the marmoreal edward gibbon: the autobiographies and the ruins of rome

The Marmoreal Edward Gibbon: The Autobiographies andthe Ruins of Romejecs_313 357..378

C H A R L O T T E RO B E RT S

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Edward Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) and his Autobiographies (1788-93). The author challenges the opinion that a secure historian-persona movesseamlessly between these works, controlling the vagaries of life and text, andinstead argues that the incomplete and fragmentary Autobiographies respondto the fragments of marble that are the materials of Gibbon’s earlier history.Finally, she suggests that a dichotomy of conquest and ruination whichinforms eighteenth-century understandings of the decline of Rome can beused to account for Gibbon’s ambivalent use of narrative tropes offragmentation in his memoirs.

Keywords: Edward Gibbon, autobiography, The Decline and Fall, ruins, Rome,fragment

I.

Any critical study of Edward Gibbon’s Autobiographies begins in the shadow ofa more substantial, famous and imposing work. Edward Gibbon, the historianof The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is such a well-established literarypersona in the minds of readers that it can seem at best futile, at worst inane,to suggest that this persona be set aside when reading Gibbon’s Memoirs. Yetin his own lifetime Gibbon’s historian-persona was frequently imagined as aseparate and alternative identity by his friends and acquaintances: analternative to the fussy, comic figure that Gibbon could sometimes appear inprivate life. Lord Sheffield and his family referred to their good friend andlong-time correspondent at times as ‘the historian’ and at other times as ‘theGibbon’ or ‘the Gib’, as though, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘he were thesolitary specimen of some extinct race’.1 These two titles refer to two discreteindividuals (Woolf describes them as ‘companion[s]’ who go ‘hand in hand’)but also to a single ‘strange being’ who defies description or designation.2

Gibbon’s personal identity thus stands in awkward relation to his public self –half disreputable associate, half bizarre appendage. In his study of Gibbon’sinner self W. B. Carnochan argues that Gibbon found ‘a surrogate for hisprivate life’ in the swollen testicle from which he suffered for many years.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 34 No. 3 (2011)

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Gibbon’s relationship with this embarrassing tumescence suggests that hethought of it both as an essential part of himself, a source of exhilaration andpower, and as an external signifier which could be interpreted by others butwhich he could safely ignore – Gibbon was so corpulent that he could not seethe swelling that was so obvious to others.3 In keeping with this ambiguoussense of belonging, Gibbon compares his swelling to ‘a small child’ and hisoperation to a ‘deliver[y]’, imagery that is most reminiscent of his descriptionof his composition of The Decline and Fall: a project that begins with‘conception’ on the Capitol in Rome and ends with ‘deliverance’ in his gardenat Lausanne.4 Whether or not we are convinced by Carnochan’s theory, hisviews are symptomatic of the difficulty both Gibbon and those around himexperienced in attempting to define the limits of his identity. His private self,his famous history, even his own body are at once essential and extraneous tohim. Given this ambiguity, it is necessary for us to evaluate the relationshipbetween the Gibbon of the earlier history and the Gibbon of the laterautobiographies. The two are intricately related but are neither sufficientlydistinct from each other nor adequately uncontentious in their proximity forus to suggest that they are interchangeable.

This interrelationship between Gibbon’s history and his personal identityhas a significant textual dimension, since The Decline and Fall has beeninterpreted as an occasionally autobiographical text. Roy Porter makes thisargument by identifying in it moments of association and self-identificationbetween author and book. However, he also takes pains to assert thatGibbon’s self-inclusion in his text is ‘a vitally important distancing device’. Itis by drawing attention to the creative process that Gibbon is able to assert hisauthorial control, and it is by ‘cultivating self-awareness’ that Gibbon is ableto move towards ‘the pinnacle of the “philosophical observer” ’.5 In otherwords the elevated perspective associated with the controlling historian-persona in The Decline and Fall is reinforced by the autobiographical elementsof the text. Many critics have also identified the presence of this samehistorian-persona in the six unfinished versions of his Memoirs that Gibbonleft at his death. Woolf writes that the six autobiographical fragmentstogether ‘compose a portrait of such masterly completeness and authoritythat it defies our attempts to add to it’. The word ‘perfect’ chimes through theparagraph in which she describes Gibbon’s confident control of life’s vagaries,although she ends by echoing the words Gibbon uses to describe theunsatisfactory portraits of complex characters such as Constantine, Julianand Mahomet in The Decline and Fall: ‘as we run over the familiar picture thereis something that eludes us’.6 By ventriloquising the voice of Gibbon-as-historian Woolf suggests its suitability for the Memoirs, although by choosingto echo a moment of authorial doubt she also acknowledges that authorialcontrol, in both The Decline and Fall and the Autobiographies, is occasionallytroubled by its own efforts at consistency.7 Porter is more confident in theability of the historian to control the accidents of Gibbon’s incoherent andbereft existence: ‘by a flick of historical interpretation, all these losses could be

358 CHARLOTTE ROBERTS

© 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

made into gains, emancipations even’.8 Although I agree that there are strongconnections between Gibbon’s two great works, Porter’s faith in thecontrolling authorial voice, which is reinforced even by Gibbon’s self-inclusion within the text of the history, fails to consider some of the ways inwhich generic cross-fertilisation can destabilise narrative order.

In The Decline and Fall the historian frequently surrenders his privilegedposition of elevated survey and becomes an agent and performer in thenarrative he relates, and this puts the narrator in a position of dangerousproximity to the declining empire he describes. From man’s pursuit of power,Gibbon writes, ‘almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood’(vol. I.110). We can imagine the blood of ancient atrocities disfiguring andblotting out the seemly narrative recorded by the historian, but we can alsoimagine the narrative of history itself set down in bloody ink, an image thatis recommended by the frequent associations Gibbon makes between thesubstance of history and the criminality of the past. ‘His reign’, Gibbon writesof the emperor Antoninus Pius, ‘is marked by the rare advantage offurnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more thanthe register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’ (vol. I.102).Whichever interpretation we favour, the historian’s page is made responsiveto the events it records, and its words may perpetuate, perhaps even in someway be responsible for, the crimes of the past. At several moments within thenarrative of The Decline and Fall Gibbon implies that the judgements anddecisions of the historian can take on the significance and agency of speech-acts. Sometimes this effect is ironically mocking, as when Gibbon introducesthe ‘antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim lightof legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies, conducted thegreat grandchildren of Noah from the Tower of Babel to the extremities of theglobe’ (vol. I.234). Sometimes it is vigorous and dramatic, as when Gibbonasserts that he will ‘punish and dismiss’ Carinus, the unworthy brother ofNumerian and the heir to the empire in the third century (vol. I.357).However, the position of power that the historian occupies here to correct andjustify the events of antiquity is tempered by the awareness that by becomingan ‘author’ of the fall of Rome, Gibbon has joined a notorious company. In theseventh chapter Gibbon describes how ‘by the execution of several of hisbenefactors, Maximin published, in characters of blood, the indelible historyof his baseness and ingratitude’ (vol. I.192). Later, the reign of Theodosius is‘polluted by an act of cruelty, which would stain the annals of Nero orDomitian’.9 The historians and the tyrants of this bloody history have movedcloser together and may, indeed, have become synonymous. In one passageGibbon describes how Rufinus’ body is mangled and dismembered by theangry populace during the reign of Arcadius. He reserves his real disgust,however, for the poet Claudian, whom he describes in a footnote asperforming the ‘dissection of Rufinus [...] with the savage coolness of ananatomist’ (vol. III.110). In the next chapter another commentator, ‘Orosius,piously inhuman, sacrifices the king and people, Agag and the Amalekites,

The Marmoreal Edward Gibbon 359


without a symptom of compassion’, and Gibbon asserts that, ‘[t]he bloodyactor is less detestable than the cool unfeeling historian’ (vol. III.147).10

Although he does not draw any explicit connection between these historiansand commentators and his own attitude to the events and individuals of TheDecline and Fall (the attack on Orosius is complicated by this man’sexemplification of all that Gibbon hated most about early Christian piety), theunqualified certainty of Gibbon’s condemnation suggests some anxiety on hispart, and a desire to set as much distance as possible between his ownhaughtily claimed prerogative to ‘punish’ the unworthy and the cruelindifference of these other historians. Both passages explore the irony of ahistorical impartiality that leads directly to a bloody and physical proximity.Claudian displays a ‘savage coolness’ in conducting his living autopsy, hisvery impartiality betraying his primitive sensuality, and Gibbon takes up thisphysician role when he searches in vain for a ‘symptom’ of humanity in the‘piously inhuman’ Orosius, whose pretensions to sainthood are forcefullyexploded by his barbarous human sacrifice. The effect of these ironicambiguities is to show how the distance between author and subject matter isalmost impossible to sustain when the historian’s prized attributes ofimpartiality and distant evaluation can themselves embroil the writer in theviscera of historical particularity. In these circumstances the historicalpersona cannot be coherent, unified and secure.

The presence of the author as a character within the text is not in itself aconclusive autobiographical trope. Porter’s image of authorial supremacybeing reinforced by the presence of an authorial persona within the narrativehas more in common with the novel than with autobiography, as hiscomparison of Gibbon’s position in The Decline and Fall with Fielding’sauthorial interactions in Tom Jones indicates.11 According to PhilippeLejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, autobiographical authenticity isguaranteed only when the author and the protagonist are united by the nameprinted on the title page, a name that they both share. This assures the readerthat the speaking voice and the ‘I’ of the utterance are one and the same – inother words, that there is a coherent identity controlling both narrative andcontent.12 This pact is clearly not established in The Decline and Fall, wheremultiple historians and an unnamed historian-persona rewrite the events ofhistory and are rewritten by them in turn. But is it established in Gibbon’sfragmented and multiple Memoirs? One of the implicit statements made by thetitle page of a published book is that the text which it prefaces is complete andwill not be subject to further evolutions or alterations (a statement, for manyeighteenth-century publications, more rhetorical than contractual).Gibbon’s Autobiographies, however, were never published. The name ‘EdwardGibbon’, which appears in the titles of only some of these fragments, refers tomultiple characters within the text, including Gibbon’s father andgrandfather. Gibbon even attributes his name to the five younger brotherswho predeceased him and records, in draft B, that his parents ‘after bestowingat my baptism the favourite appellation of Edward, [...] provided a substitute,



in case of my departure, by successively adding it to the Christian names ofmy younger brothers’ (p.112). He makes the same point with even greateremphasis in Memoir F: ‘in the baptism of each of my brothers, my father’sprudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that in case ofthe departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be stillperpetuated in the family’ (p.35). In fact, only one of Gibbon’s youngerbrothers had Edward as a middle name, and, whether this is an error or adeliberate dissimulation on Gibbon’s part, it is clear that Gibbon waspreoccupied by the idea of his supposedly unique name becoming diluted byfurther use.13 Gibbon-the-protagonist, meanwhile, is forced to negotiate abewildering array of names and titles, many of which conflict with oneanother. The well-known pronouncement ‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as ason’ has left many readers unconvinced by both Gibbon’s romantic passionand his filial piety (C, p.239), but the most significant feature of the phrase isits perfect equilibrium, which does not require the reader to choose betweenthe two roles. The irony lies in the equanimity with which the author acceptssuch a division of selfhood. Gibbon’s Autobiographies are the fragmented anddivided memoirs of a fragmented and divided individual.

Despite the fragmentations of text and identity that are a feature of bothThe Decline and Fall and the Autobiographies, many critics still apply to Gibbon’sMemoirs a coherence and stability borrowed from a perception of the earlierhistory, even if this tendency is only noticeable at the level of vocabulary.Patricia Meyer Spacks’s account of the Autobiographies moves carefullythrough the six drafts noting formal differences, but this is prefaced by adiscussion of Gibbon’s overall aims:

The historian setting down the story of his life shows himself a master ofmarmoreal style. The boy and young man he describes, struggling towardsmastery, is finally defined by his suffering, which, as boy and young man, hecannot comprehend but which as mature writer he can accept, judge, andcontain.14

Like many critics, Spacks uses the word ‘historian’ as a synonym forGibbon, and associates this persona with a ‘marmoreal’ or stony quality inGibbon’s writing that emphasises his control and stability. The word‘marmoreal’ also implies, however, that Gibbon’s Memoirs resemble thefragments of marble and stone that are the materials of his earlier history.15

The simultaneous evaluative detachment and mimetic intimacy conjured upby this single word reflect the complicated distance and attachment thatcharacterise the relationship between Gibbon and his historian-persona, thishistorian-persona and the objects of historiographical enquiry, and theauthor and protagonist of Gibbon’s Memoirs. Alongside the stability thatSpacks invokes, the association between Gibbon’s narrative style and theremnants of a historical past collapses the distance between author andsubject, implicitly undermining the authorial distance and composure that



are often associated with Gibbon as a writer. By bringing his historicalmaterial to the fore, Gibbon’s Autobiographies allow the trope of ruination tomove freely between different levels of authorial engagement, and toinfluence the work at the level of narrative as well as of content.

II.

Gibbon’s broken and fragmented Autobiographies resemble the artefactualmaterials around which he constructed The Decline and Fall, and it is thereforethe editors of Gibbon’s Memoirs who have taken on the historian’s role andapproached the six autobiographical fragments as though they were acollection of historical sources. John Baker-Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield, wasthe first person to edit Gibbon’s autobiographies, which he published in 1796

in the Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire, with Memoirs of his Lifeand Writings. Gibbon left all his personal papers to Sheffield and his otherexecutor (John Batt) in his will, with the instruction ‘that if any shall appearsufficiently finished for the public eye, they do treat for the purchase of thesame with a Bookseller’.16 As a close personal friend of Gibbon’s, Sheffieldtook this task very seriously. In his preface to the Miscellaneous Works hewrites:

The warmth of my early and long attachment to Mr. Gibbon made me consciousof a partiality, which it was not proper to indulge, especially in revising many ofhis juvenile and unfinished compositions. I had to guard, not only against asentiment like my own, which I found extensively diffused, but also against theeagerness occasioned by a very general curiosity to see in print every literaryrelick, however imperfect, of so distinguished a writer.17

The tension that Sheffield evidently feels between a wish to protect his friend’sreputation from youthful stubs and a desire to satisfy the curiosity anddevotion of himself and others is summed up in the word ‘relick’. It isbeautifully expressive of the fragmentary nature of Gibbon’s writings – asthough each autobiography were a small fragment of the man himself, afinger-bone or a lock of hair – as well as the special devotion that Sheffield feltwas due to Gibbon and his literary work.

It also goes some way to explaining Sheffield’s treatment of Gibbon’spapers. The version of the Memoirs that he published, despite his assertionthat ‘I have [...] adhered with scrupulous fidelity to the very words of theirAuthor’, takes considerable liberties with Gibbon’s text.18 Sheffield presentsthe version of Gibbon that he himself wished to be preserved and widelyacknowledged, searching out elegant and striking turns of phrase butrepressing evidence of pride, meanness and occasional earthiness ofmetaphor. Sheffield’s text is still widely published today, but it is often greetedwith varying degrees of consternation or bewilderment by editors. Themodern reader finds it hard to understand Sheffield’s devotional attitude to



Gibbon’s ‘historical record’ (so different from Gibbon’s own approach tohistory), which causes him to spirit away evidence and present a purifiedinterpretation to his readers. It is an attitude that remained unchangedthroughout his lifetime, and Gibbon’s papers stayed locked in a strong-roomin Sheffield Park for over a century after his death. It was not until hisgrandson sold the Gibbon papers to the British Museum in 1894 thatSheffield’s testamentary injunction, ‘that none of the said manuscripts,papers, or books of the said Edward Gibbon be published’, was overruled.19

In 1896, under the auspices of the 3rd Earl of Sheffield, John Murraypublished all six of Gibbon’s autobiographies verbatim (with modernisedpunctuation and capitalisation) along with Gibbon’s will, memoranda and aseventh fragment of just a couple of pages. This edition takes a rather differentattitude to Gibbon’s literary remains but picks up on Sheffield’s originalpreoccupations with the historical nature of Gibbon’s papers, and theirfragmentation. In an introduction to the new Autobiographies of EdwardGibbon Sheffield’s grandson refers again to Gibbon’s ‘relics’ and ‘remains’, andspeaks of the ‘religious care and veneration’ with which they have beenpreserved until presented to the public as ‘literary treasures’. A museumculture wins out over private devotion here, and it is no coincidence that thenew edition coincided with the removal of Gibbon’s papers to the BritishMuseum from Sheffield Park. The 3rd Earl writes, with great emphasis, that‘every piece contained in this volume as the work of Edward Gibbon is now printedexactly as he wrote it without suppression or emendation’.20 Passages omitted bythe 1st Earl are marked with severe square brackets, as though to highlightthe further mutilation that afflicts even a fragmented text when it is subjectedto well-meaning restoration. And yet, as Georges A. Bonnard, the editor of thethird and last significant text of Gibbon’s Memoirs, has pointed out, Murray’stext never overtook Sheffield’s in popularity and was not reproduced after1897. It appears that readers prefer the restored copy to the fragmentaryoriginal, and it was in response to this preference that Bonnard edited his ownversion of the text in 1966, which runs together all six memoir fragments, asfar as chronology will allow. Although his own edition includes in footnotes‘passages of biographical interest or great literary value’ from other versionsof the Memoirs omitted from the main text, variations are not exhaustivelycited, and Betty Radice’s 1984 edition for Penguin, to which most critics of theMemoirs refer and which is most readily available to readers, uses Bonnard’stext with scantier endnotes in the place of his footnote citations.21

The alterations that Bonnard makes to Gibbon’s original text, such as thedivision of the autobiography into chapters, are complicated by the appeal hemakes to ‘Gibbon’s original and final decision’.22 His restored text, Bonnardimplies, is more truly representative of Gibbon’s wishes and plans thanGibbon’s own work. Like an eighteenth-century artist in front of an antiquesculptural fragment, Bonnard ‘completes’ Gibbon’s text so that it conforms tohis idea of what Gibbon should be: coherent, comprehensive and complete.The conflict between the pleasing wholeness of a restoration and the less



comprehensible fragmentation of the original artefact is an insolubleconundrum for modern-day literary scholars, as it was for historians andantiquarians of the eighteenth century. I would argue, however, that thereliance that modern critics have on either the Sheffield or the Bonnardeditions leads to a false sense of the stability and coherence of Gibbon’s text.Stone and marble are not always symbols of stability and wholeness. Gibbon’sfirst editors knew this, and the historian of The Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire knew this most of all.

III.

The different ways in which the editors of Gibbon’s Autobiographies haveresponded to the multiple texts – as relics, exhibits or restored fragments –reflect the ways in which the antiquarians, historians and scholars of theeighteenth century have perceived the remnants of the Classical past. Twobroad approaches – the first emphasising the importance of over-archingnarratives and systematic structures, the second embracing the incoherentparticularity of the archaeological and literary record – opposed one anotherin a variety of different cultural debates: the philosophe versus the érudit,literature versus philology, and philosophical history versus antiquarianism.Attempts to unite and reconcile these two approaches to history were madeby contemporaries of Gibbon, but the result was very often fragmentation anddiscontinuity within their own narratives, which reflected this significantideological divide. The demand for factual verification led to the constructionof texts with multiple narrative strands set out in footnotes, endnotes andappendices, while an interest in the social and cultural contextualisation ofthe individual resulted in histories that embraced some of the features ofbiographies, novels and epistolary fiction. Writers also debated the valueof historical analysis and argument, condemning its digressive qualities atthe same time as applauding its didactic value.23

The narrative structure of The Decline and Fall responds to many of the samedemands as other histories of its time, with a subtext of notes and references,an ambivalent approach to chronological narrative and a notoriouslyunsatisfactory overview of the causes of decline set out in the ‘GeneralObservations of the Decline of Empire in the West’ appended to the thirdvolume. Within this formal framework Gibbon describes his struggle tomaintain a consistent narrative line amid the fragmentary sources at hisdisposal:

From the great secular games celebrated by Philip, to the death of the emperorGallienus, there elapsed twenty years of shame and misfortune. During thatcalamitous period, every instant of time was marked, every province of theRoman world was afflicted, by barbarous invaders and military tyrants, and theruined empire seemed to approach the last and fatal moment of its dissolution.The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, oppose



equal difficulties to the historian, who attempts to preserve a clear andunbroken thread of narration. Surrounded with imperfect fragments, alwaysconcise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, tocompare, and to conjecture [...] (vol. I.253)

The image of the historian imposing order on the chaos of the past by sortingand evaluating his materials is opposed by the image that precedes it, of thehistorian preserving a thread as he moves through the rubble, like Theseusnegotiating a labyrinth that he cannot hope to make sense of, but from whichhe may be able to emerge unscathed. The association between intellectualbewilderment and navigational anxiety contained in the image of thelabyrinth is explored by many eighteenth-century visitors to the city of Rome.It is difficult not to connect the progressive obscuration of the written word inGiovanni Battista Piranesi’s early work Prima parte di architettura e prospettive(1743), for example (an obscuration that Richard Wendorf describes as ‘apervasive threat to the very intelligibility of the past’), with theincomprehensible architecture of Piranesi’s subsequent Carceri d’invenzione(1750), through which no prisoner could hope to negotiate his escape.24 In hispoem ‘The Ruins of Rome’ (1740) John Dyer describes himself as a touristwandering through the remnants of the ancient city: ‘With error sweet,/ Iwind the ling’ring step, where-e’er the path/ Mazy conducts me’.25 Here thelabyrinthine imagery reflects a moral anxiety, explored elsewhere in thepoem, concerning the Catholic overtones of the tourist’s devotion to Rome’sstatues and temples. The physical, moral and intellectual disorientationexperienced by the person who views or walks among these remains can becompared to the disorientation experienced by the art critics, historians andpoets who negotiate them in narrative.

The difficulties facing the historian who must reconcile historicalparticularity with a coherent narrative are similar to those which face Gibbonas he approaches the story of his life. Gibbon’s Autobiographies have an over-arching narrative, they describe how their protagonist became the historianof The Decline and Fall, but the path of this trajectory is so beset by delays anddiversions, and the man himself is so contradictory and broken, that thisnarrative reaches its culmination in only one of the six drafts of the Memoirs,a draft that Gibbon chooses to set aside in order to begin the story of his lifeagain. Leo Damrosch, drawing a connection between the materials ofGibbon’s history and the narrative of the Autobiographies, asserts that ‘Gibbonwanted to believe that an essential unity had lain in wait from the beginning.He is a statue, not a moving picture’.26 Yet this vision of statuesque unitybelies both the broken and fragmented pieces of ancient art that werediscovered amid the ruins of Rome, the inspiration for The Decline and Fall, andthe incoherent physicality of the young Gibbon which the Memoirs portray.Gibbon’s childhood is characterised more than anything by poor health. Hisown body, far from manifesting the classical ideal of marmoreal balance andstability, is a ‘crazy frame’ in more than one of his autobiographical



fragments, indicating essential and structural instability. The extension ofGibbon’s selfhood beyond the limits of his body through the proliferation ofhis name, and the invasion of his private self by the environmental andsituational concerns expressed through his many titles (‘Captain’, ‘historian’,‘lover’, ‘son’), imply that the very boundary or frame of Gibbon’s identity isinsecure.

Gibbon’s health returned in early adolescence, but the images of bodilyincoherence and curtailment continue into his adult life. Memoir E, theautobiography that continues its account of Gibbon’s life further than anyother and which furnishes the conclusion of Sheffield’s Memoir text,describes, in its final pages, the discharge of Gibbon’s father’s debts ‘[b]y thepainful method of amputation’ (p.345). Although this Memoir marks theculmination of a process of abridgement and increased reticence in matters offamily and finances which extends from Memoir B, it is typical of Gibbon’swriting that the same draft that dismisses the severe financialembarrassments caused by his father’s debts – ‘[t]he clear untainted remainsof my patrimony have been always sufficient to support the rank of aGentleman, and to satisfy the desires of a philosopher’ (E, p.306) – should alsodisplace some of these anxieties and criticisms into a more metaphoricallanguage.27 This is not the first time that Gibbon uses this image. In a letter toSheffield written in 1784 Gibbon tells his financial manager, ‘you areentrusted with the final amputation of the best limb of my property’, whichemphasises the perversity of removing the ‘best’ or most healthy limb in orderto satisfy his father’s creditors.28 In three of the Memoirs (B, p.155; C, p.243; D,p.399) Gibbon compares the breaking of the entail on his estate, for whichpurpose his father recalled him from Lausanne in 1758, to the sacrifice of anunwitting victim at the altar of family greed, and as early as August 1761

Gibbon amusingly records the loss of his estates in his diary with an ellipsis:‘In consideration of my ... my father settled £300 a year on me’.29 Gibbon’sfinancial amputation is given a physical presence on the page as a literal gapor absence in the account of his life. The recurrence of this idea in a variety oftexts designed for different readerships and composed at different timesindicates that this was a long-term preoccupation for Gibbon, but apreoccupation that finds its fullest expression in his Autobiographies.

The intriguing combination of the personal, the painful and the comicevoked by Gibbon’s bodily fragmentations in his Memoirs can also be foundin his history. In the last chapter of The Decline and Fall Gibbon turns to Romefor a final time, describing the fifteenth-century city in its ruins, andimaginatively returning to the moment of his project’s conception ‘amidst theruins of the Capitol’ (E, p.302). The inhabitants of the empire are long dead,but their suffering appears to live on in the ruins and statues that survive. Bypersonifying the remnants of the ancient past Gibbon implies the existence ofbodily pain, and pre-echoes the images of sickness and amputation that helater uses to describe himself in the Autobiographies. The buildings of Romeare ‘lacerated’, and fallen columns lie like ‘broken members’. Most evocatively,



Gibbon paraphrases Poggius to describe how ‘[t]he public and private edifices,that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbsof a mighty giant’.30 Sometimes Gibbon’s tone is lighter, and his metaphorsare more playful:

The discovery of a statue of Pompey, ten feet in length, was an occasion of alaw-suit. It had been found under a partition-wall: the equitable judge hadpronounced, that the head should be separated from the body to satisfy theclaims of the contiguous owners; and the sentence would have been executed,if the intercession of a cardinal, and the liberality of a pope, had not rescued theRoman hero from the hands of his barbarous countrymen. (vol. VI.1082)

The threat to Pompey of a second decapitation (his head was presented toJulius Caesar by the agents of Ptolemy XIII in Egypt in 48 BC) is one of severalimages of bodily amputation found in the last volumes of the history. Gibbondescribes, for example, how the Tartars at the battle of Lignitz ‘filled ninesacks with the right-ears of the slain’ (vol. VI.802), while the conqueringTimour marks his victories with ‘columns, or pyramids, of human heads’(vol. VI.852), thus reconstructing the edifices of the cities he destroys fromhuman remains. Macabre, bizarre and even comic, these images interrupt theflow of Gibbon’s narrative with their emphatic particularity. By adoptingsuch images to describe himself in the Autobiographies, Gibbon not only drawsa strong connection between his own person and the materials of his historybut also associates the narrative incoherence of both works with theirfragmentary subject matter.

At one point in his Memoirs Gibbon turns briefly away from the imagery ofruination and compares himself, not to a sacrificial victim or amputee but toa complete and unbroken statue. In Memoir B he describes the impact of hiseducation at Lausanne on his adult character: ‘Such as I am, in Genius orlearning or manners, I owe my creation to Lausanne: it was in that school,that the statue was discovered in the block of marble’ (p.152). Thepolysyndeton of ‘Genius or learning or manners’ implies an accumulativetotality of character, but the word ‘discovered’ in part contradicts this effect.Gibbon embraces Michelangelo’s fantasy of a statue already formed andcontained within the stone which the sculptor must release: an ideally wholeand timeless work of art, removed from the narratives of artistic process. Thereality that Gibbon describes, of physical and mental maturity achievedpainstakingly by disrupted and incoherent growth and education, is replacedwith a fantasy of spontaneous, and preordained, development. Only byimagining an escape from the temporal demands of narrative, inheritanceand maturity can Gibbon envisage, albeit briefly, a complete and coherentselfhood.

In Memoir F – the final and most polished of the autobiographies – Gibbonincludes a lengthy quotation from Book 8 of Paradise Lost, in which Adamdescribes his first awakening in Eden, his instinctive movement andspontaneous language.



It is thus that the poet has animated his statue: the Theologian must infuse amiraculous gift of science and language, the Philosopher might allow moretime for the gradual exercise of his new senses, but all would agree that theconsciousness and memory of Adam might proceed in a regular series from themoment of his birth. Far different is the origin and progress of human nature,and I may confidently apply to myself the common history of the whole species.

Adam resembles an animated statue because he avoids the common humanprocesses of growth and development, arriving in the world as a fully matureadult. In this way he resembles the statue discovered in the block of marble,since his completeness is intimately connected with his removal fromnarrative progression. Yet he is also the perfect autobiographer, since hisrecollections and consciousness extend through time ‘in a regular series’ fromthe very beginning of his existence. Gibbon’s inadequate memories of his ownchildhood force him to make a rather zoological appeal to the authority of‘Mr. de Buffon’ and his natural history for an account of his early life. At thesame time he particularises the experience of his birth with a description ofbeing ‘painfully transported’ into an existence defined not by thought but bysuffering: ‘Of a new born infant it cannot be predicated “he thinks, thereforehe is;” it can only be affirmed “he suffers, therefore he feels” ’ (F, p.33). As isthe case when Gibbon describes the sacrifices and dismemberments he suffersat the hands of his father, or the incongruous human and personifiedfragments of the final chapters of The Decline and Fall, pain is presented as analternative to coherence and narrative order which focuses the reader on therealities of existence. With this quotation from Paradise Lost Gibbon brieflyimagines a reconciliation between the wholeness and integrity of thespeaking subject and narrative progression but situates it in a prelapsariancontext that is inaccessible not only for him but for everyone. Gibbon takes theconundrum that faces every autobiographer – the fact that no one canremember the experience of being born – and uses it to assert the impossibilityof writing a complete and coherent narrative of a complete and coherent life.

IV.

Most autobiographers, although unable to construct a totally regularnarrative of every moment of their lives, do not produce memoirs thatresemble Gibbon’s Autobiographies. Most are able to accept the limitations ofchildhood memory and to assimilate the inadequate recollections of theirearly lives into some sort of narrative of progress or maturation. The fact thatGibbon is not able, or else refuses, to construct such a narrative suggests thathis incomplete and fragmented Memoirs do more than respond to thetroubling incoherence of his early childhood and minority. In order todiscover the reason for the broken structure of Gibbon’s Autobiographies weneed to examine the way in which Gibbon characterises those institutions



and social structures by which his identity might have been moulded anddefined: family, school and university, the militia, Parliament and Englanditself.

The image that Gibbon returns to most frequently in his descriptions ofthese institutions is that of a chain. With this image, which combines the ideaof imprisonment and constraint with the idea of sequential linearity, Gibbonindicates the threat posed to his personal autonomy by the processes ofpersonal development or the demands of family and inheritance. Children atschool are ‘captive youths [...] chained to a book and a desk’ (F, p.60). Hishated service in the militia is an ‘inglorious chain’, during which his fatherand colonel keep him ‘chained to the oar’ (D, p.406, 401). Discussing hisancestry, he acknowledges the demand that ‘each successive generation [...]add a new link to the chain of hereditary splendour’ (A, p.354). Only at theend of draft E is there some hint that these chains might be broken. Hisdecision, in 1783, to sell his family estates, leave Parliament and move toLausanne is described as the breaking of ‘my English chain’ and as adeliverance ‘from the chain of duty and dependence’ (E, p.328-9). Education,the militia, family, Parliament and England – the chains by which Gibbon isimprisoned and from which he is eventually able to extricate himselfrepresent all the social institutions by which his personal identity is limited. Itis his desire not to make any one of these roles and their associated narrativeshis own that fragments his autobiography into a collection of different texts,protagonists and authorial voices. The explicit rejection of narratives ofdevelopment in the Autobiographies, whether associated with artistic processor personal maturation, indicates that textual fragmentation is not anunwitting response to internal incoherence but rather a deliberate reactionon Gibbon’s part to the familial and societal narratives that threaten hisautonomy.

The image of the chain locates Gibbon’s individual hardships within awider narrative of constraint: the tyranny that Gibbon suffers at the hands ofhis parents is itself part of an ongoing chain of repression extending backthrough the generations. His grandfather disapproved of his son’s choice ofwife and only grudgingly acknowledged his marriage to Gibbon’s mother. Indraft F Gibbon records how his parents were delivered ‘from a state ofservitude’ only by the death of the ‘old Tyrant’ (p.29, 21). If the language ofamputation and fragmentation in the Autobiographies has its historicalcounterpart in the ruins and remnants of The Decline and Fall, the language oftyranny and oppression that Gibbon uses to describe his grandfather’sauthority invites a comparison with the emperors and leaders whose paternalsolicitude for their subjects masks a destructive absolutism. In the earlychapters of his history Gibbon frequently associates Augustus’ execution ofarbitrary power with a paternal authority over Rome and the empire. InChapter 3 of the first volume Gibbon characterises the ‘reformation of thesenate’ as ‘one of the first steps in which Augustus laid aside the tyrant, andprofessed himself the father of his country’ (vol. I.86), but by Chapter 6 the



distinctions between these two roles appear to have become blurred: ‘It is noteasy to determine whether, on this occasion, he acted as the common fatherof the Roman world, or as the oppressor of liberty’ (vol. I.181). Theimplication that the positions of father and tyrant may be one and the same,or at least that there might be some uneasy slippage between the two, is borneout by Gibbon’s Autobiographies. In these drafts Gibbon uses the history of TheDecline and Fall to rewrite a narrative of familial control. Individual words,metaphors and literary or historical allusions become, in his hands, offensiveweapons with which to affect the defeat of paternal authority, interpretedbroadly as all the ideals and institutions of Hanoverian England that limit hisindividuality and curtail his freedom.31 He can achieve this because heassociates the decline of imperial authority in the ancient empire so closelywith the events of his own life.

Gibbon’s interest in ancient and oriental history was established at a youngage. In his Memoirs he describes his voracious appetite for Xenophon, Tacitusand Procopius, which he read in translation, his discovery of LaurenceEchard’s Roman History on a visit to Stourhead, and his interest in Mahomet,which soon directed his attention to Simon Ockley. ‘Before I was sixteen,’ hewrites, ‘I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs andPersians, the Tartars and Turks’ (F, p.57-8). Gibbon’s childhood illness,however, deprived him of a familiarity with Augustan literature in theoriginal Latin. The empire under Augustus is discussed on only two occasionsin the Autobiographies, and in both cases Gibbon’s position is destructive andcombative. In his account of his childhood reading Gibbon describes his firstencounter with the Aeneid:

From Pope’s Homer to Dryden’s Virgil was an easy transition; but I know nothow, from some fault in the author, the translator, or the reader, the piousÆneas did not so forcibly seize on my imagination, and I derived more pleasurefrom Ovid’s Metamorphoses, especially in the fall of Phaëthon, and thespeeches of Ajax and Ulysses. (F, p.49-50 [B, p.118, slightly rephrased])

Gibbon rejects Aeneas, whose habitual epithet ‘pious’ (pius) signifies hisdedication to the gods, the state and family (in a dynastic rather than intimatesense), in favour of Phaethon, the son of Apollo who drives his father’s sun-chariot through the sky, loses control and is killed by Jove in order to preventhim from destroying the earth. In this way Gibbon opposes the virtues of filialpiety and self-sacrifice with destructive independence and demonstrates hisresistance to Augustan propaganda. From this point on Aeneas becomesGibbon’s ironic alter ego in the Memoirs. The words ‘pious’ and ‘piety’ are usedrepeatedly to describe his relationship with his father, and also his adoptedparent the University of Oxford, which Gibbon hated so much. Each time theyare reiterated, they fall into the sentence with a more hollow anduncomfortable ring.

The second reference to Augustus forms part of Gibbon’s discussion of hisearly essay ‘Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid’, written in



1770 in response to Bishop Warburton’s Divine Legation of MosesDemonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1737-41). In this workGibbon describes the hero’s three virtues of justice, piety and valour, in orderto ridicule Warburton’s discovery of ‘A SYSTEM OF POLITICS’ in the Aeneidand his characterisation of Aeneas as ‘the LAWGIVER’.32 In each case Gibbonillustrates the quality in question with a passage that is, at the very least,ambiguous in its import. Aeneas’ justice, for example, is illustrated by hisalliance with the rebellious Etruscans and his defeat of their leader:

The Etruscans, tired out with the repeated tyrannies of Mezentius, had driventhat monarch from his throne, and reduced him to implore the protection ofTurnus. [...] Aeneas, with the approbation of Gods and men, accepts thecommand of these brave rebels, and punishes the Tyrant with the death he sowell deserved. The conduct of Aeneas and the Etruscans may, in point of justice,seem doubtful to many; the sentiments of the Poet cannot appear equivocal toany one. Milton himself, I mean the Milton of the Commonwealth, could nothave asserted with more energy the daring pretensions of the people, to punishas well as to resist a Tyrant. Such opinions, published by a writer, whom we aretaught to consider as the creature of Augustus, have a right to surprize us; yetthey are strongly expressive of the temper of the times; the Republic wassubverted, but the minds of the Romans were still Republican.33

Gibbon appears to pre-empt any doubtful interpretation of this episode byappealing to Virgil’s unequivocal approval of Aeneas’ actions. However, thiscertainty is undermined in the next sentence, when Gibbon compares theancient poet with ‘Milton himself, I mean the Milton of the Commonwealth’.Gibbon’s qualification reminds the reader that the political attitudes of poetscan change over time in response to external pressures and the society inwhich they live. His assertion that the Roman people maintain incongruouslyRepublican minds while subject to absolute rule begins to look troublinglynaive. The implication, that Virgil’s attitude to Aeneas’ actions may be moreambiguous and conflicted than it at first sight appears, is borne out by thedescription of Mezentius’ death in the tenth book of the Aeneid. Mezentiusattacks Aeneas in revenge for the death of his son Lausus, a model of filialpiety whom Aeneas actually rebukes for being too dedicated to his father:

Quo moriture ruis maioraque viribus audes?Fallit te incautum pietas tua.

[‘Why do you rush to meet your death and venturewith strength that is beyond you? Your piety willbe your downfall, reckless man.’]

The attack against this father-and-son pair reads like an attack on piety asmuch as an attack on tyranny. By enlisting Aeneas as an extremelyambiguous revolutionary ally Gibbon gives a new turn to the irony withwhich the word ‘piety’ is used in his Memoirs.



Aeneas may be a troubling object of condemnation, but Gibbon’s attackagainst the tyranny of Bishop Warburton, the author of the Divine Legation, isvirulent and unflinching. In his Memoirs Gibbon describes how he opposes hisacademic adversary:

The learning and abilities of the author had raised him to a just eminence; buthe reigned the Dictator and tyrant of the World of Litterature [sic]. The realmerit of Warburton was degraded by the pride and presumption with which hepronounced his infallible decrees; in his polemic writings he lashed hisantagonists without mercy or moderation, and his servile flatterers (see the baseand malignant delicacy of friendship), exalting the master critic far aboveAristotle and Longinus, assaulted every modest dissenter who refused toconsult the oracle, and to adore the Idol. (C, p.281).

Warburton is tyrannical in the certainty with which he constructs hisallegorical system. An Augustan figure, he is ‘degraded’ by his love forarbitrary power, assumes the virtue of infallibility (Augustus was the firstman to exercise the unlimited power of an imperator within the walls of Rome)and is even deified within his lifetime.34 When this event is retold in Memoir E,it should be noted, Warburton is connected, in a footnote, with the militarycommander Sylla (p.304). However, this man (now most commonly calledSulla) is invoked as a proto-Augustus, a dictator who hastened the end of therepublic with his temporary assumption of arbitrary power, and theidentification does not weaken the Augustan overtones of the first account.The importance of the Aeneid for Augustus’ national agenda makes Gibbon’sattack on Warburton a counterpart to the destruction of Rome itself, aconnection that Gibbon chooses to highlight with a quotation from a reviewercalled Hayley in support of his own essay: ‘a superior but anonymous critic[...] completely overturned this ill-founded edifice, and exposed the arroganceand futility of its assuming architect’ (C, p.283). The inherent instability ofthe structure is confirmed by Gibbon when he describes it as ‘a monument,already crumbling into dust’ (E, p.305, n.25). The ruin or fragment, whichGibbon uses elsewhere in his Memoirs to indicate his powerlessness, is heremade an emblem of personal and political freedom which combats the orderand coherence that support tyrannical power. The ruin’s fragmented formsignifies a rejection of the consistency of history or epic, and most especiallyof the Aeneid, which represents, for Gibbon, the Augustan domination ofwhich he himself was a victim.

V.

As one of the directors of the South Sea Company, Gibbon’s grandfatherfound that his fortune was more than decimated by Parliament in theaftermath of the stock market crash. ‘On these ruins,’ Gibbon writes,

with the skill and credit of which Parliament had not been able to despoil him,my grandfather, at a mature age, erected the edifice of a new fortune: the



labours of sixteen years were amply rewarded, and I have reason to believe thatthe second Temple was not much inferior to the first. (F, p.16)

Here Gibbon makes reference to a biblical image. The construction of asecond temple at Jerusalem, built to replace the first temple of Solomon,destroyed by the Babylonians, is described in the book of Ezra, and itsinferiority (since this latter structure does not house the Ark of theCovenant) is acknowledged in the book of Haggai.35 Gibbon’s ironiccomparison, which does not reflect well on either the sanctity of the Jewishreligion or the sincerity of the elder Gibbon’s declaration of his loss, isfurther complicated by the possibility that Gibbon may be responding to amore recent source. John Dryden’s poem ‘To my Dear Friend Mr Congreve,on his Comedy, called The Double-Dealer’, first printed in 1693,unfavourably compares the poet’s own age of polite but enervated dramaticpoesy with the preceding age of Jacobean vigour:

Strong were our sires; and as they fought they writ,Conqu’ring with force of arms, and dint of wit;Theirs was the giant race, before the Flood;And thus, when Charles return’d, our empire stood.Like Janus he the stubborn soil manur’d,With rules of husbandry the rankness cur’d:Tam’d us to manners, when the stage was rude;And boisterous English wit, with art endu’d.Our age was cultivated thus at length;But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.Our builders were, with want of genius, curst;The second temple was not like the first [...]36

Dryden locates his argument in a context very similar to that of Gibbon’sDecline and Fall. The association between literary and military strength isexplored by both the poet and the historian, who writes that ‘the energy of thesword is communicated to the pen’ (vol. V.25) and who describes the loss ofempire as the defeat of ‘a race of pygmies’ by the ‘fierce giants’ of the North(vol. I.84). However, the associations of this image are by no means purelyClassical. The second temple is itself a Jewish structure, and by characterisingthe interregnum as a flood Dryden draws ambiguously on both biblical andOvidian mythology. With such variety, Paul Hammond argues, Drydenproduces ‘a macaronic space in which different themes and differentlanguages jostle’.37 This representational incoherence is closely associatedwith a structural incoherence that threatens both the architectural imagesand the poem that contains them. The Civil War and Protectorate are both adestructive ‘Flood’ and an ‘empire’, and Charles’s Reformation, figured ratherincongruously with a farming metaphor, both encourages new growth bymanuring the soil and checks abundance by curing the ‘rankness’ of bothrebellious subjects and rampant weeds.38 It is to Congreve that Dryden turnsin the hope of discovering a clear and solid edifice:



Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length;Our beauties equal; but excel our strength.Firm Doric pillars found your solid base:The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space;Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace. (l.15-19)

In the remainder of the poem Dryden struggles to define the nature of thesuccession that has taken place here. A lineal inheritance that imitates royaldescent is thwarted by the election of Thomas Shadwell to the post of poetlaureate following Dryden’s expulsion, and Dryden explores variousalternatives to this pattern, including fatherly submission to the moreexcellent son and the awarding of laurel crowns, which at times indicateCongreve’s indebtedness to Dryden, at other times his own innate genius. Thecomparison of Congreve to Vitruvius, a Roman architect during the secondtriumvirate and the reign of Augustus, introduces this ambivalence. In TheDecline and Fall Augustus’ boast ‘that he had found his capital of brick, andthat he had left it of marble’ (vol. I.71) is matched by Gibbon’s description ofthe emperor as the ‘artful founder’ of an ‘edifice’ of imperial control (vol.I.95). The building projects that he dedicates to Rome’s renewal deceptivelymask his political aspirations. This contrast between appearances and realityis restated by Gibbon in his description of the senate, which ‘rested itsdeclining authority on the frail and crumbling basis of ancient opinion’ (vol.I.147). The strength and coherence of Augustus’ new Rome is established onthe shaky foundation of eroded freedoms that will ultimately contribute toRome’s decline. Dryden’s similar preoccupations, with a structural stabilitythat stands in awkward relation to an earlier representational incoherence,suggest that Gibbon’s use of this literary reference in his Autobiographies maybe intended to undermine his grandfather’s new edifice. In an early draft ofthe Memoirs Gibbon describes how his grandfather was buried under theruins of the South Sea scheme rather than being able to construct a newfortune out of the remnants (A, p.374). Even when, in all later accounts,Gibbon’s grandfather is shown to triumph over adversity, the edifice that hecreates is still not able to mask its origins in the stock market crash for whichhe was, in part, responsible: ‘I fear that my grandfather’s abilities will notleave him the apology of ignorance or error’ (B, p.108, C, p.214); ‘[a]gainstirresistible rapine the use of fraud is almost legitimate’ (F, p.16); ‘[s]ome partof my grandfather’s fortune was legally and, perhaps, honestly secured’ (C,p.215). The litotes and qualifying adverbs highlight Gibbon’s equivocation,but also indicate the weaknesses of the edifice.

Augustus and the other tyrants of The Decline and Fall exercise theirarbitrary rule within a dichotomy of ruination and rebuilding, whereby theconsolidation of personal power is achieved through the oppression anddestruction of the subjects of the empire. The necessary interrelationship ofthese two processes is given particular emphasis by the language of buildingand construction that Gibbon repeatedly employs to describe the



establishment of imperial rule. In the first volume the emperor Severus istroubled by ‘[t]he unhappy discord of his sons [which] clouded all hisprospects, and threatened to overturn a throne raised with so much labour,cemented with so much blood, and guarded with every defence of arms andtreasure’ (vol. I.150). In the fourth volume Gibbon describes how ‘[t]he edificesof Justinian were cemented with the blood and treasure of his people’ (vol.IV.592). The cement that these emperors use to bind together new structuresof power is made from the blood of their subjects, but Gibbon leaves it to thereader to determine how it is thickened to the appropriate consistency. Theimage of human bodies ground into a paste springs unbidden to mind, so thatfragmentation is increased to pulverisation in order to support the structuresof imperial tyranny.

The association that Gibbon proposed in his attack on Warburton betweentyranny and building, on the one hand, and fragmentation and freedom, onthe other, cannot be maintained when the processes of building anddestroying are mutually necessary. This is the case in The Decline and Fall,which connects tyrannical power with both construction and ruination. It isalso the case in Gibbon’s Autobiographies. In these texts Gibbon usesfragmentation and incoherence to assert his personal freedom. He opposes anarrative chain of development and maturation with a fragmented andincoherent text; he opposes patriarchal tyranny by directing his scholarlyattacks against those figures – contemporary, ancient or imaginary – whorepresent Augustus’ exercise of arbitrary power, and he opposes the physicaland ideological building that familial tyrants engage in with his ownnarrative trope of ruination. However, incoherence and mutilation are alsoassociated, in the Memoirs, with the effects of patriarchal tyranny. Gibbondescribes himself as being dismembered and fragmented by the sameinstitutions and individuals whom he attempts to combat with the aggressiveincompleteness of his life. His Autobiographies defend him from externalpressures, such as those imposed by his father, but they do so by submitting to,even embracing, the mutilation of text and person.

This double-bind, which is so integral to the structure and message ofGibbon’s Autobiographies, is extremely reminiscent of the way in whichRome’s decline was accounted for by Gibbon’s contemporaries. In histranslation of an epigram by the sixteenth-century humanist Janus Vitalis,the poet Samuel Rogers illustrates the self-involved causes of Rome’s fall:

Ill-fated city! who, her foes subdu’d,In her own blood her guilty arms embru’d;Urg’d headlong on by the absurd conceitThe work of conquest were not else complete;But to her cost soon found herself misled,As the mad victor in the vanquish’d bled.39

James Thomson, probably responding to the same source in his poem ‘Liberty’(1734-6), describes the city’s downfall:



A conquering people, to themselves a preyMust ever fall; when their victorious troops,In blood and rapine savage grown, can findNo land to sack and pillage but their own.40

Conquest and defeat are complementary activities: one person’s triumph issomeone else’s loss. One could argue that, in the case of Rome, every conquestmade by imperial power is a loss for republican freedom and manners.Thomson implies this by associating Rome’s increasing dominion with areturn to savagery, but while these conquests are directed externally theyremain dynamic and positive. It is only when all other objects have beenexhausted that Rome’s desire for conquest becomes self-defeating and self-destructive, culminating in the total loss of the Roman empire. It is becauseRome is defined by expansion and the energetic acquisition of power, territoryand ideological value that the city’s downfall is inevitable. In a finite worldexpansion must always reach an outer limit and the point at which itsdestructive energies become self-directed.

That the Roman empire came to an end is a certainty, and although Gibbonexperienced difficulties in finishing The Decline and Fall, the conclusion of hishistory was both the cause and the inevitable result of its conception amid theruins of the Capitol. The death of the autobiographer is equally inevitable but,like the moment of birth, cannot be accounted for by the author himself. Forthis reason the conclusion of the autobiographical text is always in some wayprovisional. Incompleteness and the lack of a determined end-point may thusbe inherent features of the autobiography, but Gibbon’s six unfinishedMemoirs exploit this uncertainty to its fullest extent. Critics have disagreed asto why this may be the case, but they have tended to concur that thefragmentary form of his Autobiographies was the result of a failure on theauthor’s part to construct the text he wanted to construct. I would like topropose a different model: that the fragmentary form of Gibbon’s Memoirsreflects the aims of his autobiographical project. This does not have to meanthat Gibbon actively chose not to complete his Autobiographies, since anycomplacent acceptance of fragmentation and incoherence as a source offreedom, on Gibbon’s part, threatens to control and solidify the very flux onwhich such fragmentation and incoherence rely. It means, rather, thatGibbon wished to achieve something with his Autobiographies that wasincompatible with their completion. By maintaining and exploitingprovisionality, and by constantly postponing the last word, Gibbon suspendsthe conflicting associations of fragmentation and wholeness that dominateboth his history and his life. The paradox of Rome’s self-destructive decline,which informs the patterns of dominion and control in the Memoirs, is felt butnever allowed to reach its conclusion. While Gibbon’s identity continues to bethreatened and dismembered, it can never be completely annihilated; nor canit be assimilated into a single, uncomplicated narrative of maturationgoverned by the demands of family. In this way fragmentation becomes a



weapon to be used against the limiting completeness of those social structuresby which Gibbon’s selfhood may be oppressed, but can never be entirelydestroyed.

NOTES1. ‘I began to think you imagined I should be content with the intelligence that the Gibbon

brought me from Beckenham’, Lord Sheffield to Lord Auckland, Sheffield Place, 17 December1793, The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, 4 vols (London: R. Bentley,1861-2), vol. III.158; ‘[W]e are just returned from attending the Gibbon towards Dover’, LordSheffield to Mr Eden, Sheffield Place, 29 July 1788, The Journal and Correspondence of William, LordAuckland, vol. II.220. ‘Edward Hamilton came on Sunday, and I suppose will stay till Milord andthe Great Gibbon go to London next Monday. I was very glad at his appearance; for I think boththe Peer and the Historian began to grow tired of a Tête à Tête after Dinner which always lasteda considerable time, as Gib. is a mortal enemy to any persons taking a walk, I suppose upon thevery same principle as Satan disliked the situation of Mr. and Mrs. Adam’, Maria Josepha to MissAnn Firth, Sheffield Place, 2 July 1793. J. H. Adeane (ed.), The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd,Lady Stanley of Alderley, Recorded in Letters of a Hundred Years Ago 1776-1796 (London:Longmans, Green & Co., 1896), p.225.

2. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Historian and “The Gibbon” ’, in The Death of the Moth and OtherEssays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1942), p.55-63 (p.60).

3. W. B. Carnochan, Gibbon’s Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 1987), p.17.

4. John Murray (ed.), The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon: Printed Verbatim from HithertoUnpublished MSS., with an Introduction by the Earl of Sheffield (London: John Murray, 1896), C,p.270, E, p.333. Subsequent quotations from Gibbon’s Autobiographies will be from this edition,unless otherwise stated, and a reference will be given in the text to the draft(s) (by letter) inwhich the quotation appears, along with page number(s).

5. Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p.7,160-63.

6. Woolf, ‘The Historian and “The Gibbon” ’, p.60-61.7. The portraits of the emperors Constantine and Julian and the prophet Mahomet in the

The Decline and Fall all contain passages in which the narrator acknowledges the difficulty ofwriting a unified and coherent account of an ambiguous and changeable character. Thepassage that most clearly demonstrates Woolf’s borrowing comes from Gibbon’s description ofJulian: ‘When we inspect, with minute, or perhaps malevolent attention, the portrait of Julian,something seems wanting to the grace and perfection of the whole figure.’ Edward Gibbon, TheHistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the First (1776) and Second (1781), ed.David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1995; repr. 2005), p.863. Subsequent quotations fromvolumes I and II of The Decline and Fall will be from this edition, and a reference will be given inthe text, identifying the volume and page number.

8. Porter, Edward Gibbon, p.9.9. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the Third

(1781) and Fourth (1788), ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1995), p.52. Subsequentquotations from volumes III and IV of The Decline and Fall will be from this edition and a referencewill be given in the text, identifying the volume and page number.

10. Another scene of bodily torture and dismemberment, the death of the EmperorAndronicus at the hands of the populous in Volume V, is singled out by Carnochan as a momentwhen ‘the narrative implicates both narrator and readers’. Carnochan, Gibbon’s Solitude, p.75.

11. Porter, Edward Gibbon, p.160.12. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), chapter 1.13. Carnochan, Gibbon’s Solitude, p.9-10, and note on p.191.14. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century

England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p.93.15. Spacks is not the only critic who uses such language. For Leo Damrosch, for example,

Gibbon’s style is ‘lapidary’. Leo Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p.112.



16. Autobiographies, ed. Murray, p.423.17. Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire. With memoirs of his life and writings,

composed by himself: illustrated from his letters, with occasional notes and narrative by John LordSheffield, 2 vols (London, 1796), vol. I.iii.

18. Miscellaneous works, ed. Sheffield, I, p. xi.19. Earl of Sheffield, introduction to Autobiographies, ed. Murray, p.vii.20. Earl of Sheffield, introduction to Autobiographies, ed. Murray, p.v-vi, xi.21. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984; repr.

1990).22. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London: Nelson and Sons,

1966), p.xxxii.23. For a discussion of these and other textual manifestations of the demands of historical

writing in the eighteenth century see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres ofHistorical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000),especially p.23.

24. Richard Wendorf, ‘Piranesi’s Double Ruin’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 34:2 (Winter2001), p.161-80 (p.172).

25. John Dyer, ‘The Ruins of Rome: A Poem’, in A Collection of Poems in Four Volumes. BySeveral Hands, ed. Robert Dodesley, 4 vols, 4th edn (London, 1755), vol. I.229.

26. Damrosch, Fictions of Reality p.96.27. David Womersley identifies and traces this increased reticence in Gibbon and the

‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,2002), p.255-6.

28. To Lord Sheffield, Monday, 18 October 1784, The Letters of Edward Gibbon, vol. III, ed. J. E.Norton (London: Cassell, 1956), Letter 621, p.4.

29. Gibbon’s Journal to January 28th 1763: My Journal I, II & III and Ephemerides, intro. D. M.Low (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), p.9.

30. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the Fifth(1788) and Sixth (1788), ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1994), p.1066, 1068, 1063. Allquotations from volumes V and VI of The Decline and Fall will be from this edition, and a referencewill be given in the text, identifying the volume and page number.

31. An account of Gibbon’s fraught relationship with these institutions, and its expression inhis Autobiographies, can be found in Womersley, Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’.

32. Edward Gibbon, ‘Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Æneid’, in The EnglishEssays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia B. Craddock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p.131-62

(p.141).33. Edward Gibbon, ‘Critical Observations’, p.139.34. Henry Thompson Rowell, Rome in the Augustan Age (Norman, OK: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1962), p.59-61.35. ‘Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? And how do ye see it now?

Is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing?’ (Authorized King James Version, Hag. 2: 3).36. John Dryden, ‘To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve, on his Comedy, called the Double-Dealer’,

in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond, 5 vols (London: Longman, 1995), vol. IV.326-35, l.3-14.

37. Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), p.16.

38. ‘ “rank, adj. and adv.” ’ 1. a. Having a high opinion of one’s own worth or importance;proud, haughty; insolent, arrogant; (also) headstrong, rebellious. Obs. 6. Chiefly of vegetation:vigorous or luxuriant in growth. In later use usually in negative sense: growing too luxuriantlyor rampantly; thick and coarse. Also in figurative contexts.’ OED Online, June 2009, OxfordUniversity Press, accessed 2 July 2009; <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50197220>.

39. Samuel Rogers, Poems on Various Occasions. Consisting of Original Pieces, and Translationsfrom Some of the Most Admired Latin Classics, 2 vols (Bath, 1782), vol. I.285.

40. James Thomson, Liberty, A Poem (Glasgow, 1774), p.65-6.

charlotte roberts is a PhD student at St John’s College, Cambridge, and is writing her thesis onhistory and identity in the work of Edward Gibbon. A version of this paper was presented at the BritishSociety for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38th Annual Conference and was awarded the President’sPrize for 2009.



the marmoreal edward gibbon: the autobiographies and the ruins of rome

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