SOURCE: Folkenflik, Robert. “Child and Adult: Historical Perspective in Gibbon's Memoirs.” Studies in Burke and His Time 15, no. 1 (fall 1973): 31-43.

In the following essay, Folkenflik describes passages of detachment, self-mockery, and fake impressions in Gibbon's autobiographical Memoirs.

Critics have often pointed out that Gibbon's is the autobiography of an historian, not simply that of a man; but it is even more than that an autobiography which explains through the empirical consideration of a single person the necessity of the detached looking backward which, for Gibbon, is history itself. Bemusement with his earlier self and not complacency is the dominant mood. Gibbon's whole work is pervaded by a knowledge of how wrong he had been and of how fortunate, given his mistakes, he was to become the historian of Rome. Remembering the original title of Pride and Prejudice, a book which was first conceived during the same decade in...