in 1956: "To cut a long story short, he stayed there for twenty-five years, until M.W. died a year or two ago. There was, so far as I know, no just cause or impediment why they shouldn't have married, but they just didn't. I'm sure their relationship was entirely intellectual and companionable." As a writer, Young was, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), "in no hurry". His 1931 essay Victorian History, published in Life and Letters, was "his first venture into scholarly polemics". It arose from his extensive reading of the history of the Victorian age and his conviction that the received wisdom about the period, exemplified in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, was wrong and unjust. The following year, at the age of 50, he published his first book, a study of Edward Gibbon (1932). It was well received; The Sphere found it "a clever piece of portraiture … admiring but critical"; The New York Times considered that although intended for popular consumption, it revealed why Gibbon's genius remained "as little out of date as the Parthenon". The Oxford University Press asked Young to edit two volumes of essays on Early Victorian England. They were published in 1934, with a final summary chapter by Young, which he subsequently developed into the 230-page Portrait of an Age (1936), the work by which he is most remembered. The Observer called it "the greatest single study of the age in any language"; The Times said in 1959, "The Portrait was at once recognized as an outstanding piece of interpretation, and it is not too much to say that in the more than 20 years since it appeared its reputation and influence have grown steadily", and Simon Schama has described it as "an immortal classic, the greatest long essay ever written". Though far from uncritical of the Victorian age, Young acknowledged himself as a product of it: "I was born when the Queen had still nearly nineteen years to reign: I saw her twice, Gladstone once: I well remember the death of Newman and Tennyson, and my earliest recollection of the Abbey brings back the flowers fresh on Browning's grave". Before the publication of Portrait of an Age, Young wrote an extended essay (175 pages) Charles I and Cromwell, described by the ODNB as an essay in detection. In 1937 Hart-Davis persuaded Young to publish Daylight and Champaign a