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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Winston Churchill decided to read The decline and fall of the Roman Empire at the age of twenty, in 1895. At that time he was a cavalry subaltern at Aldershot and he thought it would be more agreeable to read Gibbon than to pile up statistics. His resolve was strengthened by the advice of his old headmaster at Harrow: ‘Gibbon is the greatest of historians, read him all through.’ Churchill began reading Dean Milman's eight-volume edition of Decline and fall in the summer of 1896. He was then posted, with his regiment, to Bangalore, in India, where he read Gibbon lying on his champoy during the after lunch siesta:
I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long listening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagement of his pompous-pious editor. I was not even estranged by his naughty footnotes. On the other hand the Dean's apologies and disclaimers roused my ire.
Churchill also read Gibbon's autobiography, before concluding what he described as ‘a delightful companionship of six months with Gibbon’. He then moved on to Macaulay, but soon concluded that he was ‘not half so solid as Gibbon’.
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