Edward Gibbon

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n80005416

found: Die Freiheit der Schweizer, 2015: title page (Edward Gibbon) jacket (Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) is considered the father of modern historiography. He lived a long time in Lausanne)

Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794), historian, was born at Lime Grove, Putney, on 27 April 1737, the son of Edward Gibbon (1707–1770), MP and farmer, and his first wife, Judith (1709/10–1747), the daughter of James Porten. His life reveals much about literary relations between England and Europe, about the changing fortunes of the Enlightenment in England, and about conditions of authorship during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Ancestry and early life

The Gibbons were a well-established Kentish family, a branch of which had in the seventeenth century moved to London and become involved in commerce. Gibbon's great-grandfather had been a linen draper, and his grandfather, the first Edward Gibbon (1666–1736), was a successful man of business. Happily his ‘opinions were subordinate to his interest’ (Autobiographies, 10) and accordingly, notwithstanding his Jacobite inclinations, as an army contractor the continental campaigns of William III had made him a wealthy man. In 1716 he became a director of the South Sea Company, and inevitably ‘his fortune was overwhelmed in the shipwreck of the year twenty, and the labours of thirty years were blasted in a single day’ (ibid., 11). A fortune of over £100,000 was reduced to £10,000. Yet he was unconquered by adversity, and had perhaps managed to protect some of his assets by means of prudent transferrals of property to close relations in his wife's family. He rebuilt his fortune, and at his death in 1736 he was once more a man of substance.

In 1707 had been born his only son, Edward Gibbon, the father of the historian. The grandfather was a Jacobite of great financial acumen; the son inherited the Jacobitism, but not the shrewdness; and in the grandson all trace of the grandfather's abilities and opinions was extinguished. Edward Gibbon senior had been educated initially by the nonjuror William Law (1686–1761), who according to a family tradition portrayed his pupil as Flatus in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1732); Flatus, whose ‘sanguine temper and strong passions promise him so much happiness in everything, that he is always cheated, and satisfied with nothing’. Thereafter Edward Gibbon senior attended Westminster School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; he entered the House of Commons in 1734 as member for Petersfield, in which neighbourhood the Gibbons owned a considerable estate. He moved in Jacobite circles in Hampshire, and was in at the kill when Walpole was forced from office. On 3 June 1736 he married Judith, daughter of James Porten, a neighbour of the Gibbons in Putney, and it was from this union, ‘a marriage of inclination and esteem’ (Autobiographies, 19), that Edward Gibbon the historian was born, some five months after the death of his grandfather, on 27 April 1737. There were six further children, none of whom lived for more than a year, and Mrs Gibbon herself died on 26 December 1747. Gibbon had been largely neglected by his mother, and his father—cast into depression by the death of his wife—was beginning to advance down the path of undramatic yet unremitting dissipation (entertainment, gambling, neglect of business) which was to erode the family wealth and prevent Gibbon's circumstances from ever being truly easy. The sickly child was cared for by his aunt, Catherine Porten, who instilled in him that love of reading which on her death in 1786 Gibbon cited as ‘still the pleasure and glory of my life’ (Letters, 3.46). His early education was entrusted initially to a private tutor, the clergyman, minor author, and grammarian John Kirkby, and then to the grammar school at Kingston. In January 1748 he entered Westminster School. The shock of arrival at this public school, which Gibbon later recalled as ‘a cavern of fear and sorrow’ (Autobiographies, 60), was mitigated by the fact that his aunt Porten undertook at the same time to run a boarding-house for the school, and it was with her that Gibbon lodged during his two years at Westminster. In 1750 a mysterious nervous illness obliged him to leave off formal schooling and take the waters in Bath. During the next two years the uncertain state of his health inhibited any regular schemes of education. However, Gibbon's constitution suddenly recovered at the end of 1751, and his father then made two serious errors of judgement which were full of implication for the future life of his son. In the first place, and on the recommendation of his close friends David and Lucy Mallet, he decided to entrust Gibbon's education to the feckless and neglectful Revd Philip Francis. It was clear within two months that the experiment had been a failure, and in response to this disappointment Edward Gibbon senior thereupon embraced ‘a singular and desperate measure’ (ibid., 56). He resolved to send his son without further ado to Oxford; and thereby committed his second blunder.

Residence in Oxford and conversion to Catholicism

Gibbon emerged from childhood with an uneven education, but a great and unblunted appetite for reading. Edward Gibbon senior had arranged for his son to proceed to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, and in April 1752 Gibbon arrived in Oxford ‘with a stock of erudition which might have puzzled a Doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed’ (Autobiographies, 394). In his Memoirs Gibbon drew a damning picture of Oxford, as a university sunk in port and prejudice, and almost completely indifferent to its educational mission. It is a picture which seems now to have been overdrawn. But that the university failed him, there can be no doubt. His first tutor, Dr Waldegrave, was a learned and pious man who seems to have taken his duties seriously, but who was out of his depth when it came to directing the studies of this unusual student. When Waldegrave departed for a college living in Sussex, Gibbon was transferred ‘with the rest of his live stock’ to Dr Winchester, who, according to Gibbon, ‘well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform’ (ibid., 81). Deprived of any regular course of instruction, Gibbon soon fell into habits of indolence and absenteeism, interspersed with bouts of intense but miscellaneous reading—what at the end of his life he was to call the ‘blind activity of idleness’ (ibid., 84).

In the vacancy left by study, Gibbon pursued a course of reading which insensibly disposed him to Roman Catholicism. In one draft of the Memoirs (and one only), he attributed his apostasy to a brilliant but perverse reading of Conyers Middleton on miracles: he alleges that he construed the ironic inexplicitness of Middleton's exposé of the groundlessness of the Catholic church's claim to miraculous powers as in fact an assertion of its continuing validity. Gibbon claimed that his inference was not ‘absurd’ (Autobiographies, 85). But in the 1790s Gibbon had strong reasons for wishing to distance himself from Middleton, and casting the earlier writer as a causal agent in one of the great catastrophes of his life may have seemed a tempting strategy. A further awkward consideration is that, if we wish to adhere to the theory of Middleton's agency, we have to postulate a Gibbon who was unable to read irony—surely a great improbability. Furthermore, John Baker Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield, seems to have been sceptical about the story of Middleton's agency in Gibbon's conversion. At this point in his edited version of the Memoirs he inserts a footnote reporting that Gibbon spoke to him about his conversion to Catholicism only once, and on that occasion he attributed his decision to a reading of the polemical writings of the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons (E. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works, 1796, 1.45 n.*).

Whatever the origin of the impulse, the fact is not in doubt. On 8 June 1753 Gibbon ‘abjured the errors of heresy’ and was received into the Romish faith by Baker, one of the chaplains of the Sardinian ambassador. If the ‘humanity of the age’ (Autobiographies, 88) was averse to persecution, there were still in 1753 numerous penal statutes in force against Roman Catholics, and the affair made sufficient stir for Lewis, a Roman Catholic bookseller of Covent Garden who had acted as go-between, to be summoned before the privy council and questioned. The crisis elicited from Gibbon's father a characteristic response of contradictory extremity. His first thought was that scepticism was the best antidote to credulity, and so Gibbon was sent to the poet and sceptic David Mallet, by ‘whose philosophy [he] was rather scandalized than reclaimed’ (ibid., 130). He next sought the advice of his relative Edward Eliot, who recommended a period of residence in Switzerland. Accordingly Gibbon was entrusted to the care of Mr Pavilliard, a Reformed minister of Lausanne. After leaving London on 19 June 1753, he arrived at Pavilliard's dwelling, 16 rue Cité-derrière, on 30 June.

Exile in Lausanne

Gibbon's first period of residence in Lausanne (1753–8) was one of remarkable development on several fronts. In his Memoirs he fully recognized the significance of this episode in his life; ‘whatever have been the fruits of my education, they must be ascribed to the fortunate shipwreck which cast me on the shores of the Leman lake’ (Autobiographies, 239). If it was indeed at Lausanne that, as he was to put it in another draft, ‘the statue was discovered in the block of marble’ (ibid., 152), then substantial credit for releasing Gibbon's true identity must rest with Pavilliard, whom his charge would later praise as ‘the first father of my mind’ (ibid., 297). His wisdom, tact, and kindness were evident immediately in the steps he took to humanize the severe regime which Edward Gibbon senior wished to impose on the son who had displeased him. In recognizing so quickly how to handle the latter and negotiate with the former, the Swiss pastor must have formed swift and accurate judgements of the characters of both father and son. The first priority was the need to rectify Gibbon's religious opinions. Here Pavilliard found that he was engaged in an intellectual war of attrition, having to dispatch each separate error individually. The seriousness of mind Gibbon demonstrated in demanding to be conquered, rather than merely capitulating, is surely admirable. It was only when he chanced upon what he took to be a decisive argument against transubstantiation (which may have been a confused recollection of John Tillotson's celebrated argument against that doctrine) that ‘the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream’ (ibid., 137). On Christmas day 1754, he took communion, returned to protestantism, and ‘suspended [his] Religious enquiries’ (ibid., 137): a form of words compatible with many different shades of both belief and unbelief.

This indiscretion now behind him (and some spectacular losses at faro with a Mr Gee atoned for), under Pavilliard's guidance Gibbon began a programme of serious and methodical reading in classical and modern literature. In the first place, he began to repair the shortcomings in his reading facility in Latin. Thereafter he studied mathematics, and the logic of De Crousaz. Although he left off these subjects before his mind was ‘hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence’ (Autobiographies, 142), they nevertheless must have reinforced the ability for analysis which gradually began to assert itself in the notes Gibbon kept of his reading. Gibbon followed the advice of Locke, and ‘digested’ his reading into a ‘large Commonplace-book’, although this was a practice concerning which he later had misgivings, agreeing with Johnson that ‘what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed’ (ibid., 143–4). It was at this time, too, when the possibilities of the life of the mind were becoming vivid to him, and when he may have first suspected the extent of his own abilities, that Gibbon first encountered some of the writers who would most influence his mature work: Blaise Pascal, Jean-Philippe de la Bléterie, and Pietro Giannone. In due course he became sufficiently emboldened to enter into correspondence on points of classical philology with established scholars such as Jean-Baptiste Crevier, Johann Breitinger, and Johann Gesner. It is worth bearing in mind that Gibbon received his most effectual education in an environment of European classicism, and that his earliest scholarly writings suggest aspirations to a similar career for himself. Moreover, at this stage in his life French was for him the natural language of composition.

In the autumn of 1755 Gibbon's father gave permission for his son, accompanied by Pavilliard, to undertake a tour of Switzerland. The purpose of the tour was not to imbibe ‘the sublime beauties of Nature’ (Autobiographies, 144), but rather to view at first hand the different constitutions of the various cantons, to visit the most substantial towns and cities, and to make the acquaintance of the most eminent persons. In what may be a foretaste of his mature historical interests, he recalls being particularly struck by the abbey of Einsidlen, a palace ‘erected by the potent magic of Religion’ (ibid., 145).

Early in his residence at Lausanne Gibbon had begun the first of the two important friendships of his life. Georges Deyverdun, a young Swiss of good family but only moderate abilities, became the companion of his studies. Later, in 1757, Gibbon met Suzanne Curchod (who was subsequently to become Mme Necker, and the mother of Mme de Staël): here he formed a romantic, but ultimately fruitless, attachment which was to founder on the rocks of implacable paternal opposition. Two further connections Gibbon made while at Lausanne throw suggestive light over his intellectual, rather than emotional, life. He became the friend of a local protestant minister, François-Louis Allamand, with whom he debated Locke's metaphysics: by engaging with Allamand's dissimulated scepticism, Gibbon ‘acquired some dexterity in the use of ... philosophic weapons’ (Autobiographies, 147). Second, when Voltaire took up residence in Lausanne, Gibbon (who was now moving in polite Vaudois society) was occasionally invited to the theatrical performances and the supper parties which followed them. Gibbon later said that as a young man he had ‘rated [Voltaire] above his real magnitude’ (ibid., 148). Certainly in the later volumes of the Decline and Fall he permits himself some sharp asides at Voltaire's expense. Nevertheless, the Frenchman's influence is palpable in the first volume of the history, and it is not difficult to imagine the young Englishman being inspired, not by Voltaire's scandalous philosophy, to be sure, but rather by the way in which Voltaire embodied literary celebrity. Perhaps uncoincidentally, it was during his last few months at Lausanne that Gibbon began to sketch the outline and collect the materials for his own first literary work, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature.

Return to England: militia service and the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature

On 8 May 1755 (his son's birthday, according to the new calendar) Edward Gibbon senior had married Dorothea Patton (d. 1796), introducing her to his son by letter as the ‘Lady that saved your life at Westminster by recommending Dr. Ward when you was given over by the regular Physicians’ (Private Letters, 1.9). Gibbon approached his stepmother with understandable, although happily unnecessary, apprehension. He would soon be able to entrust his journal with the sentiment that ‘I love her as a companion, a friend and a mother’ (Gibbon's Journal, 72). On Gibbon's return to England his father, whose financial difficulties had become pressing, persuaded him to permit the cancelling of the entail on the family estate; much-needed money might then be raised by a mortgage on the property. In return, Gibbon was to receive an annuity of £300. He thus achieved a measure of independence, but was still in fact very much under his father's control. When Gibbon informed his father that while in Lausanne he had fallen in love with the pretty, but penniless, Suzanne Curchod, his father's opposition to the match was unyielding. This intransigence placed Gibbon in a dilemma between marriage and scholarship, since his annuity was insufficient for him to study and be a husband. In his Memoirs Gibbon recorded his capitulation to his father's insistence in a phrase which has done him lasting harm among the sentimental; ‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son’ (Autobiographies, 239). The literariness of the expression (it alludes to a phrase in Corneille's Polyeucte) has been construed as coldness. Yet in its allusiveness it might equally hint at the central place already occupied by literature in Gibbon's emotional, as well as intellectual, existence.

Between 1758 and 1763 Gibbon's life was divided between the family estate at Buriton and his London lodgings in New Bond Street. In London he had never enough money to cut the figure he desired. Nevertheless he frequented the cosmopolitan and philosophic salon of the francophile Lady Hervey, sought relaxation in regular theatregoing, and was often to be found in the company of David Mallet. In Hampshire his life was less fashionable but more profitable. For country pursuits he had little relish, although his letters record that he occasionally went hunting and accompanied his father to the local races. It was also out of filial duty that Gibbon became involved in Hampshire politics, where his father continued to be active. Edward Gibbon senior's scheme to buy his son a seat in the House of Commons for £1500 eventually dwindled into Gibbon's contesting the seat of Petersfield in the election of 1761, and emerging as an honourable loser at little expense. But even amid these distractions he was able to pursue a literary life of sorts. The library at Buriton was acknowledged to be his ‘peculiar domain’ (Autobiographies, 248). It was a mixed collection of books, including ‘much trash of the last age ... much High Church divinity and politics’, but also ‘some valuable Editions of the Classics and Fathers’ (ibid., 248). On the advice of Mallet he began to re-acquaint himself with ‘the purity, the grace, the idiom, of the English style’ (ibid., 251) by studying Swift and Addison, and some of the qualities of his mature prose might be traced to the contrasting but complementary influences of these writers. At this stage of his life Gibbon attended church for morning and evening service. He records that the reflections prompted by the lessons (but not the sermons) drove him to Grotius's De veritate religionis Christianae, and thence—he implies for the first time—to a ‘regular tryal of the evidence of Christianity’ (ibid., 249); a telling although silent judgement on the circumstances of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. It was also at this time that he purchased the twenty volumes of the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, a work which eventually would be of major importance for the Decline and Fall.

The main claim on Gibbon's time during these years, however, was the South Hampshire militia, in which he served as captain and his father as major. Their commissions were dated 12 June 1759; the regiment was embodied in May 1760; and it was disembodied on 23 December 1762. At the end of his life Gibbon was willing to credit the militia with bestowing on him a ‘larger introduction into the English World’ (Autobiographies, 401); it was, for instance, through the militia that Gibbon met John Wilkes. Yet, despite leading him into such lively company, even at the time this ‘mimic Bellona’ was more resented than enjoyed (ibid., 299).

It was during his militia service that Gibbon published his first book, and thereby lost (as he put it) his literary maidenhead. In France, philosophes such as D'Alembert had disparaged as minute and arid the work of the érudits, or scholars, especially those associated with the Académie des Inscriptions. The Essai sur l'étude de la littérature (1761), which Gibbon had begun in Lausanne, and which he had completed at Buriton, sought to reconcile the érudits and the philosophes by arguing that ‘all the faculties of the mind may be exercised and displayed by [the] study of ancient litterature’ (Autobiographies, 167). The argument of the Essai was a temperate reproach to what Gibbon saw as the intellectual arrogance of the philosophes. But, as Gibbon would later acknowledge, stylistically the Essai was an act of prolonged homage to Montesquieu.

In 1762 Gibbon began also to revolve subjects for a work of biographical or historical narrative, entertaining the possibility of writing on Ralegh, on the history of the liberty of the Swiss, and on the history of Florence under the Medicis. On closer inspection, he decided to reject all these possibilities, but the very fact of their being weighed is a sign of growing literary ambition. The form which that ambition was to take was determined by the next major event in Gibbon's life. ‘According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English Gentleman’ (Autobiographies, 198); Gibbon's father had agreed, after some travailing, to pay for a European tour. Within seven days of the demobilization of the South Hampshire militia Gibbon was making preparations. He left Dover on 25 January 1763, and arrived in Paris three days later.

Grand tour

Gibbon found Paris thronged with English, but the Essai distinguished him to some extent among the crowd, and procured for him the reception of a man of letters. He was received by Mme Geoffrin, engaged in one or two inconsequential flirtations, and mingled (albeit warily) with philosophes such as Helvétius and D'Holbach. In May he travelled, by way of Dijon and Besançon, to Lausanne, where he was to remain until the spring of 1764. He resumed his acquaintance with Voltaire and with Suzanne Curchod, and it was apparently at Ferney that the final rupture with Suzanne occurred. Gibbon has been reproached for coldness in the way he ended this attachment; if so, it was more probably the result of inexperience than calculated brutality.

Gibbon's early months in Lausanne were marked by some mildly riotous episodes in which he and some other young Englishmen lodging in the town, too much enlivened by burgundy, created nocturnal disturbances. One of these companions was William Guise, with whom Gibbon would the following year make the tour of Italy. Later they were joined by John Baker Holroyd. A cavalryman in the regular army, Holroyd initially teased Gibbon over his militia career, and their friendship began slowly, although it was to become the most important relationship of Gibbon's adult life. He now began to prepare himself for what promised to be the most valuable portion of his tour with some hard study of Italian antiquity, and composed a ‘Recueil géographique’ of ancient Italy. The intervals of study were filled with largely innocent recreation among the various sociétés in which the youth of Lausanne were allowed to meet.

The extension of Gibbon's tour to Italy was imperilled at almost the last moment by his father's financial difficulties, but these were for the moment resolved. Gibbon and Guise left Lausanne on 18 April 1764, crossed the Alps, and spent the first summer in Florence. Here Gibbon occupied himself in learning Italian. In the autumn they moved on to Rome, and (at least as Gibbon chose later to present it) the conception of his life's work:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. (Autobiographies, 302)

There are good reasons for believing that it did not happen quite like that. But there seems no reason to doubt that the experience of this tour enriched Gibbon's mind ‘with a new stock of ideas and images’ (ibid., 302), and influenced the direction and nature of the Decline and Fall. From Rome they moved to Naples and Venice, which was not to Gibbon's taste: ‘a fine bridge spoilt by two Rows of houses upon it, and a large square decorated with the worst Architecture I ever yet saw’ (Letters, 1.193). These final months of Gibbon's tour were marred by the embarrassment of his credit being stopped. It was apparently a misunderstanding, although one symptomatic of the complicated state of the family's finances, which required Gibbon to forget the idea of prolonging his travels in the south of France. He was back in England by late June 1765, but not before he had paused for ten days in Paris to visit Suzanne Curchod, now transformed from a young Swiss woman on the verge of destitution and spinsterhood into the wife of the wealthy financier Jacques Necker.

The search for direction, 1765–1770

On his return from the continent Gibbon resumed the pattern of life he had formed before his tour. He retained his commission in the militia, rising to the ranks of major and, in 1768, lieutenant-colonel. This involved him in only a month of drilling each year, but he gradually found this connection more irksome and less diverting, and consequently he resigned his commission in 1770. When in London he frequented clubs such as the Cocoa Tree (still in the 1760s the haunt of tories), the excitingly named, although actually respectable, School of Vice, and the Romans, a weekly gathering of those who had made the tour of Italy. However, Gibbon's ability to enjoy London society was diminished by the worsening state of the family finances, and by the deteriorating state of his father's health. Gibbon devoted much time and energy to attempts at remedying the former, but his father, made petulant and suspicious by illness, frustrated his son's schemes for improvement. Only after Edward Gibbon senior's death could decisive action be taken.

Relief from these difficulties came in the form of friendship, study, and writing. In 1765 Georges Deyverdun had come to London, and was to spend the next four summers at Buriton. In due course he obtained a post as clerk in the northern department of the office of the secretary of state, and he and Gibbon began to collaborate on various literary projects. He helped Gibbon by translating for him the German sources for a projected ‘History of the Swiss republics’, which Gibbon began to compose in French. David Hume (who was then under-secretary in the office where Deyverdun worked) encouraged Gibbon to persevere with this history, advising him only that if he were writing for posterity English was preferable to French. But when in 1767 the work in progress was read to a London literary circle, and was coolly received, Gibbon decided to abandon it. Their next project was a literary periodical, the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne (1768–9), which was designed to inform continental readers of developments in English literature. But since it was published in London and not distributed abroad among its intended readership, it unsurprisingly failed to achieve its goal. Other works, if not immediately more fruitful, can nevertheless be judged more positively when viewed in the long perspective of Gibbon's literary career, either because they indicate approaches (albeit hesitant) towards the subject matter of the Decline and Fall, or because they display the gradual forging of the technical and stylistic resources on which the great history would rely. Gibbon later regretted the Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of Vergil's ‘Aeneid’ (1770), his anonymous attack on Warburton's theory of Virgil as an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries. But it shows Gibbon beginning to deploy irony for polemical purposes, and refining his understanding of the handling of historical evidence. The unpublished essay on oriental history, ‘Sur la monarchie des Mèdes’ (dated 1758–63 by Sheffield, but which mentions the death of J. P. Bougainville and which must therefore postdate 1763), shows Gibbon reflecting with productive criticism on the principles and practice of philosophic history. Other tantalizing hints about Gibbon's scholarly projects in the later 1760s point forward to the Decline and Fall, in particular ‘an ample dissertation on the miraculous darkness of the passion’, which has not survived, but in which Gibbon tells us that he ‘privately drew [his] conclusions from the silence of an unbelieving age’ (Autobiographies, 285).

Independence and publication of the Decline and Fall, volume 1, 1770–1776

Gibbon's father died on 12 November 1770, his constitution undermined by financial anxiety. In one draft of the Memoirs Gibbon acknowledged that ‘the tears of a son are seldom lasting’, adding that his ‘father's death, not unhappy for himself, was the only event that could save me from an hopeless life of obscurity and indigence’ (Autobiographies, 288). Sheffield cautiously omitted these phrases from his conflated text of the various manuscripts. Yet it is the case that the death of his father did usher in a period of Gibbon's life when he was able to reside in London and cut a more prominent and prosperous figure there. Gibbon's friendship with Holroyd had steadily strengthened, to the point where he often stayed at Holroyd's Sussex estate, Sheffield Place. Guided by Holroyd, who was an efficient and practical man of business, the Gibbon family finances were reorganized and simplified (although it would be years before the Buckinghamshire property of Lenborough was disposed of, and even then not satisfactorily). But by the end of 1772 Buriton had been let, Mrs Gibbon had retired to Bath, and Gibbon was elegantly housed in 7 Bentinck Street, Cavendish Square—a fashionable part of London. He began to entertain, and socialized at Boodle's Club. For the first time he could arrange his life entirely in accordance with his own wishes; and only now did he enjoy ‘the first of earthly blessings, independence’ (ibid., 307). In 1774 multiple honours descended upon him: he became a member of Johnson's Club, ‘a large and luminous constellation of British stars’ (ibid., 307 n. 27); he was admitted as a mason; and in October 1774 he was returned as the member of parliament for Liskeard, thanks to the influence of his kinsman Edward Eliot. At almost the same time as he was returned to parliament Gibbon had been negotiating the contract for the Decline and Fall with the eminent firm of Strahan and Cadell. For during the previous years, Gibbon had ‘gradually advanced from the wish to the hope, from the hope to the design, from the design to the execution, of my historical work, of whose nature and limits I had yet a very inadequate notion’ (ibid., 411). The press was set to work in June 1775, and on 17 February 1776 volume 1 of the Decline and Fall appeared at a price of 1 guinea, unbound.

The book sold with great rapidity. The first edition of volume 1—which almost at the last minute Strahan had ordered to be doubled in size from 500 to 1000 copies—was exhausted ‘in a few days’ (Autobiographies, 311). A second followed in June 1776, a third in 1777, and the fourth in 1781. Nor does Gibbon seem to have exaggerated when at the end of his life he recalled that ‘my book was on every table, and almost on every toilette’ (ibid., 311). From the chorus of praise, the admiration of Adam Ferguson, Joseph Warton, and Horace Walpole must have been deeply gratifying. It was, however, David Hume's letter of congratulation which according to Gibbon ‘overpaid the labour of ten years’ (ibid., 311–12). But its praise was laced with the