Edward Gibbon Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Edward Gibbon was born on 8 May 1737 in Putney, Surrey, into a family of modest wealth and political connections. His father, also named Edward Gibbon, managed the family estates around Buriton in Hampshire, while his mother, Judith Porten, died during his childhood. Frail health marked his early years, and extended illnesses left his schooling irregular. He later credited his aunt, Catherine Porten, with rescuing his education and instilling the habits of steady reading that would define his life.

Education, Conversion, and Lausanne
In 1752 Gibbon entered Magdalen College, Oxford, a short and unhappy episode that he remembered with disenchantment. The most consequential event of his Oxford period was his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1753. His father reacted swiftly, sending him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to study under the Calvinist pastor Daniel Pavillard. There, after rigorous study and reflection, Gibbon returned to Protestantism in 1754. Lausanne transformed him. Immersed in classical literature and modern scholarship and fluent in French, he formed lasting friendships, notably with Georges Deyverdun and with Suzanne Curchod. His attachment to Curchod, later the wife of the French statesman Jacques Necker, ended under paternal pressure, but the episode remained an important memory in his private writings.

First Publications and Militia Service
Gibbon returned to England in 1758, already bent on an intellectual career. His first book, the French-language Essai sur l'Etude de la Litterature (1761), argued for a historically grounded criticism of classical texts and won him attention on the Continent. During the Seven Years' War he served as a captain in the Hampshire militia from 1760, an experience that sharpened his sense of military institutions and logistics, themes that later colored his historical judgments. These years also saw the discipline of note-taking and excerpting that would sustain his great project.

Travel and the Roman Design
After the militia was disbanded, Gibbon undertook travel on the Continent. In 1764 he visited Rome, where, as he famously recorded, the idea of writing the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire came to him among the ruins. The vision matured slowly. He read widely in Latin and Greek historians and in modern compilations, including the vast collections of Tillemont and Muratori, and began organizing the structure and sources for a monumental narrative that would join erudition and literary art.

Parliament and Public Life
Gibbon entered the House of Commons in 1774 as member for Liskeard. He supported Lord North's administration and in 1779 accepted a post as a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, a minor but salaried office. Although he never spoke frequently in the Commons, public life broadened his connections and gave him financial stability. After the fall of North in 1782 he lost the commission and, briefly, his seat, before returning to Parliament for Lymington in 1781 and serving until 1783. Among his closest friends in this period was John Baker Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield, a political ally and the friend who would become his literary executor.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776. It traced the story from the age of the Antonines through the early phases of disintegration, combining narrative sweep with dense, often ironic footnotes that displayed the range of Gibbon's sources. The second and third volumes followed in 1781, carrying the story into the Byzantine centuries. Volumes four through six, completed later and published in 1788, brought the work to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. His chapters on the rise of Christianity provoked immediate controversy; clergymen and scholars challenged his interpretation and use of sources, and Gibbon responded decisively with A Vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779). The debate confirmed his fame and fixed his reputation as a master of historical prose and skeptical inquiry.

Method, Style, and Sources
Gibbon's method balanced exhaustive reading with architectural planning. He compiled notebooks of excerpts and references, practiced careful source criticism, and compared ecclesiastical writers with secular chroniclers such as Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius. He prized continuity, cause and effect, and the interplay between political institutions, military power, religion, and manners. His style, at once stately and edged with irony, reflected his conviction that history should be literature as well as scholarship. Friends such as Deyverdun read and discussed drafts; printers and booksellers in London handled the complex apparatus of notes and references that he supervised closely from abroad.

Retreat to Lausanne
With his official income gone in 1782 and party fortunes shifting, Gibbon settled permanently in Lausanne the following year, joining his old friend Georges Deyverdun. The quiet of the Vaud suited his habits. He completed the last volumes of Decline and Fall there, corresponded with English friends, and enjoyed the sociability of local intellectual circles. He took a deep interest in Deyverdun's health and affairs, and after Deyverdun's death in 1789 he remained in the house they had shared. Events across the border in revolutionary France were a frequent subject of his letters to Lord Sheffield, which reveal both curiosity and apprehension.

Last Years, Illness, and Death
Gibbon's health, never robust, declined in the early 1790s. He traveled to England in 1793 to visit Lord Sheffield and to address a painful and recurrent physical complaint. Surgical procedures did not arrest his deterioration. He died in London on 16 January 1794 at the house of Lord Sheffield. In accordance with the wishes of his friends, he was interred in the Sheffield family vault at Fletching in Sussex. Lord Sheffield took charge of his papers and published the Memoirs of My Life and Writings, assembled from several drafts Gibbon had left behind, along with volumes of his miscellaneous works and correspondence.

Character and Relationships
In person Gibbon was sociable, fond of conversation and polished manners, yet intensely devoted to solitary study. His friendships were long and steady: Daniel Pavillard had guided him through the crisis of belief; Suzanne Curchod remained a poignant figure in his recollections even after her marriage to Jacques Necker; Georges Deyverdun provided companionship and a home in Lausanne; and Lord Sheffield offered political counsel, a London base, and finally the guardianship of his posthumous reputation. Gibbon's letters to these correspondents show tact, humor, and a measured candor, as well as an unwavering pride in his historical vocation.

Legacy
The Decline and Fall shaped modern historical writing by joining narrative ambition with a vast range of sources and by insisting on secular explanations for religious and political change. Later historians debated his judgments on Christianity, Byzantium, and the causes of imperial decay, but few denied the scale of his accomplishment. His prose set a standard for historical style in English; his footnotes defined a new kind of scholarly transparency; and his life, moving from Putney to Oxford, from Lausanne to Rome and back, exemplified the cosmopolitan habits of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Through the labors of friends such as Lord Sheffield and the enduring appeal of his great work, Edward Gibbon secured a place among the most influential historians of the Enlightenment.

Our collection contains 31 quotes who is written by Edward, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to Edward: Samuel Johnson (Author), Hypatia (Philosopher)