Young, ARTHUR, writer on agriculture, was born on 11th September 1741 at Whitehall, but passed his boyhood, as indeed most of his life, at Bradfield Hall, near Bury St Edmunds, his father, Dr Young, being rector of Bradfield Combust and a prebendary of Canterbury. On quitting Lavenham grammar-school he was apprenticed in 1758 to a mercantile house at Lynn; but this 'most detestable situation' he left next year, upon his father's death, 'without education, pursuit, profession, or employment.' In 1763 he rented a small farm of his mother's, on which he made 3000 unsuccessful experiments; in 1765 married, not too happily, a sister of Fanny Burney's stepmother; 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 newly-established Board of Agriculture, with a salary of £400. Blind from 1811, he died in London on 20th April 1820, and was buried at Bradfield. Arthur Young, by his writings, was one of the first to elevate agriculture to the dignity of a science, and render it popular among the upper classes of the country. Those writings, more than a score in number, include A Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties (1768), A Six Months' Tour through the North of England (4 vols. 1771), The Farmer's Tour through the East of England (4 vols. 1770–71), Tour in Ireland (1780), Travels in France during 1787–88–89–90 (2 vols. 1792–94), The Farmer's Calendar (1771; 21st ed. 1862), and 'Agricultural Surveys' of eight English counties, besides many papers in The Annals of Agriculture, which he edited, and to which George III. ('Farmer George') was a contributor. His works were as successful as his practice was unsuccessful.
The Travels in France is a valuable first-hand authority for the state of France in the revolution period; see the edition, with Life, by Miss Betham-Edwards (1890); Hutton's edition of the Tour in Ireland (with bibliography, 1892); Young's Autobiography, edited by Miss Betham-Edwards (1898); and Leslie Stephen's Studies of a Biographer (1898).