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Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815

Online ISBN:
9780191718861
Print ISBN:
9780198187332
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and his Reputation, 1776-1815

David Womersley
David Womersley
Official Fellow and Tutor in English Literature, Jesus College, Oxford
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Published online:
1 January 2010
Published in print:
3 January 2002
Online ISBN:
9780191718861
Print ISBN:
9780198187332
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The publication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall in 1776 immediately embroiled Gibbon in a dispute concerning his supposed irreligion. This book follows the implications and ramifications of Gibbon's sudden notoriety to recover the historian's experience of himself as author. It traces Gibbon's attempts to control, to manipulate, and at times to avail himself of, his public reputation from his first, silent, engagement with his critics when he revised the text of the first volume of The Decline and Fall, to that unfinished masterpiece of self-presentation, the Memoirs of My Life. It also shows how the debate about Gibbon's alleged hostility to Christianity shaped the posthumous publication of his Miscellaneous Works by his friend and literary executor, Lord Sheffield.

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