Background
Edward Gibbon was born May 8, 1737, in Putney. He was the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon. He had six siblings: five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy.
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Edward Gibbon was born May 8, 1737, in Putney. He was the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon. He had six siblings: five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy.
A sickly child, he had tutors and spent two brief intervals at school, but he owed most of his early education to his voracious reading. In April 1752 he was sent to Oxford, where he learned little.
In Edward's summer vacation he began his first book, a chronological inquiry called The Age of Sesostris, which he later destroyed. From 1759 to 1770, Gibbon served on active duty and in reserve with the South Hampshire militia.
Edward published in July 1761 an Essay on the Study of Literature, written in French, and considered possible historical subjects. Earlier in 1761, at his father's request, Gibbon made an unsuccessful attempt to enter Parliament. In December 1762 Edward's active service with the militia ended, and in January 1763 he began a tour of the Continent.
Reaching Rome in October 1764, Edward there first thought of writing his history. But he did not yet begin it. Gibbon returned to England in 1765, where he continued his studies, but his only publications were two volumes of a French literary journal, edited with his friend G. Deyverdun, Mémoires littéraires de la Grande-Bretagne (1768 and 1769) and an attack on Warburton's interpretation of the sixth book of the Aeneid. He began a history of the Swiss republics in French (1767), which he abandoned. David Hume, who read this work, urged him to write history, but in English. By this time Gibbon may already have begun preliminary work for the Decline and Fall, but he was preoccupied with domestic matters; his father died in November 1770.
In 1772, having straightened out some of the tangles in his father's finances, Gibbon settled in London with his sources comfortably around him in an extensive library. He joined the famous Literary Club and became a member of Parliament in 1774, and in February 1776 he published the first volume of his Decline and Fall. The fifteenth and sixteenth chapters seemed so devastating an account of the early Christian Church that attackers hurried into print. Gibbon ignored them until a rash young man named Davis added plagiarism and the falsification of evidence to the charges against Gibbon. Gibbon's superb Vindication (1779) can be read with delight by those who know nothing about either the history or Davis's attack; in passing, Gibbon answered his other critics.
After a brief visit to France (1777) Gibbon continued to work on his history, which was enjoying a large sale. In 1779 he was appointed a lord of trade, and he was a conscientious member of that Board and of Parliament, but his real work was writing; volumes 2 and 3 were published in 1781. Gibbon had lost his seat in Parliament in 1780 but was elected to another in 1781. A new ministry abolished the Board of Trade in 1782, and Gibbon left Parliament forever in 1784.
In September 1783 Gibbon returned to Lausanne to share a house with his old friend Deyverdun and to write the concluding volumes of his history. Much of volume 4 had been written before he left England, but its completion and volumes 5 and 6 occupied Gibbon until June 1787. He then returned to England to see the volumes through the press; they were issued on his fifty-first birthday. While in England, Gibbon had the pleasure of hearing R. B. Sheridan refer, in a famous Parliamentary speech, to Gibbon's "luminous pages," and he enjoyed public applause and the company of his English friends. Nevertheless, Lausanne was now his home and in 1788 he returned to Switzerland.
Various literary projects, especially six attempts to write his own memoirs, occupied Gibbon upon his return. His happiness was seriously marred by Deyverdun's death (July 4, 1789), which left him, in his words, "alone in Paradise." The cause of his return to England (1793), however, was concern for his friend John Holroyd, Lord Sheffield, whose wife had died suddenly.
A long-standing illness of Gibbon's own was temporarily relieved by surgery in November but Gibbon died on January 16, 1794. After Gibbon's death Lord Sheffield compiled and published his friend's memoirs and other miscellaneous works (1796 and 1814).
Quotations:
"I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect."
"A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness."
"The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life."
"The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy."
"A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest."
"The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
In November 1788 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the main proposer being his good friend Lord Sheffield.
Edward met the one romance in his life: the daughter of the pastor of Crassy, a young woman named Suzanne Curchod, who was later to become the wife of Louis XVI's finance minister Jacques Necker, and the mother of Madame de Staël. The two developed a warm affinity; Gibbon proceeded to propose marriage, but ultimately wedlock was out of the question, blocked both by his father's staunch disapproval and Curchod's equally staunch reluctance to leave Switzerland.
