London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
It’s April 27th.
April 27th a long time ago. Coming up to 300 years ago. April 27th, 1737 to be exact.
How did Shakespeare put it, ‘the pleasing punishment that women bear.”
Yes, childbirth. A baby boy as it happens. In Lime Grove. In Putney.
A London baby who when he grew up looked at the Roman Empire and said, in effect, “well, that escalated.”
Whereupon he picked up his pen and wrote one of the grandest sentences in English prose. And then another. And then another. Until six enormous volumes had marched across the page like Roman legions in powdered wigs.
And what was that imperially great first sentence?
“In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.”
Ok, that’s the fanfare. Say hello to Edward Gibbon. Historian of Rome. Child of Putney. Gentleman of Bentinck Street. Clubman, parliamentarian, exile, sceptic,
wit, invalid, obsessive reader, and owner of one of the most magnificent historical appetites ever issued to a human being.
He wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That title alone is a procession. You can hear the sandals, the trumpets, the marble cracking, the barbarians clearing their throats in the wings.
But let’s start in Putney.
Not imperial Rome.
Not Constantinople.
Not the ruins of the Capitol.
Putney.
A riverside London village, with market gardens, lanes, boats,
damp air, and families making their way in the world.
Gibbon’s family had money,
lost it spectacularly in
the South Sea Bubble, and then made some of it back.
Proper eighteenth-century stuff. Speculation, ruin, recovery, wigs, port, and an ancestor whose fortune went down like a piano through a rotten floor.
Gibbon himself was a sickly child. One of seven children, but the only one who survived infancy.
That detail matters. It gives the whole life a faint chill at the back of the neck. The great historian of decline and fall began life surrounded by decline and fall in the nursery.
His mother died when he was ten. His father drifted into worry, gambling, and muddle.
And into that gap stepped one of the heroines of the story, his aunt, Catherine Porten.
She gave him books.
She gave him care.
She gave him the thing that became his kingdom.
Gibbon later called reading “the pleasure and glory of my life.”
There it is. The fuse is lit.
Then Westminster School,
which he remembered as “a cavern of fear and sorrow.”
Marvellous phrase. You can see the poor boy, frail, brilliant, odd, being posted into the machinery of eighteenth-century education like a delicate parcel into a cannon.
Then Oxford.
Ah, Oxford.
Gibbon was not impressed.
He arrived, as he said, with “a stock of erudition which might have puzzled a Doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.”
That is vintage Gibbon.
He could turn self-criticism into a silver-handled dagger.
Oxford, in his telling, was lazy,
port-soaked, complacent, and intellectually underheated.
His tutor, he said, remembered he had a salary to receive and forgot he had a duty to perform. Ouch.
That is not a review you put on the prospectus.
And then – plot twist –
young Gibbon became a Roman Catholic.
In 1753 this was not a harmless teenage phase, like wearing black velvet and quoting French poetry.
It mattered. There were laws.
There was suspicion.
There was family panic.
His father reacted by sending him off to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to be straightened out by a Protestant minister.
Now here’s one of the delicious ironies.
The exile meant to correct him became the making of him.
Lausanne gave him languages, discipline, Europe, conversation, and seriousness.
It turned the London boy into a European man of letters.
The statue, he later said, was discovered in the block of marble.
He also fell in love there, with Suzanne Curchod,
later Madame Necker, mother of Madame de Staël.
But his father opposed the match. Gibbon surrendered. “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”
It’s a beautiful line, and slightly fatal. You feel the sigh is real, but you also suspect the library was already winning.
Back in England, Gibbon lived between Hampshire and London. London lodgings. New Bond Street. Clubs. Theatre. Conversation. Ambition slowly coming up to the boil.
He served in the South Hampshire militia, which is a wonderful thought.
Edward Gibbon in uniform.
Rome’s future undertaker learning the useful business of drills, orders, boredom, mess dinners, and men behaving badly in boots.
He later admitted the militia gave him a broader introduction to the English world.
It also gave him military understanding, not from the saddle of Caesar, perhaps, but from the parish end of Mars.
Mars with a Hampshire accent.
Mars worrying about buttons.
Then came the Grand Tour.
Paris. Lausanne again. Florence. Rome.
And in Rome, the famous moment. October 15th, 1764.
Gibbon sits among the ruins of the Capitol while barefoot friars sing vespers in what had once been the temple of Jupiter.
Pagan empire,
Christian worship,
ruins, twilight, music, dust.
And into his mind comes the idea of writing the decline and fall of Rome.
Whether it happened quite as neatly as he later remembered, who cares.
It’s too good not to love.
There he is, seated among the broken stones, and history taps him on the shoulder.
“Gibbon, old fruit, fancy a six-volume job?”
And he said yes.
But the book was not born overnight. It had to gestate.
Back in London, after his father’s death in 1770,
Gibbon finally had independence.
He moved to 7 Bentinck Street, near Cavendish Square,
a fashionable address,
the right kind of London.
Clubs, dinners, talk, books, politics, publishers.
The city around him was eighteenth-century London at full fizz.
Carriages grinding through mud. Linkboys with torches.
Coffee houses muttering sedition. Gentlemen at Boodle’s. Parliament roaring away. Booksellers in the Strand. Printers ink-blackened and busy. And Gibbon, immaculate, round, sharp-eyed, composing the collapse of an empire.
Volume One of Decline and Fall appeared in 1776.
Think about that date.
America is breaking away.
Britain is facing its own imperial embarrassment.
And into that moment comes a London gentleman with a vast book about another empire losing its grip. Timing, as they say in comedy and statecraft, is everything.
The book was a sensation.
Gibbon said it was “on every table, and almost on every toilette.” That’s a gorgeous eighteenth-century image. Rome collapsing beside the rouge pot.
But then came the trouble.
Chapters 15 and 16, on Christianity, caused uproar. Clergymen sharpened their quills. Critics accused him of sneering at the faith, of insinuating what he did not quite say, of smuggling scepticism into footnotes wearing a powdered wig and a look of innocence.
That was Gibbon’s special art.
He did not kick the door down.
He opened it politely, bowed, and released a ferret.
Horace Walpole admired the way Gibbon replied to his critics, calling his polemic “the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules.” Perfect.
A pink little dart, but tipped with death.
And Adam Smith, no small judge, later said Gibbon stood “at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”
That is not a bad blurb.
One imagines Gibbon reading it after dinner and allowing himself a small, well-bred glow.
Gibbon also entered Parliament.
He sat for Liskeard and later Lymington. He was not a thunderer. Not a Pitt. Not a Fox. More a silent, observant presence.
One feels he regarded politics as history before it had had the decency to settle down and become readable.
London suited him, but it cost money. He liked comfort.
He liked society.
He liked the good chair,
the good dinner, the good company. He had, as the polite phrase goes,
a talent for expenditure.
Eventually the finances bit, and he retreated to Lausanne, where he lived with his friend Georges Deyverdun at La Grotte.
There, in June 1787, he finished the final volume.
The scene is pure cinema.
Night. Garden. Moonlight. Lake. Mountains.
He lays down his pen and walks beneath the acacias. He feels joy, freedom, fame.
Then melancholy.
He has taken leave, he says,
of an “old and agreeable companion.”
That is one of the most moving things any writer has ever said about a book.
The book had been his Rome.
His empire. His daily country. And now he had closed the gates.
The final volumes were published in London in 1788. There was a dinner. There was applause. At Warren Hastings’s trial in Westminster Hall, Sheridan praised Gibbon’s “luminous page.” Soon a caricature called him “The Luminous Historian.”
Good name. He deserved it.
He illuminated ruins.
And then the French Revolution erupted. Imagine being Gibbon, historian of collapse, watching Europe begin to shake.
The ancien régime cracking.
Kings trembling.
Churches threatened.
Crowds in motion.
The man who had written the great book of historical disintegration suddenly found himself living through the opening chapters of another one.
His last years were shadowed by illness. He returned to England in 1793 to comfort his friend Lord Sheffield after Lady Sheffield’s death.
His own body, long neglected, was failing.
Even under surgical misery, he kept his wit.
Asked why a fat man was like a Cornish borough, he answered, “Because he never sees his member.”
There speaks the eighteenth century. Dying, but still indecorous.
Edward Gibbon died in London on January 16th, 1794.
Not in Rome. Not in Lausanne. London. The city that had launched him, housed him, printed him, praised him, mocked him, clubbed him, fed him, and gave him the stage on which he became himself.
What remains?
The sentences remain. The irony remains. The massive architecture of the work remains.
So does the man himself, oddly lovable despite the pomposity.
A plump, brilliant, fastidious, funny, sceptical London-born European, peering through the dust of centuries and asking the most terrifyingly simple question in history:
How do great things come apart?
And that’s why Gibbon still matters. Because every age thinks its empire, its system, its city, its civilisation, is permanent. Marble always looks permanent.
So do banks, parliaments, armies, religions, fashions, reputations, booking platforms, and websites that ask you for image dimensions at three in the morning.
Then history coughs.
And somewhere, in a very good chair, Edward Gibbon raises one eyebrow.
So, to sum up, Edward Gibbon’s birthday. Edward Gibbon.
Putney’s boy. Rome’s undertaker. The luminous historian. The man who wrote Decline and Fall, and did it so well that nearly 300 years after his birth, the ruins are still speaking.
How’s that for a stiff one? A daily London fix that packs a proper wallop?
See you tomorrow.