Ward's Book of Days.
Pages of interesting anniversaries.
What
happened on this day in history.
APRIL
27
th
On
this day in history
in 1737, was born Edward Gibbon.
Gibbon was an author and historian who wrote
The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire
, a continuous narration of
fifteen centuries of history.
Edward
Gibbon was born on 27
th
April 1737, at Putney, into a middle class
family, one of 7 siblings and the only one to survive infancy. He attended a
day school in Putney and, in 1746, moved on to Kingston Grammar School, and in
1749, he was admitted to Westminster School. Although his health was poor, he
became an avid reader and records in his journals, that he ‘early discovered
his proper food, of history'. In 1752, aged 15, he matriculated at Magdalen
College, Oxford, where he was disappointed by the lack of facilities for
reading history, and turned instead to theology. His studies led him to turn
to the Catholic faith, and he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in
1753, thereby, under the laws of the time, debarring himself from Oxford.
His
father, alarmed at the news, immediately dispatched him to Switzerland, to
lodge with a Calvinist minister, the Rev. Daniel Pavillard. There he mastered
the bulk of Classical Latin literature, and studied mathematics and French.
Meanwhile, Pavillard worked on him and eventually convinced him to abjure his
new faith, and he was readmitted to the Protestant communion in 1754. He wrote
that he ‘suspended my religious enquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief
in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of
Catholics and Protestants.’ In fact, he had not rejected any articles of
faith, either Catholic or Protestant, but had become disillusioned with
organised religion and its functions.
In
1758, his father settled an annuity on him, allowing him to devote his life to
study and writing. During the next 5 years, he read extensively and considered
many subjects for a historical composition. He spent some time in Paris and in
1764, went to Rome, where he made an exhaustive study of the ruins and antiquities. On 15
th
October 1764, he wrote that while in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli,
‘musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the friars were singing
vespers’ that the idea of writing of the decline and fall of the city, first
started to his mind.
In
1770, Gibbon’s father died, and after spending 2 years, finalising the estate, he set up house in Bentinck Street, London, and set his mind on Roman
history. He also entered fully into social life, joining fashionable clubs and
becoming known among men of letters. The first quarto volume of
Decline and Fall
was published in 1776, and was an immediate
success. In some quarters, it was considered scandalous, in that it dealt with
the great irony that, with the rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire
collapsed. Gibbon did not say, in as many words, that it was Christian beliefs
that destroyed the noble ethics of the Romans, but he implied that religion,
organised on a grand scale, had a debilitating effect on civilization.
In
1781, he published the second and third volumes of his history, bringing the
narrative down to the end of the empire in the West, and 1788, on his 51st
birthday, published the final three volumes.
Decline and Fall
is comprised of two parts, the first half covering
a period of 300 years to the end of the empire in the West, and the second
half dealing with the next 1,000 years, while the Roman Empire continued with
its capital at Byzantium. Gibbon argued that the fall of the Western empire
was not the end, but that its corporate state continued, although suffering an
asymptotic decline from the ideals to be found in classical literature. There
are some contradictions within the narrative. Gibbons often confuses material
decay with moral decadence, and asserts the morality of the Classical era,
while ignoring its incipient decadence. He
argues that the Roman Empire conquered the whole known world, ignoring the
fact that his generation knew nothing of the world, outside of the Roman
Empire. With all its shortcomings,
the work provides a coherent and lucid insight into the workings of the
Classical and medieval periods.
Gibbon
returned to Lausanne to write his memoirs, but hastened back to London in
1790, at the outbreak of the French Revolution. His
health declined, at a more rapid pace than the Roman Empire had ever done, and
he died on 16
th
January 1794. Gibbon is buried in Fletching, East
Sussex. [St Andrew & St Mary’s Church, Church Street, Fletching, East
Sussex TN22 3SS]
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