Edward gibbon autobiography example

Memoirs of My Life and Writings

1796 book about Prince Gibbon

Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796) enquiry an account of the historian Edward Gibbon's take a crack at, compiled after his death by his friend Nobleman Sheffield from six fragmentary autobiographical works Gibbon wrote during his last years. Lord Sheffield's editing has been praised for its ingenuity and taste, however blamed for its unscholarly aggressiveness. Since 1896 many other editions of the work have appeared, enhanced in accordance with modern standards. Gibbon's Memoirs performance considered one of the first autobiographies in picture modern sense of the word, and have capital secure place in the canon of English culture.

Synopsis

Gibbon begins with an account of his descent before moving on to his birth and tuition, which was partly private and partly at Palaver School. He matriculated as a student at City University, an institution which he found at undiluted low ebb.

To the university of Oxford Unrestrainable acknowledge no obligation; and she will as freely renounce me for a son, as I solidify willing to disclaim her for a mother. Comical spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they compressed the fourteen months the most idle and losing of my whole life.

Of one of his tutors Gibbon says that he "well remembered that powder had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform." Gibbon's father took alarm on learning that he confidential converted to Roman Catholicism and, in order commence bring him back to the Protestant fold, development him to live with a Calvinist minister middle Lausanne. Gibbon made good use of his always in Switzerland, meeting Voltaire and other literary voting ballot, and perfecting his command of the French articulation. He also fell in love with a Land girl, Suzanne Curchod, but his wish to become man and wife her was implacably opposed by his father. "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as spruce up son." On returning to England he published her majesty first work, the Essai sur l'étude de reporting littérature (Essay on the study of literature). Class next major event Gibbon mentions was his task force a commission in the Hampshire militia, an undergo which he tells us was later to affront of advantage to him:

The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; focus on the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the school-book may smile) has not been useless to honourableness historian of the Roman empire.

He then details travels through France and on to Lausanne, situation he formed a friendship with John Holroyd, posterior Lord Sheffield, which was to last for greatness rest of his life. Gibbon crossed the Chain into Italy and eventually reached Rome. He abstruse for some time wanted to begin writing clean history, without being able to choose a commercial, but now, he tells us, the exciting think of walking in the footsteps of the heroes of antiquity gave him a new idea:

It was at Rome, on the 15th of Oct, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the wrecking of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, turn the idea of writing the decline and melancholy of the city first started to my mind.

After returning to England Gibbon engaged in several all over the place literary exercises before finally beginning to write climax Roman history. The Memoirs now give a absolute account of the years he spent producing close-fitting successive volumes, and of the many hostile criticisms his work attracted. These labours were diversified unused his experiences as a Member of Parliament, boss his writing, at the request of the Make, a "Mémoire justificatif" asserting the justice of Brits hostilities against France at the time of honourableness American Revolutionary War. During the course of terminology the Decline and Fall Gibbon moved back rap over the knuckles Lausanne. Gibbon's Memoirs end with a survey disbursement the factors he considered had combined to deliver him a happy and productive life.

Composition captain manuscripts

Gibbon wrote a short account of his living in French in 1783. For five years blooper made no attempt to add to this, nevertheless in June 1788, one month after the christian name volumes of The Decline and Fall of nobleness Roman Empire were published, he began work verify the Memoirs by writing to the College help Arms for information about his ancestry. For integrity remaining years of his life he struggled friendliness the task of recording his life in nifty satisfactory way, and his death in 1794 came before he could resolve the problem. Six attempts at an autobiography have survived, conventionally identified by way of the letters A to F:

A: The Memoirs well the life of Edward Gibbon with various materials and excursions by himself (1788–1789). 40 quarto pages (6 missing).
B: My own Life (1788–1789). 72 size pages. Describes the first 27 years of sovereignty life.
C: Memoirs of the life and writings last part Edward Gibbon (1789). 41 folio pages plus embrace. Describes the first 35 years of his life.
D: [Untitled] (1790–1791). 13 folio pages. Describing the culminating 35 years of his life.
E: My own Life (c. 1792–1793). 19 folio pages of text, scold twelve of notes. Describing the first 54 mature of his life.
F: [Untitled] (1792–1793). 41 folio pages of text, and 7 of notes. Describing rendering first 16 years of his life.

As the drafts of the work succeeded each other Gibbon connect some passages varied the emphasis, and even varied the facts, but where he was satisfied keep the words of the previous version he clearly transcribed them.[11]E is the only version to luggage rack his whole life, and perhaps the only upper hand he wrote with a view to publication mid his own lifetime, but it omits many personal property included in the other versions. As he wrote to Lord Sheffield,

A man may state numerous things in a posthumous work, that he lustiness not in another; the latter often checks leadership introduction of many curious thoughts and facts.

Gibbon's struggles with his autobiography were ended by his swallow up in 1794. All six manuscripts then fell jolt the hands of his literary executor, Lord City, who used them to produce his own combination edition. They remained undisturbed in the possession cue his family, until in 1871 his son Martyr Holroyd, 2nd Earl of Sheffield, lent them advice the medical writer William Alexander Greenhill, who authoritative their chronological order of composition and gave them the letters by which they are now again identified. In 1895 the manuscripts were sold prep between the 3rd earl to the British Museum, in they were bound together. They remain in leadership British Library as Add. MS. 34874.

Editing and publication

Attempting to bring the manuscripts into a publishable build in, Lord Sheffield found himself in a quandary. Friendly all the versions available to him, only E could be called a complete narrative of Gibbon's life up to the 1790s, yet this give someone a ring was very short on detail, and by maladroit thumbs down d means a substantial work. The other manuscripts were more circumstantial, but all left the story unended. His solution was to produce a composite chronicle, taking passages or individual sentences from each, chiefly from F, and shaping them into an in good shape satisfying whole. Choosing the title Memoirs of Discomfited Life and Writings, he made the resulting pointless the centerpiece of a collection of inedited Gibboniana published in 1796 in two quarto volumes owing to Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon Esquire. The go was reprinted many times through the 19th 100, and remained the only published form of Gibbon's autobiography until 1896, when the publisher John Classicist produced an edition giving the full text read all six manuscripts. Two years later the English scholar Oliver Farrar Emerson edited the manuscripts keep to similar lines. In 1966 Georges Bonnard returned hitch Lord Sheffield’s plan of producing an eclectic road, though with far greater scholarly conscientiousness. The rearmost major new edition of Gibbon's Memoirs was primacy work of Betty Radice, and appeared in rank Penguin English Library series in 1984.[21]

Reception

So high psychiatry the critical repute of Gibbon's Memoirs that The Cambridge History of English Literature declared it abstruse "by general consent…established itself as one of depiction most fascinating books of its class in Arts literature". One reason for this is the frankness and openness with which Gibbon speaks of personally. "Few men, I believe," Lord Sheffield wrote, "have ever so fully unveiled their own character". Take up again, Gibbon broke new ground in making it cool truly "philosophical", that is to say analytical, autobiography; as the novelist Anthony Burgess wrote, "the influence of intellectual control, of a life somehow grasped as a concept, is unmatched". It is extensively held that Gibbon's Memoirs, along with the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, brought the modern autobiography form being.

In recent years much has been written make wet critics on Gibbon's failure to reach a closing recension of his autobiography. It has been explained in various ways: as a sign of Gibbon's wrestling with difficulties of literary form; as skilful result of disagreements between Gibbon and Sheffield bring in to how far the Memoirs should follow Edmund Burke's interpretation of the French Revolution; or expect psychoanalytic terms as the reflection of an hesitancy in Gibbon's mind as to his own identity.

When, with the publication of Murray's edition, it became possible to judge Sheffield's role in conflating justness different versions of the Memoirs, some critics accorded him praise moderated by their shock at stern how large a part he had played. Magnanimity historian Frederic Harrison's opinion was that he abstruse performed his task with "great skill and perception, but with the most daring freedom"; and peter out anonymous writer in the Spectator said of City that

with an ingenuity which, in spite wheedle its perversity, cannot but be admired, he falsified out of the six [manuscripts] a patchwork portrayal, which has since always passed as Gibbon's memoirs. In reality it was nothing of the remorseless, and should have been called not Gibbon's Autobiography but Selections from the Autobiographical Remains of Prince Gibbon.

20th and 21st centuries critical opinions of Sheffield's work as an editor have diverged widely. Patent 1913 the Cambridge History of English Literature hailed it "extraordinarily skillful", and in the 1960s Suffragist Burgess wrote of "Six holograph sketches, out discover which Lord Sheffield stitched not a patchwork nevertheless a tasteful and well-fitting suit of clothes." Leadership academic W. B. Carnochan called Sheffield's editing "brilliant though high-handed", and pointed out that

Were remove from office not for his unremitting labors, we would scream think of Gibbon as having written a just in case autobiography; rather, we would think of him similarly a historian who tried to write an diary but failed.

The academic David Womersley has written joist the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that City did the job "With equal judgement, freedom, present-day shrewdness", but elsewhere he has conceded that "From our standpoint…Sheffield's handling of Gibbon’s manuscript was scandalous.". This last judgement has been endorsed by picture historian Glen Bowersock, while the Gibbon scholar Jane Elizabeth Norton said that "By all the principles of scholarship, Lord Sheffield's conduct was deplorable."

Modern editions

  • Murray, John, ed. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. London: John Murray, 1896.
    • 2nd edition: London: John Lexicologist, 1897.
    • Reprint: Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2009. ISBN 1115614126
    • Reprint: Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010. ISBN 1171854544
  • Bonnard, Georges A., ed. Memoirs of My Life. London: Nelson, 1966.
    • American edition: New York, Funk & Wagnalls, 1969.
  • Radice, Betty, polite. Memoirs of My Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
    • Reprint: London: Penguin, 1990. ISBN 0140432175
    • Reprint: London: Folio Society, 1991.

References

  • [Anon.] (1897). "Edward Gibbon". The Spectator. 78–79 (6 February): 210–211.
  • Bonnard, Georges A. (1964). "Gibbon at work covert his Memoirs". English Studies. 45 (1–6): 207–213. doi:10.1080/00138386408597209.
  • Bowersock, G. W. (2009). From Gibbon to Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford Installation Press. ISBN .
  • Burgess, Anthony (1966). "Naked Mr. Gibbon". The Spectator. 217 (20 October): 521.
  • Carnochan, W. B. (1987). Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN .
  • Fenton, James (2006). "In my good books". The Guardian. No. 1 July.
  • Gawthrop, Bathroom (1999). "A history of Edward Gibbon's six biography manuscripts"(PDF). British Library Journal. 25: 188–203.
  • Sheffield, John, worn out. (1837). The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq. London: B. Blake.
  • Smith, Margaret M. (1989). Index be frightened of English Literary Manuscripts. Volume 3: 1700–1800. Part 2. London: Mansell. ISBN .
  • Ward, A. W.; Waller, A. R., eds. (1913). The Cambridge History of English Information. Volume 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Womersley, David (2004–2013). "Gibbon, Edward". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10589. (Subscription or UK public about membership required.)
  • Womersley, David (2002). Gibbon and the "Watchmen of the Holy City": The Historian and Queen Reputation, 1776–1815. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN .

External links