Gibbon and the 'Watchmen of the Holy City': The Historian and His Reputation, 1776-1815

'Womersley has produced a signally effective study of the various processes which create an authorial reputation, assiduously demonstrating how careful documentary reconstruction can restore the rich textuality of a writer's life... This is a major contribution not only to Gibbon scholarship but also to methodology.' -Review of English Studies'Erudite and absorbing new book... David Womersley has written an important book; it greatly increases our sense of the ways in which Gibbon's self-fashioning went on within the pages of his major works... Womersley has taken us where none have ventured before, in showing Gibbon as a Bowdler-like censor of his own ongoing productions.' -Pat Rogers, Times Literary SupplementWomersley examines Gibbon's conflict with his critics, in particular the spokesmen for religious orthodoxy. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, he illuminates what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself, at the same time deepening our understanding of the conditions of English authorship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.