Edward Gibbon was born to a well-off middle-class family in Surrey, a county of southeast England. While briefly a student at Oxford University, Gibbon converted to Catholicism, after which his staunchly Protestant father made him leave the university and sent him to live in Switzerland. There, he fell in love with a Catholic French Swiss woman named Suzanne Curchod. However, his father pressured him to break off the engagement, and Curchod was unwilling to relocate to Britain. After his father’s death, Gibbon moved to London, where he lived off his family’s inheritance and the royalties from his books and even briefly served as a member of the British Parliament.

Inspired by several books he read in his youth, like Laurence Echard’s Roman History (1713) and An Universal history, from the earliest account of time (1747-1768), Gibbon decided to dedicate himself to the study and writing of history, starting with a history of Switzerland that he never finished. His first published work was written in French, Essai Sur l’Etude de la Litterature (“Essay on the Study of Literature”) (1761), and was enough of a success in France to establish his reputation as a scholar.

He finished the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by 1776 and published it that year.