SOURCE: Pearson, John H. “Reading the Writing in the Drafts of Edward Gibbon's Memoirs.” Biography 14, no. 3 (summer 1991): 222-42.

In the following essay, Pearson describes the six attempts Gibbon made to write his autobiography, describing how in each draft the historian revised the image he presented of himself.

Edward Gibbon began writing his memoirs in 1788 after completing his strikingly monumental work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He labelled the impulse to write autobiography in “An Address &c” five years later when at work on the sixth and last draft of the autobiography: “Nature implanted in our breasts,” he wrote, “a lively impulse to extend the narrow span of our existence, by the knowledge, of the events that have happened on the soil we inhabit, of the characters and actions of those men from whom our descent, as individuals or a people is probably derived” (Essays 534). By...