The Reverend Arthur Young, 1769-1827: traveller in Russia and farmer in the Crimea

Abstract

EVERY textbook of English or European history makes some reference to the great Arthur Young, 1741-1820, in connection either with the Agricultural Revolution, or with his Travels in France on the eve of the French Revolution.1 His son, the Reverend Arthur Young, the object of this study, is not at all famous and was not at all great. There is no notice of him in the Dictionary of National Biography. As a clergyman he never held a living except in Ireland, from which he was an absentee. As an agriculturalist he was but a pallid shadow of his father. The only reason why he is worth a study is that in 1805 he went to Russia at the invitation of the Imperial Government to make an agricultural survey of the province around Moscow. He remained in Russia until 1814, was there again from 1815 to 1820, and finally for a few months before his death in 1827. In 1810 he bought an estate in the southern Crimea near Kaffa (Theodosia). Considerable information about the Rev. Arthur Young is to be found in the Young Manuscripts in the British Museum.2 Quite recently the John Rylands Library at Manchester has acquired fourteen letters by the Rev. Arthur Young, as a part of the Bagshawe Muniments. 3 Most of these letters were written from Russia to his father, mother, and wife. Some are very lengthy. They will furnish the chief source for this study.