The name's Bond. Harold Bond. His The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (Oxford, 1960) seems, in retrospect, to have marked an era in the scholarly reading and appreciation of ‘the Gibbon’ (as he was sometimes humorously known). Five decades and more further on, another OUP author, Dr Charlotte Roberts, a lecturer in English at University College London, has sought to incorporate all the most winning insights of a literary-critical approach to Gibbon's consummately artful historiography, taking her cue above all from the postmodernist turn.

A famous autograph marginale to Gibbon's own copy of the first volume of Decline and Fall regretted an authorial oversight, but cheerily added: ‘Where error is irretrievable, repentance is useless.’ As has been well noted, ‘that is the remark of a confident historian keenly aware of his own role in the shaping of his work’ (C. M. Kelly, G&R 44 (1997), 39–58, at 51). What R. has in effect achieved, with huge aplomb, is to give body and substance to that potentially weasel word ‘shaping’.

The 1964 commemorations of the bicentenary of Gibbon's originary moment of inspiration in Rome probably came too early to exploit fully any Bondian re-reading. At any rate, they were predominantly concerned to reconsider Gibbon's overarching metaphor of decline and fall and reconfigure it into a less linear, more nuanced narrative of socio-cultural as well as political transformation. Successive Gibbonian bicentenaries (1976, 1988, 1994) have registered an increasing shift away from ‘did Gibbon get it right?’ to ‘how did Gibbon seek to shape history, and his History?’. R. is thus catching the dominant interpretative wave, and she rides it with great assurance throughout. Her sequential mode of exposition — closely reading or re-reading the Decline and Fall in accordance with its tripartite rhythm of quarto publication (1776: vol. 1; 1781: vols 2 and 3; 1788: vols 4–6) and concluding by reappraising the successive, only posthumously published drafts of autobiographical memoirs — enables her in particular and not incidentally to engage with the provocative thesis of David Womersley, editor of the best recent edition of the Decline and Fall: viz. that by the end of his monumental composition (1787) Gibbon's authorial perspective had altered perceptibly from that of the seeming magisterial certainty informing his first volume, to one of more open-ended and tentatively engaging reflectiveness, if not playfulness, and that his literary manner had shifted accordingly.

‘Shape’ (more often used here as a verb than as a noun) turns out to be a somewhat protean term. Readers are said in the Introduction (‘Shaping Edward Gibbon’) to be able to shape ‘an expressive portrait of Gibbon's mind’ (5), while Gibbon himself though ‘shaped by history … also shapes history, and, most remarkably, shapes himself and his historian persona in response to history's pressures’ (11). Readers, Gibbon's ideal and imagined, are returned to most explicitly in ch. 3 (especially 102–4): ‘a polite audience of men and women’, to whom he proudly believed his work would have a broad appeal. From those readers, however, R. carefully distinguishes ‘the critic who can analyse Gibbon's ironies and unpick his rhetoric’ (104) — the critic such as herself.

Ch. 1 is entitled ‘Gibbon's Characters: Identity and Personhood in the Decline and Fall’. Through readings of Gibbon's Constantine, Julian and Mahomet above all, R. seeks to disinter and distil ‘what is unique about Gibbon's history: the character of its exceptional historian’ (18), one who sought to negotiate a dauntingly disparate variety of modes of enquiry. Ch. 2 (‘“On that Celebrated Ground”: Equivalency in the First Volume of the Decline and Fall’) does not dwell unduly on the ‘notorious’ fifteenth and sixteenth chapters but notes that it is in these above all that ‘ironic equivalence becomes one of Gibbon's most valuable narrative tools’ (74–5).

Ch. 3 (‘“To Unite the Most Distant Revolutions”: Inheritance in the Second and Third Volumes of the Decline and Fall’) convincingly shows that it is here that ‘the uncertainty and particularity of the past’ are first foregrounded at the expense of ‘large-scale, singular, explanatory causes’ (90). Ch. 4 (‘“A Solemn and Mournful Recollection”: Repetition in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Volumes of the Decline and Fall’) explores Gibbon's ‘vast overviews of time and territory’ (142) but pays even more attention to Gibbon's handling of what struck him as the religious fervour and torrentially spreading spirit of fanaticism of these eight or more centuries.

Ch. 5 (‘The Marmoreal Edward Gibbon: the Memoirs and the Ruins of Rome’) reprises and revises an essay published in the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011). It recurs to and explicates the ‘unresolved ambivalence’ foreshadowed in ch. 1. Finally, a brief summative Conclusion (‘Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History’) nicely recapitulates Gibbon's ‘revolutions of character’, which harness the complementary energies shaping the history of the Decline and Fall — repetition and change, recurrence and development, conflict and renewal.

The Index is a little disappointing, being sparse and parsimonious if not jejune, and there are a few slips and omissions in the bibliography as well as in the main text. But overall this fine monograph is a very considerable achievement, reminding us ultimately that, as the eminent Tacitean Sir Ronald Syme once put it, ‘style abides’. Or, as Gibbon himself, echoing Buffon, averred in an autobiographical draft, ‘style is the image of character’. Thanks to the acute researches of R., we now are aware that there may be more of heaven and earth in Gibbon's philosophy and historiography than even Sir Ronald dreamed of.