The Work of Young Men in the Present Age

The authorship of this essay is uncertain: it is by either Cormell Price or William Fulford. Internal evidence favors Price, who was more concerned with social issues than Fulford (see for example the essays on Gaskell and on dangerous occupations.) Nearly all of Fulford's contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine are poems, stories, or literary essays, although the essay on popular lectures has, probably erroneously, been attributed to him.

Fulford generally uses a denser syntax than appears in this essay, and tends to begin his essays by modestly admitting his own inadequacy to take on any large subject. He also has three other works in the September issue: only one other issue (March) has four works by the same author, and one of the four is a continuation of the essay on Tennyson.

The primary evidence favoring Fulford as the author of this essay is that Price himself marked it with a question mark in his own list of authors (Wellesley Index 731). He doesn't mention this essay at all in his letter to Buxton Forman, though in the same letter he gives himself as the sole author of Unhealthy Employments, which he co-authored with Charles Faulkner. If one concludes that the essay on popular lectures is by Fulford, the similar theme between that essay and this one might also support him as the author of this piece.

This essay, like the essay on popular lectures, is addressed to young Englishmen. The author urges the preservation of the sense of duty common among Englishmen the during recently-ended Crimean War, and puts the task of social reform on this (his own) generation.

First printed in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , September, 1856.