Writer on agriculture, was born at Whitehall, but spent his boyhood, as indeed most of his life, at Bradfield near Bury St. Edmunds, his father being rector and a prebendary of Canterbury. In 1763 he rented a small farm of his mother’s, on which he made 3,000 unsuccessful experiments; during 1766–71 held a good-sized farm in Essex (ruin the result); from 1776 to 1778 was in Ireland; resumed farming at Bradfield; and in 1793 was appointed secretary to the Board of Agriculture, with a salary of £600. Blind from 1811, he died in London, and was buried at Bradfield. Young, by his writings, was one of the first to elevate agriculture to a science. They include “A Tour through the Southern Counties” (1768), “A Tour through the North of England” (1771), “The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England” (1770–71), “Tour in Ireland” (1780), “Travels in France during 1787–88–89–90” (a very memorable view of the state of France just before the Revolution, 1792–94), “The Farmer’s Kalendar” (215th ed. 1862), and “Agricultural Surveys” of eight English counties, besides many papers in “The Annals of Agriculture,” which he edited. See A. W. Hutton’s edition of the “Tour in Ireland” with bibliography by J. P. Anderson (1892); M. Betham-Edwards’s edition of the “Travels in France” (1890); and her edition of his “Autobiography” (1897).
Personal
He was not a walking blue-book, but a highly sensitive, enthusiastic, impulsive, and affectionate man of flesh and blood, whose acquaintance one would have been glad to cultivate…. Young’s devoted and unflagging zeal, and his sanguine confidence in his principles is equally attractive, whatever the inconsistencies or rashness of his speculations.
Whilst Arthur Young’s famous “Travels in France” have become a classic, little is known of the author’s life, a life singularly interesting and singularly sad. Whether regarded as the untiring experimentalist and dreamer of economic dreams, as the brilliant man of society and the world, or as the blind, solitary victim of religious melancholia, the figure before us remains unique and impressive…. The religious melancholia of his later years is explicable on several grounds: to the influence of his friend, the great Wilberforce; to the crushing sorrow of his beloved little daughter “Bobbin’s” death; lastly, perhaps, to exaggerated self-condemnation for foibles of his youth. Few lives have been more many-sided, more varied; few, indeed have been more fortunate and unfortunate at the same time.
Young was a great favourite in society. Vivacious, high-spirited, and well informed, he was an agreeable companion. His characteristics are abundantly manifested in his writings, and there is no lack of material for forming a mental picture of his personality…. His tall slim figure, thin features, aquiline nose, and hawk eyes are in keeping with the restless activity of his character. He rose at 5 A.M., bathed in the open air; on one occasion—undaunted experimentalist—he broke the ice in the pond to bathe, and rolled his body in the snow to test the effect.
General
To the works of Arthur Young the world is more indebted for the diffusion of agricultural knowledge than to any writer who has yet appeared. If great zeal, indefatigable exertions, and an unsparing expense in making experiments can give a man a claim to the gratitude of agriculturists, Arthur Young deserves it more than most men. We will not assert that in all cases his conclusions were correct, or his judgment unimpeachable; but even his blunders, if he committed any, have tended to the benefit of agriculture, by exciting discussion and criticism.
The works of Arthur Young did incomparably more than those of any other individual to introduce a taste for agriculture and to diffuse a knowledge of the art in this and other countries. They are written in an animated, forcible, pure English style, and are at once highly entertaining and instructive. Though sometimes rash and prejudiced, his statements and inferences may in general be depended upon. His activity, perseverance, and devotedness to agriculture were unequalled. His Tours, especially those in Ireland and in France, which are both excellent, are his most valuable publications.
I am a worshipper of Arthur Young’s, and from me you will hear only his praises. I think him the most truthful writer and fuller of information upon any subject than any other author. In his 150 volumes that he wrote and edited, like Shakespeare, and another book, you find everything, or something à propos to every subject. He is the only man of eminence of my time that I unfortunately was not acquainted with; I did not then appreciate his merits. Since I have turned my attention to agriculture, I look upon him as the real source of information upon all matters; his correctness, his accuracy, has never been impugned. I have a duplicate of his works, one at Lowther and another in London, and some odd ones both at Barnes and Whitehaven. His agricultural tours in France and Italy I consider the only works that give an intelligible account of those countries. His tour in Ireland has given me the idea that his views of Ireland were nearer the truth than any other work.
He projected nothing new or original, nor devised any different scheme of agriculture in any point; but he collected a huge mass of miscellaneous information, which had no small effect on the progress of agriculture.
It is a somewhat remarkable fact, that a man so distinguished in agriculture, so full of information, so earnest in advocacy of improved methods of culture, so doggedly industrious, should yet never have undertaken farming on his own account save at a loss. I attribute this very much to his zeal for experiments. If he could establish, or controvert, some popular theory by the loss of his crop, he counted it no loss, but a gain to husbandry. Such men are benefactors; such men need salaries; and if any such are afloat with us, unprovided for, I beg to recommend them for clerkships in the Agricultural Bureau at Washington; and if the Commissioner shall hit upon one Arthur Young among the score of his protégés, the country will be better repaid than it usually is.
But the substantial and decisive reply to Burke came from his former correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield in Suffolk. Arthur Young published his “Travells in France” some eighteen months after the “Reflections” (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter in which he closes his performance, as a luminous criticism of the most important side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than Burke, Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young afterwards became panic-stricken, but his book remained. There the writer plainly enumerates without trope or invective the intolerable burdens under which the great mass of the French people had for long years been groaning.
It is as a social and political observer that Young is now best known to the reading public, and the books which have established his reputation in these departments—his “Tour in Ireland” and “Travels in France”—are still full of interest and instruction…. His master passion was the devotion of agriculture, which constantly showed itself. He strongly condemned the métayer system then widely prevalent in France, as “perpetuating poverty and excluding instruction,” as, in fact, the curse and ruin of the country. Some of his phrases have been often quoted by the advocates of peasant proprietorship as favoring their view. “The magic of property turns sand to gold.” Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years’ lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert. But these sentences, in which the epigrammatic form exaggerates a truth, and which might seem to represent the possession of capital as of no importance in agriculture, must not be taken as conveying his approbation of the system of small properties in general. He approved it only when the subdivision was strictly limited, and even then with great reserves; and he remained to the end what J. S. Mill calls him, “the apostle of la grande culture.”
His “Survey of France” has permanent attraction for its picture of the state of that country just before, and in the earliest days of the Revolution. And though his writing is extremely incorrect and unequal, though its literary effect is much injured by the insertion of statistical details which sometimes turn it for pages together into a mere set of tables, he has constant racy phrases, some of which have passed into the most honourable state of all—that of unidentified quotation—while more deserve it.
As a writer Young contributed nothing of permanent importance towards the advancement of political economy; but he remains the greatest of English writers on agriculture…. He was indefatigable in observation, inquiries, researches, and experiments, collecting by hand the seeds of artificial grasses and sowing them himself, pointing out to the country as a whole practices which were successful in particular neighbourhoods at home and abroad, endeavouring, with the aid of Priestley, to discover the chemistry of soils and to apply science to practice, incessantly attempting new methods, new rotations of crops, and stirring up a widespread and intelligent interest in the development of agricultural science. He thought the most useful feature of his tours was his teaching upon the correct courses of crops. His works were much esteemed at home and abroad, and especially in the two great agricultural countries of Europe—France and Russia.
