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Edward Gibbon was born at Putney in 1737 of an old but undistinguished Kentish family, a younger branch of which had migrated to the City. There his grandfather, a pious, black-browed tyrant, rose rapidly to great wealth after the Revolution, and forfeited it all as Director of the South Sea Company. He escaped with £10,000, and as much more as he had been able to conceal. In a few years he had rebuilt his ruined fortune, and was able to give his son the education of a gentleman, the run of his teeth in Paris, and in due course a seat in Parliament. Edward Gibbon ii. was a vague impulsive person, ineffectually vibrating between the opposite attractions of business and gentility. Marrying for love, against his father’s intentions, the daughter of another but less solvent Putney family, he found himself and their children deprived by the old man’s will of a large share in the fortune they had a right to expect. Of Judith Gibbon we know only that she had seven children, lost six, and neglected the frail little mortal who survived, while she was making a social position for her husband in London, and trying to keep his passion for deep play within bounds. Her sister Catherine supplied her place, and won the lasting affection of her child. Once it is said (but Gibbon declined to confirm the story) he proposed to kill her. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘you are perfectly good now, so if you die you will go to heaven. If you live you may become wicked and go to hell.’ ‘But where do you expect to go if you kill me?’ ‘That,’ he replied, ‘my godfather will answer for. I have not been confirmed.’ The first piece of the historian’s writing we possess is a letter to his aunt in a bold round hand of thirteen, reporting his visit to an Ancient Camp near King’s Weston. His education, at home or at private schools, was constantly interrupted by ill-health: ‘fevers and lethargies, a fistula in the eye, a tendency to a dropsical and consumptive habit, a contraction of the nerves, with a variety of nameless disorders,’ including a bite from a dog ‘most vehemently suspected of madness.’ At Westminster, where he spent two years and a half, he seems to have learnt little more than some lower-form Latin. His mother was now dead: his father had abandoned Parliament and the town and buried himself in his Hampshire estate. With the approach of adolescence the pains which had tortured his childhood and frustrated his education disappeared. He was not quite fifteen when he matriculated as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen.

Catherine Porten was a wise woman: she saw that the best treatment for an ailing child with an active brain, who disliked games and schoolboys, was books and talk. With Pope in hand they debated the characters of Homer: languid hours were comforted by the Arabian Nights. The combination is suggestive. Into the classical world, as the eighteenth century conceived it, Gibbon always had the entry. He thinks of the Decline like one who had lived among the sages and heroes of a greater age. His judgment was on the side of the West, but his imagination moved most freely in the East, and the work of his manhood is shot with a child’s visions of grave and bearded Sultans who only smiled on the day of battle, the sword of Alp Arslan, the mace of Mahmoud, ‘Imaus, and Caf, and Altai, and the Golden Mountains, and the Girdle of the Earth.’ Half his History is written from the point of view of an ancient Roman, watching with mournful and indignant contempt the encroachments of barbarism and religion, the other half from the point of view of a Turk or Arab impatient for the end to come. To the Christian middle ages his imagination had no such key. No place in the world demands historic explanation so insistently as Venice. He passed through it with indifference and something like disgust. Gibbon’s incomprehension of Mediaeval Europe is the measure of what history owes to Scott.

Where Catherine Porten--she soon becomes and remains my dear Kitty--could not follow, she encouraged. She was not a woman of much education, and the boy was a scholar born. The Universal History in octavo began to appear when he was eight, and the last and twentieth volume came out when he was twelve. The presiding spirit in this co-operative enterprise was that Campbell whose reputation among his brother Scots was such as to put Johnson on his guard. ‘I used to go pretty often to Campbell’s on a Sunday evening till I began to consider that the shoals of Scotchmen who flocked about him might probably say when anything of mine was well done, “Ay, ay, he has learnt this of Cawmell.”’ The collaborators were an odd set: the learned Swinton, who once told a pewful of condemned criminals that he would give them the second half of his discourse on the following Sunday; the still more learned Sale, who was indeed the best Orientalist in Europe; Shelvocke, whose father sailed with the man who shot the Albatross; and the pious impostor, George Psalmanazar. ‘I never sought much after anybody,’ Johnson once mused. ‘I sought after George Psalmanazar the most. I used to go and sit with him at an ale-house in the city.’ Gibbon devoured the successive volumes as a later generation devoured the Waverley Novels. From ‘this unequal work’ he ranged, backwards and forwards and far afield, to translations of Herodotus and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Fra Paolo, to descriptions of China, Mexico and Peru. His twelfth year was his intellectual spring: his fourteenth fixed his destiny. On a visit to the Hoares at Stourhead, city friends of his father it may be supposed, he found a book on the later Roman Empire. He has chronicled the moment with affectionate recollection. ‘I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube when the summons of the dinner bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast.’ In the passage of the Goths over the Danube, and all it meant and brought about, he was immersed for the rest of his life. From the successors of Constantine he plunged into the sea of Oriental history. Some instinct of criticism directed him to the original sources, and taught him also how to build with maps and tables that solid framework of time and place in which a historian must set his learning. He spelt his way through French and Latin translations, and he dreamt of chronology. ‘I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.’ Untaught and unguided he had ranged round the whole circle of his life’s work.

From Oxford he got even less than he had got from Westminster. He paid slight attention to the authorities or the undergraduates, and they paid less attention to him. In later years Magdalen faintly recalled her most illustrious son as a little creature with a big head, who always wore black and was usually late for dinner. A vague idea of learning Arabic was not encouraged by his tutor, and he was too immature to read profitably alone. Thrown on himself, his mind turned to religious controversy, not on the theological so much as the historical side. He had always been fond, in a childish way, of religious speculation, and something in his early reading had impressed him with a deep respect for the Church of the Fathers. As he went further he did not fail to notice that in its beliefs and observances the Church of the Fathers was much more like the Church of Rome than Protestants usually allowed. Newman was to take the same road. In this mood he fell in with the writings of Bossuet and of the Elizabethan Jesuit, Parsons: the majestic unity and antiquity of Rome, some transient flush of adolescent piety, combined to carry him away, and he announced his conversion, as he afterwards told a friend, with the pomp, the dignity and the self-satisfaction of a martyr. He was just sixteen.

A gentleman commoner of Magdalen was a person of sufficient importance for his conversion to attract attention, and the Privy Council examined the bookseller who had found the priest to receive him. Technically, both the convert and the priest had committed high treason. But the law was dormant, and the priest was further protected by his diplomatic status as chaplain to the Sardinian Embassy. The worst that could have happened to Gibbon was some annoyance from informers. But he could not, as a Catholic, return to Oxford, and his father determined to send him out of the country. Chesterfield had made a Swiss education fashionable, and one of the Eliots, who had married a Gibbon cousin, had been at Lausanne with the young Stanhope. To Lausanne accordingly the renegade was dispatched in wrath.