What Churchill got from Gibbon
In 1895, when Winston Churchill was a twenty-year-old subaltern, he devoured Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, saying: “I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.” Having not gone to Oxford or Cambridge and feeling undereducated, he decided to become his “own university” and to set himself an ameliorating curriculum.
The intellectual advantages his academic contemporaries had obtained at their colleges must have irked the highly ambitious and endlessly impatient young Churchill. This chasm of knowledge, separating him from his peers, had to be crossed quickly. He planned to generate a cerebral confidence which would enable him to overtake his better educated adversaries and via the choice and master intellects he studied, he speedily paved a way from private life to Parliament and eventually on to Downing Street. He read three or four books simultaneously to “avoid tedium” and doggedly built the “scaffolding of logical and consistent views which will perhaps tend to the creation of a logical and consistent mind”. He did this by reading widely from the works of Schopenhauer, Malthus, Aristotle, Darwin, Fawcett, Lecky, Pascal, Adam Smith and many others. Interestingly, he seldom spent occasions dedicated to furnishing his commodious mind reading novels. But the biggest influence on Churchill during those self-improving days was unquestionably Edward Gibbon.
Edward Gibbon is regularly credited as our greatest historian. His exciting syntax and extraordinary vocabulary makes him impossible to put down and forget. So infectious is his style that after reading him for a day or two you might hear your inner reflections unfold in a Gibbonian fashion. Churchill sought to enrich his writing with the cadences and rhythms Gibbon eloquently exploited. From his monotonous posting in Aldershot to his over-heated bivouac in Bangalore, he read Gibbon every lunch break and before bed, scribbling his ideas and annotations over the miles and miles of Decline and Fall’s margins.
In addition to philosophers, historians, sociologists and economists, he asked his mother to send him one hundred editions of the Annual Register, a record of public events and a trove of parliamentary speeches. Enhanced by the contents of that text and the classical cognition he had autodidactically acquired, Churchill started to blow the spark which would illuminate the pitch and tone of his own political voice. Responding to his mother, who diligently sent him these little libraries, Churchill said: “A good knowledge of these (Annual Register) will arm me with a sharp sword. Macaulay, Gibbon, Plato etc. must train the muscles to wield that sword to the greatest effect.” He had less of a love for Macaulay who criticised his favourite ancestral super-hero, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. Perhaps of greater consequence, Churchill deemed him “not so solid as Gibbon”.
Not only did Gibbon’s oeuvre effect Churchill’s written intonations and inspire his inherent instinct for forming aphorisms, but Gibbon’s scope and style provided the template for the histories Churchill would later write and be awarded the Nobel Prize for. There were, of course, other important rhetorical and linguistic qualities which Churchill himself cultivated and which Gibbon could not have given him. Gibbon’s language for example is intoxicatingly lavish and grandiloquent, owing much to French, whereas Churchill opted for short Anglo-Saxon words which were efficiently accessible to large audiences, but there is no doubt that Churchill was guided by Gibbon’s manner of ideas and expression.
When people admire the attributes of their spiritual ancestors they often attempt to emulate their forebears and as such, an inheritance of character (or of characteristics) transpires. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s profile certainly in part projects the Churchillian quirks that must have impressed him as a young man, but what Churchill gained from Gibbon was perhaps more essential to Churchill’s character than Churchill’s quirks are to Boris’s.