Edward Gibbon

English · 1737 to 1794

Born on May 8, 1737, in Putney, Surrey, Edward Gibbon was the only one of seven children to survive infancy, a sickly boy raised largely by his aunt after his mother died when he was ten. He read voraciously and erratically, devouring histories in his father's library before any formal discipline took hold. At fourteen he was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, which he later dismissed as the most idle and unprofitable period of his life. There, after reading Catholic apologetics, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and his alarmed father packed him off to Lausanne to be reconverted under a Calvinist pastor. The five years in Switzerland made him a European scholar, fluent in French and steeped in the classics. On October 15, 1764, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome as friars sang vespers in the former temple of Jupiter, he conceived the idea of writing the city's decline. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, tracing more than thirteen centuries from the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople. Its chapters on the rise of Christianity provoked lasting controversy for their cool, ironic skepticism. He sat in Parliament for several years, voting reliably and speaking never. He published his Memoirs of My Life posthumously, a model of measured English prose. After completing the final volume he wrote that he could not conceal the first emotions of joy on recovering his freedom. He died in London on January 16, 1794, at the age of fifty-six, from complications of a long-neglected swelling.