Memoirs of My Life and Writings

"[2] Gibbon's father took alarm on learning that he had converted to Roman Catholicism and, in order to bring him back to the Protestant fold, sent him to live with a Calvinist minister in Lausanne.

Gibbon made good use of his time in Switzerland, meeting Voltaire and other literary figures, and perfecting his command of the French language.

He had for some time wanted to begin writing a history, without being able to choose a subject, but now, he tells us, the exciting experience of walking in the footsteps of the heroes of antiquity gave him a new idea: It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

The Memoirs now give a detailed account of the years he spent producing its successive volumes, and of the many hostile criticisms his work attracted.

These labours were diversified by his experiences as a Member of Parliament, and his writing, at the request of the Government, a "Mémoire justificatif" asserting the justice of British hostilities against France at the time of the American Revolutionary War.

[6] For five years he made no attempt to add to this, but in June 1788, one month after the last volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were published, he began work on the Memoirs by writing to the College of Arms for information about his ancestry.

[8][9]As the drafts of the work succeeded each other Gibbon in some passages varied the emphasis, and even changed the facts, but where he was satisfied with the words of the previous version he simply transcribed them.

They remained undisturbed in the possession of his family, until in 1871 his son George Holroyd, 2nd Earl of Sheffield, lent them to the medical writer William Alexander Greenhill, who established their chronological order of composition and gave them the letters by which they are now always identified.

[23] Again, Gibbon broke new ground in making it a truly "philosophical", that is to say analytical, autobiography; as the novelist Anthony Burgess wrote, "the sense of intellectual control, of a life somehow grasped as a concept, is unmatched".

[25] When, with the publication of Murray's edition, it became possible to judge Sheffield's role in conflating the different versions of the Memoirs, some critics accorded him praise moderated by their shock at finding how large a part he had played.

The historian Frederic Harrison's opinion was that he had performed his task with "great skill and tact, but with the most daring freedom";[22] and an anonymous writer in the Spectator said of Sheffield that with an ingenuity which, in spite of its perversity, cannot but be admired, he concocted out of the six [manuscripts] a patchwork narrative, which has since always passed as Gibbon's autobiography.

In 1913 the Cambridge History of English Literature called it "extraordinarily skillful", and in the 1960s Anthony Burgess wrote of "Six holograph sketches, out of which Lord Sheffield stitched not a patchwork but a tasteful and well-fitting suit of clothes.

[24]The academic David Womersley has written in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Sheffield did the job "With equal judgement, freedom, and shrewdness", but elsewhere he has conceded that "From our standpoint…Sheffield's handling of Gibbon’s manuscript was scandalous.".

[10][27] This last judgement has been endorsed by the historian Glen Bowersock, while the Gibbon scholar Jane Elizabeth Norton said that "By all the standards of scholarship, Lord Sheffield's conduct was deplorable.