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''Memoirs of My Life and Writings'' (1796) is an account of the historian
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is k ...
's life, compiled after his death by his friend
Lord Sheffield from six fragmentary autobiographical works Gibbon wrote during his last years. Lord Sheffield's editing has been praised for its ingenuity and taste, but blamed for its unscholarly aggressiveness. Since 1896 several other editions of the work have appeared, more in accordance with modern standards. Gibbon's ''Memoirs'' are considered one of the first autobiographies in the modern sense of the word, and have a secure place in the canon of English literature.
Synopsis
Gibbon begins with an account of his ancestors before moving on to his birth and education, which was partly private and partly at
Westminster School
(God Gives the Increase)
, established = Earliest records date from the 14th century, refounded in 1560
, type = Public school Independent day and boarding school
, religion = Church of England
, head_label = Hea ...
. He matriculated as a student at
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
, an institution which he found at a low ebb.
To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College
Magdalen College (, ) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. It was founded in 1458 by William of Waynflete. Today, it is the fourth wealthiest college, with a financial endowment of £332.1 million as of 2019 and one of the st ...
; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.
Of one of his tutors Gibbon says that he "well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform." Gibbon's father took alarm on learning that he had converted to Roman Catholicism and, in order to bring him back to the Protestant fold, sent him to live with a
Calvinist
Calvinism (also called the Reformed Tradition, Reformed Protestantism, Reformed Christianity, or simply Reformed) is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Ca ...
minister in
Lausanne
, neighboring_municipalities= Bottens, Bretigny-sur-Morrens, Chavannes-près-Renens, Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Crissier, Cugy, Écublens, Épalinges, Évian-les-Bains (FR-74), Froideville, Jouxtens-Mézery, Le Mont-sur-Lausanne, Lugrin (FR-74), ...
. Gibbon made good use of his time in
Switzerland
). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
, meeting
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his ...
and other literary figures, and perfecting his command of the French language. He also fell in love with a Swiss girl,
Suzanne Curchod Suzanne Curchod (1737 – 6 May 1794) was a French-Swiss salonist and writer. She hosted one of the most celebrated salons of the Ancien Régime. She also led the development of the Hospice de Charité, a model small hospital in Paris that still ...
, but his wish to marry her was implacably opposed by his father. "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." On returning to England he published his first work, the ''Essai sur l'étude de la littérature'' (Essay on the study of literature). The next major event Gibbon mentions was his taking a commission in the
Hampshire militia, an experience which he tells us was later to be of advantage to him:
The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx
The phalanx ( grc, φάλαγξ; plural phalanxes or phalanges, , ) was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar pole weapons. The term is particularly use ...
and the legion
Legion may refer to:
Military
* Roman legion, the basic military unit of the ancient Roman army
* Spanish Legion, an elite military unit within the Spanish Army
* Legion of the United States, a reorganization of the United States Army from 179 ...
; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.
He then details his travels through France and on to Lausanne, where he formed a friendship with John Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield, which was to last for the rest of his life. Gibbon crossed the Alps into Italy and eventually reached Rome. He had for some time wanted to begin writing a history, without being able to choose a subject, but now, he tells us, the exciting experience of walking in the footsteps of the heroes of antiquity gave him a new idea:
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars 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.
After returning to England Gibbon engaged in several other literary exercises before finally beginning to write
his Roman history. The ''Memoirs'' now give a detailed account of the years he spent producing its successive volumes, and of the many hostile criticisms his work attracted. These labours were diversified by his experiences as a
Member of Parliament
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members of ...
, and his writing, at the request of the Government, a "Mémoire justificatif" asserting the justice of
British hostilities against France at the time of the
American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...
. During the course of writing the ''Decline and Fall'' Gibbon moved back to Lausanne. Gibbon's ''Memoirs'' end with a survey of the factors he considered had combined to bring him a happy and productive life.
Composition and manuscripts
Gibbon wrote a short account of his life in French in 1783. For five years he made no attempt to add to this, but in June 1788, one month after the last volumes of ''The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' were published, he began work on the ''Memoirs'' by writing to the
College of Arms
The College of Arms, or Heralds' College, is a royal corporation consisting of professional Officer of Arms, officers of arms, with jurisdiction over England, Wales, Northern Ireland and some Commonwealth realms. The heralds are appointed by the ...
for information about his ancestry. For the remaining years of his life he struggled with the task of recording his life in a satisfactory way, and his death in 1794 came before he could resolve the problem. Six attempts at an autobiography have survived, conventionally identified by the letters A to F:
A: ''The Memoirs of the life of Edward Gibbon with various observations and excursions by himself'' (1788–1789). 40 quarto
Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...
pages (6 missing).
B: ''My own Life'' (1788–1789). 72 quarto pages. Describes the first 27 years of his life.
C: ''Memoirs of the life and writings of Edward Gibbon'' (1789). 41 folio
The term "folio" (), has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book ma ...
pages plus insert. Describes the first 35 years of his life.
D: ntitled(1790–1791). 13 folio pages. Describing the first 35 years of his life.
E: ''My own Life'' (c. 1792–1793). 19 folio pages of text, and twelve of notes. Describing the first 54 years of his life.
F: ntitled(1792–1793). 41 folio pages of text, and 7 of notes. Describing the first 16 years of his life.
As the drafts of the work succeeded each other Gibbon in some passages varied the emphasis, and even changed the facts, but where he was satisfied with the words of the previous version he simply transcribed them. E is the only version to cover his whole life, and perhaps the only one he wrote with a view to publication during his own lifetime, but it omits many things included in the other versions. As he wrote to Lord Sheffield,
A man may state many things in a posthumous work, that he might not in another; the latter often checks the introduction of many curious thoughts and facts.
Gibbon's struggles with his autobiography were ended by his death in 1794. All six manuscripts then fell into the hands of his literary executor, Lord Sheffield, who used them to produce his own composite edition. They remained undisturbed in the possession of his family, until in 1871 his son
George Holroyd, 2nd Earl of Sheffield George Augustus Frederick Charles Holroyd, 2nd Earl of Sheffield FRS (16 March 1802 – 5 April 1876), styled Viscount Pevensey from 1816 to 1821, was a British Conservative politician.
Sheffield was the son of John Baker-Holroyd, 1st Earl of Shef ...
, lent them to the medical writer
William Alexander Greenhill
William Alexander Greenhill (1 January 1814, Stationers' Hall, London – 19 September 1894, Hastings) was an English physician, literary editor and sanitary reformer.
Biography
William Alexander Greenhill was the youngest of three sons of Georg ...
, who established their chronological order of composition and gave them the letters by which they are now always identified. In 1895 the manuscripts were sold by the
3rd earl to the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, where they were bound together. They remain in the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
as Add. MS. 34874.
Editing and publication
Attempting to bring the manuscripts into a publishable state, Lord Sheffield found himself in a quandary. Of all the versions available to him, only E could be called a complete narrative of Gibbon's life up to the 1790s, yet this one was very short on detail, and by no means a substantial work. The other manuscripts were more circumstantial, but all left the story unfinished. His solution was to produce a composite version, taking passages or individual sentences from each, especially from F, and shaping them into an artistically satisfying whole. Choosing the title ''Memoirs of My Life and Writings'', he made the resulting work the centerpiece of a collection of inedited Gibboniana published in 1796 in two quarto volumes as ''
Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Esquire''. The work was reprinted many times through the 19th century, and remained the only published form of Gibbon's autobiography until 1896, when the publisher
John Murray produced an edition giving the full text of all six manuscripts. Two years later the American scholar
Oliver Farrar Emerson edited the manuscripts along similar lines. In 1966 Georges Bonnard returned to Lord Sheffield’s plan of producing an
eclectic
Eclectic may refer to:
Music
* ''Eclectic'' (Eric Johnson and Mike Stern album), 2014
* ''Eclectic'' (Big Country album), 1996
* Eclectic Method, name of an audio-visual remix act
* Eclecticism in music, the conscious use of styles alien to th ...
edition, though with far greater scholarly conscientiousness. The last major new edition of Gibbon's ''Memoirs'' was the work of
Betty Radice
Betty Radice (3 January 1912 – 19 February 1985) was a literary editor and translator. She became joint editor of Penguin Classics, and vice-president of the Classical Association. Her English translations of classical and medieval Latin texts ...
, and appeared in the Penguin English Library series in 1984.
Reception
So high is the critical repute of Gibbon's ''Memoirs'' that ''
The Cambridge History of English Literature'' declared it had "by general consent…established itself as one of the most fascinating books of its class in English literature". One reason for this is the candour and openness with which Gibbon speaks of himself. "Few men, I believe," Lord Sheffield wrote, "have ever so fully unveiled their own character". Again, Gibbon broke new ground in making it a truly "philosophical", that is to say analytical, autobiography; as the novelist
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, (; 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993), who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.
Although Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his Utopian and dystopian fiction, d ...
wrote, "the sense of intellectual control, of a life somehow grasped as a concept, is unmatched". It is widely held that Gibbon's ''Memoirs'', along with the ''
Confessions'' of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (, ; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolu ...
, brought the modern autobiography into being.
In recent years much has been written by critics on Gibbon's failure to reach a final recension of his autobiography. It has been explained in various ways: as a sign of Gibbon's wrestling with difficulties of literary form; as a result of disagreements between Gibbon and Sheffield as to how far the ''Memoirs'' should follow
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_ NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style"> ...
's interpretation of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...
; or in psychoanalytic terms as the reflection of an uncertainty in Gibbon's mind as to his own identity.
When, with the publication of Murray's edition, it became possible to judge Sheffield's role in conflating the different versions of the ''Memoirs'', some critics accorded him praise moderated by their shock at finding how large a part he had played. The historian
Frederic Harrison
Frederic Harrison (18 October 1831 – 14 January 1923) was a British jurist and historian.
Biography
Born at 17 Euston Square, London, he was the son of Frederick Harrison (1799–1881), a stockbroker and his wife Jane, daughter of Alex ...
's opinion was that he had performed his task with "great skill and tact, but with the most daring freedom"; and an anonymous writer in the ''
Spectator
''Spectator'' or ''The Spectator'' may refer to:
*Spectator sport, a sport that is characterized by the presence of spectators, or watchers, at its matches
*Audience
Publications Canada
* ''The Hamilton Spectator'', a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, ...
'' said of Sheffield that
with an ingenuity which, in spite of its perversity, cannot but be admired, he concocted out of the six anuscriptsa patchwork narrative, which has since always passed as Gibbon's autobiography. In reality it was nothing of the kind, and should have been called not ''Gibbon's Autobiography'' but ''Selections from the Autobiographical Remains of Edward Gibbon''.
20th and 21st centuries critical opinions of Sheffield's work as an editor have diverged widely. In 1913 the ''Cambridge History of English Literature'' called it "extraordinarily skillful", and in the 1960s Anthony Burgess wrote of "Six holograph sketches, out of which Lord Sheffield stitched not a patchwork but a tasteful and well-fitting suit of clothes." The academic W. B. Carnochan called Sheffield's editing "brilliant though high-handed", and pointed out that
Were it not for his unremitting labors, we would not think of Gibbon as having written a great autobiography; rather, we would think of him as a historian who tried to write an autobiography but failed.
The academic David Womersley has written in the ''
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...
'' that Sheffield did the job "With equal judgement, freedom, and shrewdness", but elsewhere he has conceded that "From our standpoint…Sheffield's handling of Gibbon’s manuscript was scandalous.". This last judgement has been endorsed by the historian
Glen Bowersock
Glen Warren Bowersock (born January 12, 1936 in Providence, Rhode Island) is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.
Early life
Bowersock was born in Providence, Rhode Island a ...
, while the Gibbon scholar Jane Elizabeth Norton said that "By all the standards of scholarship, Lord Sheffield's conduct was deplorable."
Modern editions
* Murray, John, ed. ''The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon''. London: John Murray, 1896.
** 2nd edition: London: John Murray, 1897.
** Reprint: Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009.
** Reprint: Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010.
* Bonnard, Georges A., ed. ''Memoirs of My Life''. London: Nelson, 1966.
** American edition: New York, Funk & Wagnalls, 1969.
* Radice, Betty, ed. ''Memoirs of My Life''. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
** Reprint: London: Penguin, 1990.
** Reprint: London: Folio Society, 1991.
Footnotes
References
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External links
Full text of the 1796 edition at the University of Oxford Text ArchiveFull text of the 1796 edition at the University of Michigan Digital Library
{{Authority control
1796 non-fiction books
Literary autobiographies
Literary memoirs
British memoirs
British autobiographies
Books published posthumously
Works by Edward Gibbon