In Our Time - Edward Gibbon

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of one of the great historians, best known for his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-89). According to Gibbon (1737-94) , the idea for this work came to him on 15th of October 1764 as he sat musing amidst the ruins of Rome, while barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Decline and Fall covers thirteen centuries and is an enormous intellectual undertaking and, on publication, it became a phenomenal success across Europe. The image above is of Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton, oil on mahogany panel, 1773.WithDavid Womersley The Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature at St Catherine’s College, University of OxfordCharlotte Roberts Lecturer in English at University College LondonAnd Karen O’Brien Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, on the 15th of October, 1764, Edward Gibbons sat amidst the ruins of Rome while barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter. Then an idea came to him.

This was to write The History of the Decline of the Reims of, and fall of the Roman Empire, covering 13 centuries, an enormous intellectual undertaking that became a phenomenal success. It ran to six large volumes and was published between 1776 and 1789. And in doing so, he reinvented what it meant to write history, to be a historian, and the importance of sources. So it's worth saying that the source of the Barefoot Friars anecdote is Gibbon's own. With me to discuss Edward Gibbon, I David Womersley,

the Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature at St. Catherine's College, University of Oxford. Charlotte Roberts, lecturer in English at University College London, and Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Karen O'Brien, Gibbon was born in 1737. Can you tell us something about his background? He was from quite a prosperous family who were originally from Kent, and his grandfather had made a fortune in the South Sea bubble and had been a successful businessman and passed his wealth down to Gibbon. Gibbon's father. Gibbon's father was a gentleman farmer and an MP and a somewhat effectless character

who steadily dwindled the family fortune. Gibbon was his oldest son. He was born in Putney and Gibbon's mother subsequently had six more children. Gibbon only remembers a sister. The other five were boys and they all died and his mother died when he was only nine. He was then looked after by an aunt whom he absolutely adored and he said that it was this aunt who gave him his love of reading He was quite an unhealthy child, so his childhood education was quite irregular, a series of schools, a series of tutors, including Westminster School. At the age of only 15, he went up to Mordling College, Oxford as a gentleman commoner, and he described that short period at Oxford University as the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. He was poorly supervised by his tutors, one of them left during his first summer, another gave him almost no instruction, and he spent a lot of time absentee and travelling around. I think partly because of this lack of direction and this innate intellectual restlessness that he had,

he started reading his way around theological controversies and thinking about the great religious questions of the day and took the extremely unusual step in 1753 of converting to Catholicism. It is important to emphasise how unusual and how perturbing this step would have been to his family. It would have meant that he would be excluded from public office when he grew up. And it was sufficiently unusual that it attracted the attention of, the Privy Council when the news became more widely known. How did that conversion happen? How did he do this?

Well, it seems that he provided in the memoirs that he wrote of his life and that were published subsequently after he died, that he was reading a number of sources. He mentions on one of those memoirs, Conius Middleton's free inquiry into the miraculous powers of the church, which was an ironic work looking at the false claims to miraculous powers of the Catholic. Church, which Gibbon somehow says he may have read against the grain as confirmation that only

miracles would be proof of Catholic truth. More probably, he was also reading the Catholic apologist Bishop Bossoway, who was an important theological thinker who asserted that the Catholic Church had stood steady and theoretically consistent throughout all of the varieties and changes of the Protestant Church and represented a beacon of truth in a troubling world. Either way, it was really an intellectual conversion that I think they've given a lasting interest in the phenomenon of conversion when he grew up, the psychological impulse to attach oneself to stable truth, and also a lasting interest in the way that theological ideas persuade people and move them to action. Can you tell the listener briefly what being a Catholic meant that he couldn't do?

It would mean that he couldn't become, for example, an MP. It would mean that he couldn't whole public office of any kind. It would mean that there would be severe restrictions on the inheritance he could receive from his family. And it would put him within a small religious minority of his own country. So it would undoubtedly have put him at a disadvantage and made him seem very much out of the main Anglican mainstream of the mainstream of the time. And the second thing was what might seem an extreme reaction to this 16-year-old boy from his father? It was an extreme reaction. His father initially sent him to the home of a free thinking friend. He then took advice and took the decision that he was going to pack the poor boy off

to Lausanne where he could be placed in the care of a Calvinist Protestant pastor and reconverted to the most stringent and clear form of Protestantism he could think of. And in the company of an escort, he packed him off in 1753 to Lausanne. Can you check up the story there, David, David, his father backed him off to Lausanne. Why send him there? Gibbon's conversion to Roman Catholicism, given that the Test Act wouldn't be repealed until 1828, meant that if he was going to have a public life, he had to become a Protestant again. And Lausanne was a very sensible choice.

So firstly, and this will be very surprising to anyone who's been to Lausanne recently, it was incredibly cheap, a very much cheaper place to live than England. Secondly, it was a place of moderate, enlightened Calvinism, untouched by the occasional extremity that characterise the Calvinism of nearby Geneva. Thirdly, it had a tradition of welcoming Englishmen in trouble in their homeland for reasons of religion or politics. So for various reasons, Lezanne seemed like an appropriate place of temporary exile. And he is sent there very, very quickly, just a little over three weeks after his conversion. Gibbon, who at this point speaks no French, found him,

himself lodging with a Calvinist minister, Daniel Pavia, in a cramped townhouse in the old part of Luzanne, just near the cathedral. It sounds like a lonely and condemned existence, doesn't it? He was very unhappy to begin with, but it had an extraordinary impact on his life. So Gibbon stayed in Luzan, lodging with Pavia until the spring of 1758. So that's just a shade under five years. Gibbon would say famously of this period in Lausanne that it had revealed the statue in the block of marble.

What did he mean by that? Well, I think the first is that he very quickly became a Protestant again and he, as he put it, suspended his religious inquiries but, as Karen has suggested, by no means losing interest in religion as an aspect of human history and social organisation. Secondly, Pavia, who is himself a very educated man, set Gibbon on a course of reading, and Gibbon thus acquired the sort of literary education that he had failed to get from Oxford, including a complete fluency in French.

And towards the end of the 1750s, French is actually a more natural language for Gibbon than English. He read widely in classical literature in Greek and Latin, modern European scholarship and philosophy, polite literature. He begins a series of slightly precocious correspondences with leading European scholars. He was also socialized. Luzan society allowed young men and women to meet one another with greater freedom than was then possible in English polite society. And of course, from that arose his youthful infatuation with a young Swiss girl, Suzanne Courchou,

that his father refused to allow to ripen into marriage. And he regretted that for the rest of his life, didn't it? And as far as we know, there wasn't another woman in his life, as it were. No, he never married. Russo is very scathing about what he refers to as the tepidness of Gibbon's emotions that he could be put off by his father. But if I may just come back to the last thing I want to say about the impact of Lazan on Gibbon's life, which is that it impelled his mind down the historical channel

in which it would remain for the rest of his life. Pavia's strategy for getting Gibbon to renounce Roman Catholicism was to set him on a course of reading that would lead him eventually to historicise the claims which, when he was alone in his rooms in Oxford, he had taken as simple matters of doctrinal truth or falsehood. Suddenly, under Paviaire's care, begins to see these questions as historical questions.

So in Lausanne, Gibbon loses a religion, but he finds a calling and an occupation. Thank you. Charlotte Roberts, what indications are that Gibbon was building himself into his sorrents? What did history mean, first of all, what would history mean to him then? As Gibbon starts to develop the thinking which he established in Lausanne in the years following that stay, He returns to England just before he turns 21. With slightly suspicious timing, he says in his memoirs that his father has made sure he gets back just as he reaches his majority at the age of 21 so that he can sign away the entail on the family estate. That means that his father can raise a mortgage and start spending the money,

which is supposed to have been ring-fenced for Gibbon and for the continuation of the family. When he comes back to England from Lausanne, he starts to pursue particular historical projects and starts to think in ways that are going to be very important for him when he comes to write the decline and fall. But I think it's worth noting that these years are in many ways marked by a feeling of being a little bit sort of out of things. He, as David has already pointed out, he is not as comfortable writing in English as he is writing in French at this time. He doesn't have a wide circle of acquaintance in English culture. He'd left England when he was just 16 years old, and so he's never had a chance to really

establish mature social connections in English society, and he talks about sitting in his study in London during this time and listening to coaches rattling by in the evenings whilst he is pouring over his books. So there's a sense in which socially he feels himself a little bit excluded as well. But there's also evidence in this period of time that he's starting to think historically and to think about the sort of questions that are going to become very important to him later. And one piece of evidence for that is an early publication, the essay Sir L'etude de la Litrecher, which he publishes in 1761. It's his first publication and it's written in French.

And in that work, he starts to think about the sort of current climate of historical thinking, particularly on the continent. And in particular, he uses that essay to negotiate his own relationship to two sort of prominent schools of historical things. the philosoph and the erudy. The philosoph, these are figures like Voltaire and Montesquieu, have an approach to history that is somewhat distanced and theoretical. They see the events and the facts of history as organized into large explanatory narratives that illuminate patterns of human behavior over time. The erudis, by contrast, their name is connected, of course, to our English

erudition are interested in the value of detailed historical research, the examination of sources, and relatedly, therefore, the historical significance of particular facts and specific circumstances when looking at the past. So what we can see, given doing in these years before he begins working on the decline in form, is thinking about these two different models for the understanding of history and trying to think about ways in which they might be able to be brought together. What was this personal relationship to Christianity? It's very difficult to excavate Gibbon's own personal feelings about Christianity at this time.

Certainly it's very difficult to put our finger on what his own personal faith might have been or whether he had any kind of personal faith. He certainly believes in the importance of an outward conformity to the established practices of your state religion. He sees that as part of the social contract. It is the decent thing to do. and that's something which comes up in his notorious attacks on Christianity in chapters 15 and 16, of course, under the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

It's the Christians who are the schismatics. It is they who are undermining state religion. He also, though, sees that there can be dangers in a kind of Christian practice or a religious practice, which is too performative in polytheism, at the end of the Roman Republic. It's really become a religion, according to Gibbon, in which no one really believes anymore. And that makes it very vulnerable to attack from Christianity when it starts to become prominent in the Roman Empire. Thank you. Karen O'Brien, it's hard to overstate the enormity of what he did next. But why do you think he started to write his decline and fall of the Roman Empire? That was definitely a moment, the moment when he did first go to the steps of the Capitol and start to think about writing the history, specifically of the city of the city.

the empire. So he starts out with this idea that he'd like to write a city of Rome. And this moment that you read out earlier, Melvin, was in 1764 when he went on a grand tour, starting off back in Switzerland and going down to Rome and then subsequently to Naples and having this intense moment of excitement as he subsequently described it, not the conic, as he wrote it up there, and starting to formulate this idea. Thereafter, it does seem to have been an idea of a very long gestation and he spent some time writing a history of the Swiss cantons. He spent some time speculating about other projects, even editing a journal with his good Swiss friend, David Dunn. So it was a very long gestation. But during that whole process, he starts to construct

chronologies. He starts to piece the histories and geographies of the world together. It's always simultaneously for him about place, space and time. And I think there when we go back to the place of the steps of the capital, all the barefooted fries, that coming together of geography and history is really typical of the way that Gibbon's imagination works. He always locates history spatially in that interesting way. He then spent a brief time serving in the Hampshire militia. It was during the period of the seven years war and in 1759 he was a captain in the militia. So he had a taste of military life. And again, I think that made him think very much about Roman history and about the military side of

history, which is clearly such a big part of the decline and fall, and then spends a good deal of time in London. And it's really only when his father dies in 1770, and he's somewhat free of all of the duties of a son and the cares and the time that he spent with his very nice stepmother and all of the practicalities of life as an elder son, that he really settles down to write the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and really starts writing in earnest in 1773 on the basis of the world. of enormous reading. He has clearly undertaken in all of those years since that grand tour to Rome,

a vast amount of reading, everything going all the way up to the fall of Constantinople, the formal end of the Roman Empire in 1453. David, why did his philosophies, where did he sit philosophically? He doesn't have a simple philosophical character. There are a number of different elements to it.

Gibbon admired Voltaire as a literary and a moral figure, but he was certainly no disciple of Voltaire's in respect of history. In fact, in a famous footnote in decline and fall, he would say that in his way, Voltaire was an intolerant bigot. The French philosophy to which Gibbon was more attracted was the historically informed sociology of Montesquieu, in, for example, the Esprit de Loire of 1748, questions of commerce and questions of law. And they also get taken up in the second really important element in his philosophical background, which is the influence on him of a trio of Scottish writers. Again, in a footnote in Declin and Four, Gibbons says talking about the subject of the progress of society in Europe, that a strong ray of philosophic light has broke from Scotland.

And he's referring to three figures, David Hume, William Robertson and Adam Smith, all of whom he knew personally. William Robertson, we don't read so much now, but what Gibbon got from him, I think, was an understanding of how to handle historical narrative. David Hume's influence was much more extensive, and it was exerted not so much through the technical philosophy of the treatise and the inquiries,

though Gibbon had read those, but more through the essays and the history of England. And Hume influenced him, firstly politically. Under the influence of Hume and also to a lesser extent Locke, Gibbon starts to move towards a kind of enlightened Whigism. And this involves a repudiation of his family tradition. His family were Tories and even verging towards Jacobites. The other thing he gets from Hume is an understanding of empire as a profoundly unnatural and violent political formation. It's often thought mistakenly that decline and fall is a kind of elegy for empire.

but in fact in many ways it's the reverse of that. The second thing he gets is some ideas about how the church has acted in society and the effects of religious beliefs on human psychology. And he also introduces him to a really interesting way of reading classical literature, which we might say is reading classical literature as a symptom rather than as a message, more for what they inadvertently reveal than for what the author is conscious. saying. And then finally, from Adam Smith, I think Gibbon would have got reinforcement of his anti-imperialist commitments. And also Smith, I think, would have

encouraged Gibbon to think about from between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the Renaissance as a period of European history that had driven the economic development of the whole continent down, what today's economists would call a suboptimal path of capital misallocation. Thank you very much. Charlotte, Charlotte, Robert, the decline. There's no rise here. There's no rise and fall.

It's the decline. We start by declining, continue to decline for 1300 years. It's all downhill. So what did the empire mean to Gibbon? What was going on? There were already sort of established histories, which had precisely done what we might more expect,

talked about the rise and forth. fall or the success and then fall of Rome rather than the decline and fall which Gibbon chooses to use the most prominent of those written by Montesquieu whom we've already heard mentioned. So it's a deliberate choice on Gibbon's part and it's not simply a feature of the chronology that he chooses. It's not just that he's telling us the second half of the story. It is, as David has pointed out, an inherent feature of Gibbon's understanding of empire, which is something which is always self-destructive, which is always in a state of decline. That's because Gibbon sees empire as inherently unstable and unproductive. He's very suspicious of sameness,

whether that's large conglomerations of territory or expansive diffusions of political power, especially, of course, when they're held in the hands of a single individual such as an emperor. So we're reading something that tells us that again and again and again, things are getting worse and worse. In a certain way, that's right. And that's something which given struggles with narratively, of course. How can you possibly write six volumes of history about something which is... About something which is just, you know, sort of petering out that has no kind of rhetorical lift to it. That's something which he's particularly conscious of in his last installment, in his final. volumes where he actually says to us as readers, he says, how can I possibly keep going telling

you this succession of crime and folly? How can I expect you to kind of follow my narrative line if I keep doing this? And indeed, he puts new strategies in place. He abandons kind of the chronological succession that he's preserved until that point. He talks about how both the kind of Roman Empire and his own narrative are like a river which is losing itself in the sands of the desert before it ever reaches the sea. Gibbon does talk about some of the marvellous material legacy of empire, so there is that. But also, of course, towards the end, particularly, decline and fall becomes the story of the emergence of the polite European culture of Gibbon's own day.

So there is a kind of a rising trajectory being started out, anyway, alongside the Peter out, as Charlotte's put it, of empire. And Karen, how does Gibbon characterise migration the people's moving towards the empire? Lots of people, lots of different tribes coming in over those hundreds of years. Is there any general view of them? Are they always destructive?

What's going on? It's a very good question because it's a fundamental theme, particularly as Gibbon thinks about the western half of the Roman Empire. In the early chapters, as he surveys the age of the Antonines and the beginning of that decline in 180 AD and afterwards, he gives us a sense of this amazing multi-ethnic polity that the Romans had created by assimilating different people's, different religions, into a single entity.

He acknowledges that that entity has become a bit like a prison, particularly as it becomes under the control of one man and that there's nowhere else to go in the world. But nevertheless, that attainment of multi-ethnicity is a success factor for the Roman Empire. And of course, what follows and what follows particularly, particularly during the crisis of the third century, his successive waves of barbarian invasion,

which are ultimately going to transform and bring to an end the Roman Empire in the West. But he's very careful to differentiate between the different kinds of barbarians, and he's very careful to underline the fact that they're not merely plunderers and conquerors. They are also settlers. They often bring their families with them.

They often settle. They often mingle. So it becomes a very complex story of the reformulation of the territories of Europe and beyond by a different kind of co-mingling of peoples, peoples who are often at different economic developmental stages under different kinds of population pressure, moving because of famine, because of need.

This culminates for me in one of the most exciting and brilliant sections of the decline and fall, which is the description of the great Gothic migration in the late 4th century across the Danube and into the borders of the Roman Empire. And the way that Gibbon describes this goes so far beyond his wonderful source Amiana's Marcellinus, because it exhibits a kind of compassion for these Gothic migrants who have been driven to the borders of the Danube by pressure from the Han invaders further east,

have asked for asylum from the Roman Emperor, are admitted into the borders of the empire, and then have their children taken as hostage and are starved and treated unjustly by the Roman Empire. So the message from Gibbon is that something that might have been another process of assimilation, a proper act of justice on the part of the Roman Empire becomes an absolute disaster. And elsewhere in the decline of fall where he's thinking about this whole question of emigration and migration,

he even asks the question, what about modern Europe? What about great patterns of migration, warfare, asylum, refugee crises in modern Europe? And he says, well, it is a bit different because we're all at a similar stage of economic and social development with technologies to match. and if ever we were invaded, he says, we could go to North America. It's a slightly surreal moment, but one has to remember that just before he wrote and published the first volume of the decline and fall in 1776, he'd become an MP. And he was sitting in the House of Commons during the great crisis of the North American colonies,

knowing that that declaration of independence might be on its way and that things were breaking up in North America and thinking again about global patterns of geographical movement and how people move through space and time and how that transforms the world that we're in. Thank you, sitting in the House of Commons, in which he made one speech, he's maiden speech, and that was all.

David... He was totally silent and he knew it. Yes, and when he joined the club, Johnson's Club, he's supposed to have nothing at all. Never mind. David, he linked Christianity to the fall of Rome. Why was that so disturbing for readers? Given inherits a number of arguments

about the relationship between the empire and the church. One of them that he inherits, which we can see in Machiavelli in the Discorsi, says that the otherworldly values and commitments of the early Christians undermine the civic and military strength of the early Roman Empire because they couldn't make sacrifices to pagan gods, so they couldn't take public office, they couldn't serve in the army. And Gibbon notes that, but it's by no means all that he has. to say about the interactions between the Christians and the empire.

And one of the unfortunate effects of the mischievous but wonderful ironies of chapters 15 and 16 has been to flatten and narrow our understanding of Gibbon's attitude towards Christianity and to a kind of a sort of feline hostility. But there's much more to it than that. Another argument that Gibbon inherited was a providential argument about God having allowed the an empire to flourish, notwithstanding its paganism, so that Christianity could subsequently spread easily through this pacified and extensive polity. Clearly, all sorts of problems with that argument once you start even trying to take it seriously and Gibbon doesn't buy it at all,

but what he does do in decline and fall is to kind of transplant it so that after the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity, of course, becomes the official religion of the empire, Gibbon starts to explore the interactions of church and empire and traces the very complicated processes whereby the church survived and eventually supplanted the empire. So to that extent, Gibbon does endorse Hobbes' memorable image of the Roman church as a ghost sitting on the tomb of empire. But it's often the surprising and paradoxical details of that process

which most firmly excite his historical imagination. And then, of course, in the later stretches of decline and fall, given devotes much attention to the way that the church acts as a conduit for the transferal of fragments of antiquity to later European culture. Charlotte, how did he handle the response to his book? Let's stick to the Christianity topic, because it did cause quite a rumpus. How did he respond to that?

In his memoirs, Gibbon says not quite truthfully that the universal applause that greeted his first volume was not interrupted by the barking of any profane critic. But of course, there were those who criticised what they saw as the irreligion in the first volume in particular of the decline and fall. In later life, certainly, and in public, Gibbon cultivates a kind of pose of contemptuous indifference largely to this. outpouring of anxiety on the part of the more devout perhaps portion of his readers. But one thing which he does say is that he's perfectly happy for people to criticise him as an infidel, but he's not happy for people to criticise him on his scholarship. So the way he phrases that is that when someone presumed to attack not the faith, but the good faith of the historian, that he is someone who's distorting the historical record

or is misrepresenting his source material, that's when he gets really riled up. Karen, it took him 13 years to finish decline and thought. Can you see him learning and developing his ideas in the writing? Absolutely, and I think that changing attitude towards Christianity is very evident in the later volumes. So there's heavy irony and sarcasm in chapters 15, and it develops into something much more nuanced. I also think his attitude towards the power of character in history changes. So in those early volumes, there are these very colourful characters who have,

have serious agency in history, comodus, Septimius, Severus, Constantine, himself, the first Christian emperor, and Julian the Apostate, an emperor who followed Constantine. And there's a real sense of their power and agency, which I think does diminish as he continues to write his history and thinks about those larger forces at work, economic forces, forces of ideas, forces of geographical transformation, migration, invasion and war. And we see many characters, but few of them with that kind of individuals. say over the course of historical events. I also think more generally there's just a sense of a more multipolar history as he moves particularly into the Byzantine period of his history.

There's an ever-diminishing city of Constantinople at the center of the story, but his attention really locates itself on the variety of nomadic and peoples who transform that whole landscape. So whether it's the Islamic conquerors or whether it's the Islamic conquerors or whether it's, it's Timor or Genghis Khan or whether it's the invaders, the Slavic invaders of the Balkans, there's a sense of a history that's being made in many places and reconfigured in a constant pattern. He's often complimented, or sometimes mocked a little bit, complimented on his style. Could you give us a couple of sentences to give listeners, who haven't read it, some idea of the way he wrote? Allow me to read a few sentences and then just comment on how these are,

typical of Gibbons style. He's talking here, having given a huge geographical overview in the first chapter of the decline and fall of the empire in the age of the Antonines, and he says, this long enumeration of provinces whose broken fragments have formed so many powerful kingdoms might almost induce us to forgive the vanity or ignorance of the ancients. Dazzle with the extensive sway, the irresistible strength, and the real or effective moderation of the emperors, they permitted themselves to despise and sometimes to forget the outlying countries which had been left in the enjoyment of a barbarous independence, and they gradually usurp the license of confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the earth.

But the temper, as well as the knowledge of a modern historian, require a more sober and accurate language. Now, this is very typical of Gibbon's style because there's a lot of either-or, there are parenthetical sentences, there are qualified adjectives, and they're held together under a certain kind of pressure by this critical, humane, sane intelligence of the historian. and here in that final sentence he even references himself as a historian, weighing up the evidence and actually quite cleverly and somewhat cynically looking at the motives of the Romans who believed their empire to be a global empire

and there to be nothing outside of it and who forgot that the world was a much larger place than their own empire. Thank you very much, David. In 1789, the French Revolution is upon him. He's finished and published the last of his volumes by then. How did that revolution challenge? Gibbon's ideas. Of course, by this time, Gibbon is back in Lausanne. In 1783, he goes back to Lausanne, again on grounds of cheapness, actually. He finds London too expensive. So he goes and lives with his childhood friend, Georges de Vardin, in a very nice house overlooking Lake Geneva. And when the

revolution breaks out, this gives him a kind of great physical proximity to the revolution, because from the terrace of his house, he could actually see the campfires of a revolutionary army on the French southern shore of Lake Geneva. So he's much closer to the revolution than any other English writer. But there's also a kind of ideological proximity to revolution that troubles Gibbon. And this is all to do with the Vex question of how the revolution stands in relation to enlightenment. The revolutionaries themselves, of course, encouraged the connection by introducing Voltaire into the Pontaigneur in 1791 and then following him up with Rousseau in 1794. So the revolutionaries themselves encouraged an interpretation of revolution as owing something to French philosophy.

And of course, that was also the interpretation of the revolution offered by Gibbon's friend Edmund Burke in his reflections on the revolution in France. Now, Gibbon reads Burke immediately, and at a time when much educated, English opinion was inclined to dismiss Burke as an hysterical overreactor to the revolution, Gibbon immediately sees that Burke is onto something. And this is a very interesting endorsement. First, in terms of the argument that Gibbon has advanced in decline and fall about the origins of the civilization of modern Europe, Gibbon has referred to the Europe of his own day,

in a phrase taken from Hume, as a republic of Christian monarchies. kind of lovely paradoxical phrase. But the revolution marks the eruption of fanatical energies into that system, which Gibbon had thought was a stable and self-checking system. So the French Revolution at one level marks a challenge to Gibbon's understanding of his own cosmopolitan European culture and of its origins implicitly. But secondly, the revolution poses a more intimate threat to his own public image. Gibbon was referred to occasionally as the English Voltaire mistakenly, I think.

So Gibbon wants to challenge this alignment of himself with French philosophy. And so at the end of his life, in his memoirs, we see him trying to check that interpretation in various subtle ways. Charlotte Roberts, he worked on his memoirs, but he never finished them. Why do you think that was? The best answer to this question is actually to go back to what Karen was saying about character in the declass. and fall and the way in which over time in that work Gibbon appreciates more and more

the ways in which individuals are shaped not by their self-determination but by their circumstances. Contingency and the conditions of the times become dominant forces in the exploration of character in that history. And I think that's something which also

goes on to effect the way in which Gibbon writes his memoirs as well. It would have been very easy for him to have adopted a point of view which saw him, Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the decline and fall, emerging triumphantly from all of the difficulties that he'd faced in his past, whether they be his childhood illnesses, his ill-fated conversion to Catholicism or anything else. But instead, what we see, particularly in the later versions of the draft,

is Gibbon becoming aware or showing his awareness that actually no one emerges triumphantly from circumstance. everyone is hemmed in by it. And it becomes very difficult for him, therefore, to conceive of an autobiography in which he is going to be the hero. Karen, why does he sit in relation to other people of ideas at the time? Who did you want to compare himself with? He undoubtedly, as David suggested,

would like to compare himself to David Hume as a historian, and I do see Hume as a principal source of inspiration, and undoubtedly saw himself as a figure of the European Enlightenment until that notion was complicated by the French Revolution. I think, however, he sought in his writing to distinguish himself from other writers in the way that he presented a persona that was civilised, critical, ironic, and yet supremely humane. The most frequent word that I can find in the decline in fall is the word cruel, and Gibbon repeatedly invades against all forms of cruelty and violence.

And there's a kind of self-conscious humaneness that I think does deliberately to differentiate himself from other historical writers of his time. I mean, he was against slavery and several other things. He invades against the Roman forms of slavery. He was also critical of the slavery of his own time. He was critical of all forms of harshness towards women and very complimentary about intelligent, significant women in the course of history and in his own life.

And I think that general moral sensibility that he had becomes part of what he calls his own character as a historian. David, what, if anything, changed in the writing of history is after Gibbon? Well, I suppose the interesting thing is that there's no Gibbonian school. And attempts to imitate Gibbon's style are all pretty much disastrous, I think. If you look at English history in the 19th century, take, for instance, McCauley, not a text that's very much shorter than decline and fall,

but it deals with only one country over a few decades at the end of the 17th century. If you compare that with the chronological and geographical sweep of the decline and fall, it's clear that there's nothing really happening after Gibbon that responds to his own level of ambition. And it also shows that although decline and fall is a very long book, it's also a kind of marvel of concision, really. I think that Gibbon's example has sometimes had a kind of crushing effect on later historians. I think sometimes a huge Trevor Roper in that respect, a huge admirer of Gibbon, on whom he wrote and lectured and whom he edited.

But the realisation that he had not rivaled Gibbon by producing a great book on the scale of decline and fall, haunted and disturbed Hugh to the very end of his life. So Gibbon has perhaps had a kind of suppressive effect on English history writing to some extent. And David, let's remember the Virginia Woolf essay called The Historian and The Gibbon. Yes. Charlotte, what if any has been the longer term? legacy of his work of these six volumes? Sometimes when we look at Gibbon's sort of 20th century reputation, the decline and fall

has suffered from being perceived more as a kind of cultural icon or a kind of historical monument or relic than a living, breathing text that people should be reading and engaging with. So Graham Green in his post-war novel, The End of the Affair, he wants to describe a character who is absolutely weighed down with the expectations of a kind of completely outdated Victoriaana. And the way in which he chooses to indicate that is by saying that he has an unread copy of the decline and fall in his library. To this idea of a sort of cultural relic that you're carrying with you, but that you're never really engaging with. Of course, that's actually the complete opposite of what the decline and fall really represents and really is. It's an extraordinarily textured and varied work, as Karen has described.

described very well already. It's never complacent or secure in its own worldview. It's mobile, as the people in it are, of course, and it's self-criticking. So the argument is never allowed to kind of come to rest in moments of unproblematized judgment. And the prose is also never allowed to crystallize into moments of uncomplicated aphorism. So what I hope is that in the 21st century, Gibbon's alternative reputation as a historian of kind of difference and of movement will come more to the fore. There is an important sense in which that very ambitious comparative history that focuses on networks, on long-range historical change, it's very much part of our own moment, is putting Gibbon back on the menu at present. He's not writing universal history,

which is the sort of the large, comprehensive narratives of the centuries before he wrote. It's much more sensitive to difference. It doesn't try to bring everything under a single horizon of explanation. This suppleness and flexibility in the sort of framework with which given approach has the past keeps it wonderfully alive. Thank you very much, Karen LeBry, David Womersley and Charlotte Roberts, and to our studio engineer, John Boland. Next week, shall I compare thee to Summers Day, it's Shakespeare's Sonuts.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out that you wish we had included? Who would like to start? Karen, do you like to start? I would have liked a bit, thank you for getting it in Melvin. I would have liked a bit more on style and irony.

Gibbon is really funny. I mean, there's irony at the level of the unintended consequences of actions and historical events, you know, at the level of historical narrative. But there's also obviously irony at the level of figure of speech. And I had a little quotation up my sleeve, which I didn't read out. But just a classic example when Gibbon is writing about Septimius Severus's mother, Julia Domna, a very learned woman, he said, chastity was very far from being the most conspicuous virtue of the Empress Julia. And the whole of the history and his footnotes are full of these strange comical asides.

and this constant insinuating irony, this sometimes polemical, sometimes just lightly touched on, as in that example. And I think it would be great to reflect a bit more on that aspect of his writing. And you talk about the, in the New Testament said that when Christ was crucified, there was darkness for three days,

and he made a remark on that. Oh, the supine inattention of the pagos, who failed to notice it. Yes, three hours, not three days. It was dark for three hours, but not noticed by the pagans, yes. Yeah, how could they be so stupid as not to have noticed that is what he says? When they had recorded darkness after the death of Caesar, of course. That's how the joke is kind of sealed, isn't it?

That's a kind of irony, which is very characteristic of those particular chapters, those chapters on Christianity at the end of volume one. And it's a sort of irony then that, um, It elevates, doesn't it? But both the historian Gibbon, who's writing it and the reader as well, we share a joke. And we are made superior to those others, those historians who don't understand or who have misrepresented for their own reasons, the truth of the historical record. Later on, we get sort of different kinds of irony developing in the decline and fall,

which are a lot more self-directed that don't allow Gibbon to kind of take that super, superior sneering pose, that moments of irony, which are sort of, where the kind of ironic detail becomes almost the kind of grain of sand in the mechanism that stops it quite working properly, that prevents any kind of clear viewpoint from crystallising, and that instead sort of leaves us in a state of doubt rather than in a state of security. Is that phrase, Byron's phrase, the solemn sneer, the lord of irony, I enjoy the solemn sneers, I have to say. Yeah.

I think there's a danger there if we see Gibbon as kind of purely the author of irony, that it will lead us to overlook his geniality. And something that I think is very interesting to reflect on is the subject for Gibbon and friendship. I mean, we've mentioned a couple of times, George DeVadar, this friend of his youth that he went back, who we went back to live with in Lausanne. But there's also his... his rather unlikely very close friend, Lord Sheffield,

whose acquaintance he makes in the 1760s again in Lausanne. And then there's also this very interesting Swiss family who kind of adopt him after the death of De Vardin in the 1780s, the De Sèvaries. And I think that Gibbon's social life is fascinating and perhaps, you know, is not unrelated to some of the sort of sociability of texts and perspectives that we see in decline and fall.

You were going to talk at the beginning, and we cut to something else on the way that conversation played a part in this style. Was that you, Karen? What I was going to say is that the 18th century put quite a high premium on an easy conversational prose style. They derived this from Addison's Spectator, and you see it somewhat at work in Hume's history and Robertson and others. And Gibbon is, I think, fairly self-consciously rejecting

that as an appropriate medium for historical prose. There's something too complex about history. There's a need to hold incompatible or unresolvable ideas together in a single sentence or paragraph that doesn't lend itself readily to the conversational and the facile. And that, I mean, as David says, I think it's one of the many reasons why Gibbon is inimitable, why he wasn't imitated. But it makes him a different kind of read from Samuel Johnson or Addison or any of the other great pro stylists of the 18th century.

Well, those, the people you mentioned were they great admirer of this of his. Well, both Boswell and Johnson didn't like Gibbon. And Boswell, Boswell rather encourages Johnson to say something nasty about Gibbon in the life of Johnson. He says, you know, oh, he poisons our club for me, Gibbon. So why did they ask him into the club? Well, it wasn't just Johnson's club. I mean, it was a club set up by friends of Johnson to support him. but Johnson didn't have a veto over who could join.

It's perhaps also worth acknowledging that at the time of its first publication, the decline and fall is not just recognised as an extraordinary work of scholarship, although it is, but it's a bestseller. It's seen as a kind of urbane and polite work, and given it takes enormous pride in the fact that people are reading it sort of casually as part of their everyday lives. He says it's on every table, and on almost every toilet, by which he means, a lady's dressing table.

So polite men and women are reading this while they get dressed or while they prepare to go out for dinner or these other kind of sociable things. So that's a conception of the decline and fall that perhaps we've become a little bit more blind to. But in that respect, he would have been an obvious candidate for Johnson's Club. It was a literary club. It was supposed to celebrate and bring together people who were contributing to this particular literary. culture of the time. What he and Johnson have in common, they clearly don't have religious sensibility in common, quite the opposite, but they do have phenomenal scholarship in common.

And one can't know whether Johnson had any sense of just how profound a scholar Gibbon was becoming at that earlier point when they were fellow club members. But one thing that we could amplify a little bit is the sheer scale and range of Gibbon's scholarship, limited by the fact that he didn't speak Arabic, didn't read Turkish, didn't read much German, but anything in Latin, Greek, translated into French, in French, Italian, he absolutely consumed the great might of post-Renaissance scholarship. And he and Johnson are quite unusual in the 18th century in terms of their capacity for scholarly absorption. Another point to make about the antipathy between Johnson and Gibbon is that Johnson,

is that Johnson is on record as saying sort of very disparaging things about history as a literary form. He says, you know, the greatest work of English history is knowledge history of the Turks. Well, probably not, I should think. I suppose what we could have done is say a little bit more

than we managed to about some of the topics, the substantive topics in decline and fall, but then there's so much there. I mean, Karen, her remarks about migration, I suppose, touched on, some really interesting substantive issues. But we could have talked about the Crusades, which of course is a wonderful kind of set piece

in the kind of fall about, you know, a whole nation's being transplanted and moving east. We could have said more, I think, about, would have been interesting to say something about Byzantium and the way that Byzantium obliges given to think about how commerce starts to supplant war

as a way of interaction between nations. How successful was his book in Europe and how did its success compare it with other British authors? It was hugely successful and translated into many modern European languages. Adam Smith, when the book is completed in 1788, writes to give him to say it has set you at the head of the whole literary tribe of Europe. And when Gibbon goes back to Lezanne in the 1780s, he doesn't go back as some speechless little English teenager

He goes back as someone at the head of literary culture in the whole continent. It really is a work of the first importance, I think, in European terms, not just English terms. And did that continue for a while, David? Yes, it goes on into the 19th century, certainly in France. I mean, Gizzo is a great reader of Gibbon in Switzerland. Benjamin Constant is a great reader of Gibbon. There is a great afterlife in European historical culture, more than in English, actually, for reading Gibbon.

And it's difficult not to think that someone like Spengler is influenced by Gibbon. Thank you very much. That was terrific. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Welcome to Descendants, the series which looks into our lives and our past and asks something pretty simple. How close are each of our lives to the legacy of Britain's role in slavery? And who does that mean our lives are linked to? Narrated by me, Yersa Daily Ward, we hear from those who have found themselves connected to each other through this history.

Whoever you are, wherever you are in Britain, the chances are this touches your life somewhere, somehow. Descendants from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.