The present is a fleeting moment; the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.
As we ponder the decline and fall of quality television, people may recall the series Steptoe and Son which ran from 1962 to 1974. In this high-concept comedy about scuzzy rag-and-bone men, scriptwriters Galton and Simpson enjoyed attributing highfalutin’ ideas to the ambitious younger Steptoe, and one of them was to have him, in his scrapyard, make an incongruous la-di-da reference to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. Memory plays tricks, but I am sure there was also in one episode a reference to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. How mystifying this might have been to a prime-time audience of the day we can now only surmise. But Gibbon’s great history has passed into collective memory. That’s not to say it is often read today. Many great books go undisturbed (though see SF no.68). But I sometimes think that reading is not always the point: for many of us it seems important that we simply know Gibbon exists. Some will say the same of Proust. But while Proust’s first translator borrowed his title from Shakespeare, Gibbon donated his to Evelyn Waugh, making ‘Decline and Fall’ an unforgettable trope.
Much less familiar is Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life (1796), one of the first modern autobiographies, composed in the vacancy left by the completion of his enormous masterpiece. It was a huge vacancy, but time was short. In his fifty-second year Gibbon had a conviction that his life was nearly over, so he set about describing his own ascent. There is a dutiful
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Subscribe now or Sign inThe present is a fleeting moment; the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.
As we ponder the decline and fall of quality television, people may recall the series Steptoe and Son which ran from 1962 to 1974. In this high-concept comedy about scuzzy rag-and-bone men, scriptwriters Galton and Simpson enjoyed attributing highfalutin’ ideas to the ambitious younger Steptoe, and one of them was to have him, in his scrapyard, make an incongruous la-di-da reference to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son. Memory plays tricks, but I am sure there was also in one episode a reference to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. How mystifying this might have been to a prime-time audience of the day we can now only surmise. But Gibbon’s great history has passed into collective memory. That’s not to say it is often read today. Many great books go undisturbed (though see SF no.68). But I sometimes think that reading is not always the point: for many of us it seems important that we simply know Gibbon exists. Some will say the same of Proust. But while Proust’s first translator borrowed his title from Shakespeare, Gibbon donated his to Evelyn Waugh, making ‘Decline and Fall’ an unforgettable trope. Much less familiar is Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life (1796), one of the first modern autobiographies, composed in the vacancy left by the completion of his enormous masterpiece. It was a huge vacancy, but time was short. In his fifty-second year Gibbon had a conviction that his life was nearly over, so he set about describing his own ascent. There is a dutiful amount of family history: his improvident father was, for example, always a vexation – ‘The vanities of his youth were severely punished by the solitude and sorrow of his declining age.’ There are nice pictures of childhood: aged 9, crossing Putney Heath in a carriage with his mother on his way to school, he is warned that he now must learn to think and act for himself. Additionally, there are accounts of his time in the Hampshire militia and as an MP. But the best parts, the compelling parts, are the insights into his methods and personality. And, indeed, into his medical condition, a nice corrective to the vanities of conceited and paranoid hypochondriacs such as myself. Gibbon was a short man – perhaps no more than five feet – with a big head and red hair. He suffered from gout and what has been retrospectively diagnosed as hydrocele, an embarrassing swelling of the scrotum, and erysipelas, a disfiguring bacterial skin infection. None of this affected his genius. Nor, from all accounts, his mood: Gibbon was as affable as he was articulate. Yet for such a precise thinker, such a forensic historian, such a master of clarity in expression, the editorial history of the Memoirs reveals a man curiously indecisive: writing your own history, the evidence of Gibbon suggests, may be more difficult than writing that of Rome. The few precedents for an autobiography included St Augustine’s Confessions, Caesar’s de Bello Gallico and Benvenuto Cellini’s rambunctious Vita of 1556–8. Of course, Gibbon’s friend Rousseau published his own autobiographical Les Confessions which appeared between 1782 and 1789, and Casanova and Thomas de Quincey soon followed. But it is only with an effort of imagination that we can realize the originality of Gibbon’s project: a man telling his own story – ‘no one is so well-qualified as myself to describe the series of my thoughts and actions’. This is a very modern project. There were six drafts, each slightly different, all overlapping, found in the papers left on Gibbon’s death in 1770. His friend John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield, assumed the job of editing the unpublished jumble. In 1796, Miscellaneous Works appeared in print. A stand-alone Memoirs appeared in 1827. In 1896, John Murray published Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, printed verbatim from hitherto unpublished mss. The Everyman edition of 1910 is based on Sheffield’s redaction. The Penguin edition of 1984 has a heroic Introduction by Betty Radice who makes very good sense of a publishing muddle that is nearly bewildering. This Penguin edition is itself based on Georges A. Bonnard’s 1966 edition of Memoirs of My Life. Meanwhile, Murray’s was perhaps the very first use by a publisher of the term ‘autobiography’ in our modern sense (although in 1841 Carlyle had lamented the lack of a Shakespeare autobiography). Sheffield’s editing processes were free and ingenious, confusing and annoying to more academic followers. His was the work of a helpful friend, cautious about content and careless with method, rather than a literary scholar. And Sheffield had a certain delicacy. Gibbon described his first venture into print as ‘the loss of my literary maidenhead’ which was bowdlerized to ‘circumstances and period of my first publication’. Thus, the penetration of and by a virgin became, in Sheffield’s edit, a matter of polite bureaucracy. What the Memoirs make clear is that Decline and Fall was a venture of his middle age, preceded by his Essai sur l’étude de la littérature of 1761 and by the unpublished History of the Liberty of the Swiss. And Gibbon had been, of course, not just a traveller, but a Grand Tourist. Many Grand Tourists stopped in Paris, bought gay clothes and experimented with brothels. Indeed, Chesterfield’s very worldly advice to his wandering son included free experimentation with prostitutes. Gibbon’s approach was altogether more serious, ultimately preferring the life of the mind to that of a lover or a husband. The one flirtation he had, in Lausanne in 1757, before his Grand Tour of Italy, with 48 49 Filling a Vacancy Filling a Vacancy Suzanne Curchod, was brought to an end by his father’s disapproval of her religion. ‘I sighed as a lover,’ Gibbon wrote, ‘I obeyed as a son.’ His prep for the 1764–5 Grand Tour included the inevitable Horace, Juvenal, Strabo, Pliny and Virgil, but also the German antiquarian-geographer Philipp Clüver’s Italia Antiqua which he read in both Latin and Greek. He also instructed himself in coins and medals. Crucially, he studied Nicolas Bergier’s Histoire des grands chemins de l’Empire Romain of 1728. This allowed him to make methodological calculations about routes and journey times. Not all of Italy enthralled him. Of Venice he experienced ‘some hours of astonishment and some days of disgust’. His memoirs also reveal a glorious eclecticism in his private library. Books here included a history of Norway and Frederick II’s book on falconry. Wonderfully, Gibbon also possessed the first European edition of the Bhagavad Gita, published in English in 1785. Two aspects of Gibbon’s character are dominant. First, his meticulous research. His formal training had been slight and he was also something of an autodidact: he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1752 and promptly came down again the following year. However, he had what he described as an ‘early and invincible love of reading’ and a memory both ‘capacious and retentive’. Add to this what he described as a mind distinguished by its powers of extension and penetration, and you have the specification for a great historian. T hen there is his somewhat melancholy, but never gloomy, view of the writer’s life. He wrote the last sentence of the Decline on 27 June 1787 in his summer house on the banks of Lake Geneva: ‘It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.’ Soon, however, he would be thrilled by the success of what had become a surprise bestseller: ‘My book was on every table and almost on every toilette,’ he says in the Memoirs. After Decline, he began to put on weight. The man who calculated the distance between Italian towns now calculated the remaining time left to him. ‘The abbreviation of time and the failure of hope will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.’ Not, then, a black view of life, but a brown one. Gibbon is very much on my mind as I contemplate a memoir of my own. His idea of an autobiography was to write a ‘history of my own mind’. My idea is to write a history of things my mind has coveted. Gibbon was inspired by Pope’s Homer and the Arabian Nights. I was inspired by Ferrari. Gibbon’s inspirations were tragedy, fear and pity: mine was style. But that’s for another day. How true must memoirs be? ‘Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which Nature has confined us,’ Gibbon writes. This question of imagination is interesting. Was he like Proust who invented nothing, but changed everything? It’s been said that all memoirs are in truth novels (and that all novels are memoirs). Memoirs tend to be about others. Autobiographies tend to be about self. Using this test, Gibbon’s Memoirs is surely an autobiography. He explains the process of self-portrayal: ‘The discovery of my own weakness was the first symptom of taste.’ When Gibbon uses the word ‘taste’ it is very much in the eighteenth-century sense: not so much competitive discrimination as an elevated refinement understood collectively. No one who has read them will ever forget the opening words of Decline and Fall, majestic, but almost whimsical too: ‘In the second century of the Christian aera, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.’ The first sentence of the Memoirs is more practical: ‘A lively desire of knowing and recording our ancestors so generally prevails that it must depend on the influence of some common principle in the minds of men.’ But the orotund cadences, the perfect sense of rhythm, words matched to line length create an identical effect: authoritative, but a little sceptical too. Nor would anyone forget Gibbon’s tragi-comic account of finishing his great work: ‘But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion and that whatever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian might be short and precarious.’ What sort of man emerges here? ‘Wit I have none’, he says, but he is unfair on himself. He was affectionate and amiable. He wrote in a very fine hand, as manually dextrous as his prose was fluid. His friendships were well-maintained and long-lasting. Of course, his manners and vision were High Tory, but in that restricted milieu he was liberal and decent. Gibbon’s journey was from Putney to Switzerland and Rome, then back to London’s West End where he died on 16 January 1794. And then to Sussex: he is buried at Fletching church, near Uckfield, just outside the grounds of Sheffield Park, his friend’s seat. That ‘blind and boyish taste for exotic history’ paired with match less English prose and vivid observation of detail made Gibbon’s reputation. The last line of the Memoirs doubts ‘the vanity of authors who presume the immortality of their name and writing’. I hope I have been able to correct that misapprehension here.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Stephen Bayley 2026
About the contributor
Stephen Bayley is a recovering design guru. His view of the world is an eclectic one: as a boy, while watching the Indianapolis 500 on television, he was also reading eighteenth-century literature. He is presently chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust.
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