Gibbon: Making History

Historians on Historians

by Roy Porter

Roy Porter's elegant study of Edward Gibbon is the first of its kind in almost 20 years. Neither a full-length biography nor a specialist monograph, it is a study of Gibbon as historian: a product of his own time, and an enduring voice in our own. His History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is without doubt the most distinguished and best-known work of history in the English language; but how did Gibbon come to write it? Roy Porter explores the magical connotations of Rome and its Empire for the civilization of the Enlightenment, and gives an intriguing account of Gibbon's own very odd childhood and adolescence which turned him into a solitary scholar, with deeply-held views about religion and political power. Rome, Gibbon eventually decided, would be the best challenge to his powers and his best hope of fame. Roy Porter's incisive portrait examines the special ⁠⁠— and controversial ⁠— qualities of Gibbon as historian, showing the man, the mind and the history as inevitably, complexly, intertwined.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Roy's books cover several fields: the history of geology, London, 18th-Century British ideas and society, medicine, madness, quackery, patients and practitioners, literature and art, on which subjects (and others) he published over 200 books are articles.

List of works can be found @ wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Porter )

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Gibbon is the rare historian whose impact went far beyond his profession to leave an indelible impression upon Western thought. This is entirely due to his most famous work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which as Roy Porter notes in the introduction to this book, remains so well known today that “people who cannot name any other work of history can rattle off the phrase Decline and Fall.” Yet to reduce Gibbon’s classic to a mere phrase glosses over his complex thinking about the past and the forces that drive history. Porter demonstrates this in a compact study that describes Gibbon’s historical vision, how he developed it, and the ways it was reflected in his foremost work.

Porter begins his analysis by summarizing the state of historical thought in Gibbon’s time. As he explains, it was a historically minded age that benefited from the efforts that had been invested over the previous century in gathering texts and facts. Yet this material typically was presented without any real effort at interpretation, which resulted in a paradox: a land “saturated in history” but without works of insightful social analysis. As a child, the precocious Gibbon benefited from this saturation through an early immersion in many of these texts. The books kindled a passion for learning, which was refined both at Oxford University and an extended stay in Lausanne. It was during his time in Switzerland that Gibbon both honed his linguistic abilities and gained greater exposure to the Enlightenment ideas then current in Europe. It was a period that would equip him well for his greatest project.

Upon his return to England in 1765 Gibbon embarked upon a career as a writer. Though he wrote widely about both literature and history, Porter understandably focuses his examination of Gibbon’s ideas on the Decline and Fall. After taking a chapter to summarize the book, he elaborates on Gibbon’s thinking in three chapters that address the key themes within it: power, religion, and civilization in the face of barbarism. Through them he details the ways in which Gibbon analyzed the history of imperial Rome through the lens of Enlightenment thinking, seeing with it the flaws of Christianity and an important object lesson about the loss of liberty to despotism. Porter is frank about the flaws of Gibbon’s book, including its slighting of Islamic writings and its anti-Byzantine bias. Yet he also pays tribute to the many strengths of his work, making it clear how Gibbon’s fine prose style and his perceptive arguments contributed both to the book’s success and its endurance as a work of historical literature down to the present day.

In examining Gibbon’s work, Porter demonstrates his own gifts as a historian and writer. Though he occasionally indulges himself with a flowery phrase, this never gets in the way of his analysis of Gibbon’s thinking. Because of this, his book makes for an admirable study of Gibbon as a “philosophical historian” who both embodied and transcended his age. Readers would be well advised to have a copy of Decline and Fall handy while they read it, though, because while it’s perfectly possible to enjoy Porter’s book without it, most will want to read (or re-read) Gibbon’s monumental study for themselves once they’re through with it.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating short appreciation of the author of Decline and Fall by a great modern historian who died tragically young. Too rich to summarize, but in general Porter rescues Gibbon from his contemporaries who were outraged by his sneers at religion and his sly, sometimes lubricious footnotes, from the nineteenth century historians who regarded him as complacent and naive, and from contemporary historians who lack his breadth of knowledge and his awareness of his audience. In fact he does not celebrate the Roman Empire as the pinnacle of happiness; he does not sneer at religion, but only at superstition, corruption, and bigotry; and J.B. Bury, his late nineteenth century editor, actually found very little to correct. It's important to remember that he was writing at a time when many historians were principally concerned to prove that history began with Noah's flood and that God's will determines the success or failure of empires. Gibbon wanted to write objective history, but he knew that that was impossible; instead he wrote ambiguous history, seemingly lucid but ultimately opaque, always inviting the reader to learn, interpret, and judge. "He was fascinated by history as the creation of the historian's mind playing upon the mind of the reader and passionately concerned about its capacity to enlighten, entertain, interest, and instruct."

[Stephen Lavington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparkling and invigorating study of Edward Gibbon and his Decline and Fall. Roy Porter shows the same verbal dexterity he praises in his subject and is deeply informative on the man, his work, and particularly the interplay between the historian and the time in which he was writing.

One small criticism is that, at times, it reads a little like a fleshed out introduction to a Penguin paperback of the Decline and Fall, but if that were the case, that is an edition that I should like to have.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sympathetic defense of Gibbon's history and historiography against his many detractors-- both modern and past.