Gibbon Observed

Abstract

The preliminary aim of this paper is documentary: to clarify and confirm the dating of Gibbon's famous essay ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’. According to a new view, this essay may reasonably be read as if it were written in the early months of 1780. The obvious objection to this position is that, in a now familiar passage from his Memoirs, Gibbon explicitly assures us that the ‘General Observations’ were written before 1774, and thus in all probability before 1773, when he began writing his History. I argue that we should believe what Gibbon tells us. But though the discussion originates in the dry terrain of dates, important interpretative consequences follow. These stem from the interest of the ‘General Observations’ in their own right — a panoramic view of ancient and modern history as broad as the entire range of Gibbon's History — and from their insertion at the end of Volume III of that work (published in 1781). Were the ‘Observations’ so revised as to be virtually written in sequence (as the new view supposes), or do they present a more problematic case — being written before the beginning of Volume I but inserted at the end of an independent text completed eight years later? Consideration of this point raises issues fundamental to the understanding of Gibbon's compositional and intellectual processes, and is the principal justification for what follows.