Arthur Young (1741–1820): For and Against

Abstract

Of all the works produced by Arthur Young, Travels in France is the most enduring. It first appeared in 1792 and became an immediate literary success. Translations into French and German followed swiftly, and the book has been available in print more or less continuously ever since. The diary element of the work, in which Young recounts in a vivid and laconic style his reactions while travelling through France on horseback or in a gig between 1787 and 1790, has chiefly attracted publishers and booksellers. The coincidence that his three tours overlapped with the collapse of the ancien régime and the launch of a far- reaching social and political revolution undoubtedly added to the appeal. Students of the French Revolution are nowadays the principal consumers of Arthur Young’s writings. Part Two of the work, which formed a separate volume in the first and second editions of the English original, is much less frequently read. Indeed, Young’s most recent biographer dismisses the second volume as ‘very technical and not very interesting’.1 Yet Part Two enshrines the serious purpose of the Travels, which the full title was intended to capture.2 This detailed 500-page survey of France’s natural endowment and human resources offers little in the way of amusement, but provides substantial amounts of information for researchers. It is one of the main foundations for Young’s claim to be an expert observer of the eighteenth-century rural economy, a claim which this article sets out to assess.