'Varnish the business for the ladies': Edward Gibbon's decline and fall.

Abstract

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) aroused strong feelings. Samuel Taylor Coleridgel said '[his] style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him'. But his works, the multivolume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire2 and the Autobiography3 published in the year after his death by his friend and literary executor J B Holroyd (Lord Sheffield), have not been out of print for over 200 years and are fun to read, especially the shorter Autobiography, which was expanded by Lord Sheffield with extracts from Gibbon's letters and his own observations. It is rich in data about Gibbon's health and death; and there have been comprehensive later publications of Gibbon's diaries and letters4. Gibbon has attracted many excellent biographers (including Leslie Stephen7, J B Bury3, D M Low8, G M Young9, J W Burrow10) but only the biologist Sir Gavin de Beer11'12 has discussed Gibbon's longstanding, and ultimately fatal, affliction. Sir Geoffrey Keynes'3 work on Gibbon was confined to his library, and Roy Porter's14 to literary and historical criticism. Recent transatlantic students15'16 have indulged, like de Beer, in 'psycho-biography', but Gibbon himself had written stylishly and explicitly about his feelings and inclinations, as he had done about his 'organic' symptoms3 4. Gibbon was the first born of a wealthy City of London family: