Gibbon: Making History
About this book
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.