The true value of Gibbon's personal writings lies not so much in the biographical information they provide as in the flickering light they cast on The Decline and Fall. It is, for instance, of great importance to know that Gibbon expended many pains over the opening of his history:

To be aware that the ‘effect’ of the first pages of The Decline and Fall is the product of conscious and successful intention is to be reassured that, at this point, Gibbon's prose will bear a large pressure of attention, and that the fruit of such attention is likely, given his satisfaction that he had made his design legible, to be what he desired it should be. The unusual care Gibbon took over the first three chapters of The Decline and Fall springs from his understanding of the rhetorical importance of the beginning of a work in creating the relationship between writer and reader to be sustained or modified in the pages that follow.