in 1796, from six fragmentary drafts) is one of the great autobiographies in English — a portrait of the scholar’s life that combines self-deprecating wit with a genuine understanding of how a mind forms itself through reading, travel, and reflection.
Collecting Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Strahan and Cadell, 1776–1788, 6 volumes) in first edition is one of the landmarks of English book collecting. Volume I (1776) appeared in quarto; the subsequent volumes in octavo. Complete sets in contemporary binding are rare and valuable. The Memoirs (1796) are collected as autobiography. Gibbon’s manuscript materials are primarily in institutional collections (the British Museum, the Bodleian). Modern editions — particularly the Bury edition (1896–1900, 7 volumes) with notes — are standard reference copies.