A short life of the author
Edward Young was one of the most famous poets of the eighteenth century — a writer whose Night-Thoughts was read throughout Europe, translated into a dozen languages, illustrated by William Blake, and admired by figures as diverse as Samuel Johnson, Denis Diderot, and Novalis. That his reputation has declined so dramatically since then — he is now one of the least read of the major eighteenth-century poets — is itself instructive about the changing tastes of literary history and the precarious nature of poetic fame.
Life
Edward Young was born in 1683 at Upham, Hampshire, the son of the Dean of Salisbury. He was educated at Winchester College and Corpus Christi and New College, Oxford, where he was a fellow and took a degree in law. He aspired to a career in politics and spent years cultivating patrons — the Duke of Wharton, the Duchess of Portland — in the hope of preferment. When these hopes were disappointed, he took holy orders in 1727, at the age of forty-four, and was presented with the rectory of Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where he spent the remaining thirty-eight years of his life.
Young married Lady Elizabeth Lee, the daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, in 1731. She died in 1741, and her death — along with the deaths of her daughter and son-in-law in rapid succession — was the emotional catalyst for Night-Thoughts.
Night-Thoughts
The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality was published in nine “nights” between 1742 and 1745. It runs to approximately 10,000 lines of blank verse — longer than Paradise Lost — and is a sustained meditation on mortality, grief, the vanity of worldly ambition, the consolations of religion, and the certainty of immortal life. The poem is addressed to “Lorenzo,” a fictitious young sceptic whom Young attempts to convert through a combination of argument, rhetoric, pathos, and sheer verbal abundance.
The poem was an enormous success. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian. In Germany, it influenced the Sturm und Drang movement and was admired by Klopstock. In France, it contributed to the vogue for melancholy literature. In England, it helped establish the “graveyard school” of poetry — alongside Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard (1751) — which was a major precursor of Romanticism.
William Blake’s watercolour illustrations for Night-Thoughts (1797), commissioned by the publisher Richard Edwards, are among Blake’s most extraordinary works — 537 watercolours, of which 43 were engraved. The Edwards edition, with Blake’s engravings, is one of the great illustrated books of the eighteenth century.
Love of Fame
Before Night-Thoughts, Young’s most admired work was Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1725–1728), a series of seven verse satires in heroic couplets that anatomised the forms of human vanity with a wit and polish that drew comparisons to Pope. Samuel Johnson praised the satires highly and quoted Young frequently. The satires were successful in their day but have been overshadowed by Night-Thoughts and by the superior satires of Pope himself.
Conjectures on Original Composition
Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), written when he was seventy-six, is perhaps his most enduring work. This prose essay argued that literary genius is innate, not acquired; that originality is superior to imitation; that the great writers of antiquity should inspire, not intimidate; and that “an original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius.” The essay was a direct challenge to the neoclassical doctrine that literary excellence consists in the successful imitation of established models, and it became a key text for the Romantic theorists who championed originality, genius, and individual expression.
Decline of Reputation
Young’s reputation declined sharply in the nineteenth century. George Eliot’s devastating essay on Young (1857) accused him of fundamental insincerity — of using the language of grief and piety as rhetorical display rather than genuine feeling, of writing about death as a literary subject rather than a human experience. The charge was unfair as a comprehensive judgement but pointed to a real quality in Young’s verse: its relentless eloquence can feel performative rather than felt.
Modern readers, trained by Romantic and modernist standards to value compression and authenticity, find Night-Thoughts nearly unreadable in its entirety. But individual passages retain their power, and Young’s influence on the development of Romanticism — through Night-Thoughts and the Conjectures alike — remains a matter of historical importance.
Collecting Young
The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts (R. Dodsley, London, 1742–1745, 9 parts) in first edition is collected for its literary-historical importance. The Blake-illustrated edition (R. Edwards, London, 1797, folio, with 43 engravings) is one of the most magnificent illustrated books of the period and a major Blake item. Conjectures on Original Composition (A. Millar, London, 1759) in first edition is a landmark of literary criticism.