This digital edition of The autobiography of Arthur Young — Text and Context is described by source-level measurements including 136,576 words, 9 hr 54 min estimated reading time, and 29 detected text sections.
The text analysis averages about 21.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.
Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Agriculturists -- Biography,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.
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Arthur Young, best known for his Travels in France, left behind a substantial autobiographical manuscript that editor Matilda Betham-Edwards shaped into this volume. The work draws on seven packets of manuscript and twelve folio volumes of correspondence, presenting Young's life in his own words, with editorial curtailments to manage length. The autobiography is notable for its outspokenness: Young aimed for perfect frankness, and the editor notes that this candor obliged many cuts. The result is a portrait of a man who was at once an untiring experimentalist in agriculture, a brilliant social figure, and later a blind, solitary victim of religious melancholia.
The editor highlights a striking paradox: Young was never more English, yet never less narrow in his social sympathies. His affectionate relations with Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Danes, Italians, and Scandinavians are a recurring feature. The excerpts show Young dining with magistrates in Exeter, debating the Enclosure Bill with a clerk of the House of Commons, and visiting Edmund Burke at Gregory’s. He describes Burke as possessing “the greatest and most brilliant parts of any person of the age,” but is equally struck by Burke’s deep melancholy. Young’s own cosmopolitanism is not merely social; it reflects a mind engaged with agricultural practices across borders, though the excerpts here focus on English settings.
Young’s autobiography is punctuated by devastating personal loss, most acutely the death of his beloved daughter “Bobbin” in 1797. The chapter titled “Illness and Death of Bobbin” opens with Young’s regret at sending her to school in London, which he calls “that region of constraint and death.” He describes her as “my dear angelic child” and laments that in the country she had health and spirits. The editor links this tragedy, along with the influence of Wilberforce and his own religious melancholia, to the profound change in Young’s later years. The excerpts convey a father’s raw grief, but the full account of Bobbin’s letters and Young’s replies is only partially visible here.
Young’s agricultural expertise is never far from his social encounters. At a dinner with thirty magistrates, he unwittingly argues against the clerk of the House of Commons on the Enclosure Bill, only to discover his opponent’s official role. Young notes that officers of Parliament were “the most determined opposers” of the measure, due to fees on private acts. He proposes a precedent: the Speaker’s fixed salary of £6,000 per annum could replace such fees. Elsewhere, he visits the Duke of Buccleugh’s farm and finds the workers “throwing money away like fools.” These passages show Young as a practical, opinionated observer, unafraid to criticize even powerful men.
Readers approaching this autobiography should expect a work that is as much a record of inner turmoil as of agricultural progress. Young’s voice is direct, often blunt, and his editor has preserved that quality while shaping the mass of material into a coherent narrative. The volume rewards those interested in the intersection of personal history, economic thought, and eighteenth-century social life, but it offers no simple heroism—only a man’s honest account of his strengths, failures, and sorrows.
I recall Arthur Young, poring over his fields and accounts, finding in his own frank reckonings a certain ache for order. That same ache lives in the old forms, the chiseled gods and quiet vases, of History of Ancient Art — Context and Discussion. Both are honest companions, speaking of what we build, and what time takes away.
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