Few figures in the history of Western letters so perfectly combined the intellectual ambitions of the Enlightenment with the patience and precision of genuine scholarship as Edward Gibbon. Born on May 8, 1737, at Lime Grove in Putney, Surrey, Gibbon was the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon and the sole survivor of a family of seven children, all his brothers and sisters having died in infancy. His grandfather had suffered severe financial losses in the South Sea Bubble collapse of 1720 but eventually rebuilt much of his wealth, leaving Gibbon's father a substantial estate to inherit. Gibbon's paternal grandmother, Catherine Acton, was a granddaughter of Sir Walter Acton, 2nd Baronet, giving the family a respectable if not exalted social position.
Gibbon described himself with characteristic candor as a puny child neglected by his mother and starved by his nurse. His mother died when he was nine, after which he took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house owned by his beloved aunt, Catherine Porten, whom he credited with rescuing him from his mother's disdain. He later remembered her as having imparted the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which was still the pleasure and glory of his life when he recalled her warmly after her death in 1786. From 1747 he spent time at the family home in Buriton, and by 1751 his reading was already extensive and pointed toward his future vocation. He had worked through Laurence Echard's Roman History, William Howell's An Institution of General History, and several volumes of the sprawling Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time, a project that ran to sixty-five volumes published between 1747 and 1768.
In 1752, following a stay at Bath intended to improve his health, the fifteen-year-old Gibbon was sent by his father to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he enrolled as a gentleman-commoner. The experience was, by his own account, a disaster. The college atmosphere struck him as intellectually bankrupt, and he later described his fourteen months there as the most idle and unprofitable of his life. His restless theological curiosity led him, through a complicated path of reading that included the deist Conyers Middleton, the Catholic Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons, to convert to Roman Catholicism on June 8, 1753. His father, already alarmed, acted swiftly. Within weeks of the conversion, Gibbon was removed from Oxford and sent to live under the care of Daniel Pavillard, a Reformed Protestant pastor in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Switzerland proved transformative. In Lausanne, Gibbon made two of the great friendships of his life, with Jacques Georges Deyverdun, who would later translate Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther into French, and John Baker Holroyd, who became Lord Sheffield and would serve as Gibbon's literary executor. He also encountered the one romantic attachment of his life, Suzanne Curchod, daughter of the local pastor. The affair deepened into genuine love, but Gibbon's father refused to sanction the match, and Gibbon, ever dependent on his father's financial support, submitted. Suzanne later married the Swiss banker Jacques Necker and became the mother of Germaine de Staël, one of the great intellectuals of the next generation. Gibbon reconverted to Protestantism on Christmas Day 1754, after his father threatened to disinherit him, dismissing the articles of Roman Catholic belief as having disappeared like a dream.
Returning to England, Gibbon served briefly in the Hampshire Militia during the Seven Years War, an experience he later satirized but which gave him an understanding of military organization that would inform his later historical writing. He traveled to Italy in 1764, and it was in Rome, on October 15 of that year, as he sat among the ruins of the Capitol and listened to barefooted friars singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the history of Rome's decline first struck him. The moment he described in his memoirs became one of the most celebrated origin stories in literary history. He would spend the next quarter century bringing that inspiration to fruition.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in six volumes published between 1776 and 1789. The first volume was published to immediate and sensational success in 1776, going through multiple printings within weeks. Readers admired the elegant and ironic prose, the command of classical sources, and the sweeping narrative that carried Rome from its zenith through centuries of internal decay, external invasion, and eventual transformation into the medieval world. Two chapters on early Christianity, however, provoked outrage from religious readers. Gibbon examined the rise of the church with the same cool analytical eye he applied to everything else, treating religious enthusiasm as a historical phenomenon with social and psychological causes rather than as a miraculous intervention in human affairs. His critics accused him of impiety and atheism, charges he deflected with polished disdain.
Gibbon served as a Member of Parliament for Liskeard and then Lymington between 1774 and 1783, generally supporting Lord North's administration, though his parliamentary career was undistinguished and he rarely spoke. He was appointed a Lord of Trade in 1779, a comfortable sinecure that provided income. After the fall of North's government he lost the position and, finding London too expensive, settled in Lausanne in 1783 to live in the household of his old friend Deyverdun. There he completed the final three volumes of the Decline and Fall, which appeared in 1788. He returned to England in 1793 when Deyverdun died and his own health deteriorated. Edward Gibbon died on January 16, 1794, in London, aged fifty-six. His great work, still read and debated, remains one of the monuments of historical prose in the English language.
