Gibbon, Edward

Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), was educated at Westminster and at Magdalen College, Oxford; in his posthumously published Memoirs he paints a vivid portrait of the ‘narrow, lazy and oppressive’ spirit of Oxford, and of the ‘idle and unprofitable’ time he spent there. He became a Catholic convert at the age of 16, and was sent off to Lausanne by his father, where he was reconverted to Protestantism. He returned to England in 1758 after an absence of nearly 5 years. In 1761 he published his Essai sur l'étude de la littérature. He left again for the Continent in 1763; it was in Italy, while ‘musing amid the ruins of the Capitol’, that he formed the plan of his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He entered Parliament in 1774, voted steadily for Lord North, and was made a commissioner of trade and plantations. He was elected to Dr Johnson's Club in 1774. In 1776 appeared the first volume of the History which was very favourably received, although his chapters on the growth of Christianity provoked criticisms from Porson and others. Gibbon replied in 1779 in A Vindication of Some Passages in the XVth and XVIth Chapters. The second and third volumes appeared in 1781, but were less warmly received. He retired to Lausanne in 1783 where he completed the work. The last three volumes were published in 1788. He returned to England and spent most of his remaining days in the home of his friend the earl of Sheffield (John Baker Holroyd), who published his remarkable Memoirs with his Miscellaneous Works (1796). The memoirs reveal Gibbon's sense of vocation as a historian, and record on several occasions his gratitude at having been born ‘in a free and enlightened country’; he was in many ways a representative product of the Enlightenment, anticlerical, rational, and one of the last of the great Augustans.