Memoirs of My Life

Published in 1796 from Gibbon's drafts, this autobiography follows his childhood, a brief Oxford conversion to Catholicism and his father's removal of him to Lausanne, militia service, and the Grand Tour. He records parliamentary years, the conception of a history of Rome's decline among ruins, and the labor of writing and issuing that work. Friends, libraries, and a carefully managed private life occupy as much space as public events. The book is a composed self-portrait of a historian, not the Decline and Fall itself and not a novel.

Bound in dark green cloth decorated in gold. Pictorial endleaves. Cream slipcase.