Edward Gibbon

About this figure

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English historian whose six-volume "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" remains one of the most influential works of history written in English. Born in Putney to a family of means, Gibbon was a sickly child whose formal education was repeatedly interrupted; a brief period at Magdalen College, Oxford, left him unimpressed with the university's rigor, and he was sent instead to Lausanne, Switzerland, where a Calvinist pastor was engaged to reverse a conversion to Catholicism Gibbon had undergone as a teenager. The years in Lausanne gave him fluency in French and a rigorous, self-directed education in classical literature and history that shaped the rest of his career.

Gibbon later served briefly in the Hampshire militia during the Seven Years' War and sat for over a decade in Parliament, as member for Liskeard from 1774 to 1780 and for Lymington from 1781 to 1784, though he took little active part in debate and valued the position chiefly for the access it gave him to London society and information. His central project, conceived, by his own account, while sitting among the ruins of Rome in 1764, traced the history of the Roman Empire from its height under the Antonine emperors of the second century through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and appeared in installments between 1776 and 1788. The work was immediately recognized for its command of sources and its elegant, often ironic prose, but chapters fifteen and sixteen, which attributed part of Rome's decline to the rise of Christianity and treated the early Church with skeptical detachment, provoked sustained criticism from clergy and other readers, controversy Gibbon addressed at length in later prefaces and a subsequent defense of his methods. He spent much of his later life in Lausanne, completing the final volumes there, before returning to England, where he died in London in 1794.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.