Josiah Wedgwood, whose name in connection with pottery-ware has become a
household word amongst us, was the younger son of a potter at Burslem,
in Staffordshire, who had also a little patch of ground which he farmed.
When Josiah was only eleven years old, his father died, and he was thus
left dependent upon his elder brother, who employed him as a "thrower"
at his own wheel. An attack of smallpox, in its most malignant form,
soon after endangered his life, and he survived only by the sacrifice of
his left leg, in which the dregs of the disease had settled, and which
had to be cut off. Weak and disabled, he was now thrown upon the world
to seek his own fortune. At first it was very uphill work with him, and
he found it no easy matter to provide even the most frugal fare. He was
gifted, however, with a very fine taste in devising patterns for
articles of earthenware, and found ready custom for plates,
knife-handles, and jugs of fanciful shape. He worked away industriously
himself, and was able by degrees to employ assistance and enlarge his
establishment. The pottery manufactures of this country were then in a
very primitive condition. Only the coarsest sort of articles were made,
and any attempt to give elegance to the designs was very rare indeed.
All the more ornamental and finer class of goods came from the
Continent. Wedgwood saw no reason why we should not emulate foreigners
in the beauty of the forms into which the clay was thrown, and made a
point of sending out of his own shop articles of as elegant a shape as
possible. This feature in his productions was not overlooked by
customers, and he found a growing demand for them. The coarseness of the
material was, however, a great drawback to the extension of the trade in
native pottery; and it seemed almost like throwing good designs away to
apply them to such rude wares. Wedgwood saw clearly that if earthenware
was ever to become a profitable English manufacture, something must be
done to improve the quality of the clay. He brooded over the subject,
tested all the different sorts of earth in the district, and at length
discovered one, containing silica, which, black in colour before it went
into the oven, came out of it a pure and beautiful white. This fact
ascertained, he was not long in turning it to practical account, by
mixing flint powder with the red earth of the potteries, and thus
obtaining a material which became white when exposed to the heat of a
furnace. The next step was to cover this material with a transparent
glaze; and he could then turn out earthenware as pure in quality as that
from the Continent. This was the foundation not only of his own fortune,
but of a manufacture which has since provided profitable employment for
thousands of his countrymen, besides placing within the reach of even
the humblest of them good serviceable earthenware for household use.
The success of his white stoneware was such, that he was able to quit
the little thatched house he had formerly occupied, and open shop in
larger and more imposing premises. He increased the number of his hands,
and drove an extensive and growing trade. He was not content to halt
after the discovery of the white stoneware. On the contrary, the success
he had already attained only impelled him to further efforts to improve
the trade he had taken up, and which now became quite a passion with
him. When he devoted himself to any particular effort in connection with
it, his first thought was always how to turn out the very best article
that could be made--his last thought was whether it would pay him or
not. He stuck up for the honour of old England, and maintained that
whatever enterprise could be achieved, that English skill and enterprise
was competent to do. Although he had never had any education himself
worth speaking of, his natural shrewdness and keen faculty of
observation supplied his deficiencies in that respect; and when he
applied himself, as he now did, to the study of chemistry, with a view
to the improvement of the pottery art, he made rapid and substantial
progress, and passed muster creditably even in the company of men of
science and learning. He contributed many valuable communications to the
Royal Society, and invented a thermometer for measuring the higher
degrees of heat employed in the various arts of pottery.
Again his premises proved too confined for his expanding trade, and he
removed to a larger establishment, and there perfected that
cream-coloured ware with which Queen Charlotte was so delighted, that
she ordered a whole service of it, and commanding that it should be
called after her--the Queen's Ware, and that its inventor should receive
the title of the "Royal Potter."
A royal potter Wedgwood truly was; the very king of earthenware
manufactures, resolute in his determination to attain the highest degree
of perfection in his productions, indefatigable in his labours, and
unstinting in his outlay to secure that end. He invented altogether
seven or eight different kinds of ware; and succeeded in combining the
greatest delicacy and purity of material, and utmost elegance of design,
with strength, durability, and cheapness. The effect of the improvements
he successively introduced into the manufacture of earthenware is thus
described by a foreign writer about this period: "Its excellent
workmanship, its solidity, the advantage which it possesses of
sustaining the action of fire, its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids,
the beauty and convenience of its form, and the cheapness of its price,
have given rise to a commerce so active and so universal, that in
travelling from Paris to Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest port
of Sweden, and from Dunkirk to the extremity of the south of France,
one is served at every inn with Wedgwood ware. Spain, Portugal, and
Italy are supplied with it, and vessels are loaded with it for the East
Indies, the West Indies, and the continent of America." Wedgwood
himself, when examined before a committee of the House of Commons in
1785, some thirty years after he had begun his operations, stated that
from providing only casual employment to a small number of inefficient
and badly remunerated workmen, the manufacture had increased to an
extent that gave direct employment to about twenty thousand persons,
without taking into account the increased numbers who earned a
livelihood by digging coals for the use of the potteries, by carrying
the productions from one quarter to another, and in many other ways.
Wedgwood did not confine himself to the manufacture of useful articles,
though such, of course, formed the bulk of his trade, but published
beautiful imitations of Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan vases, copies of
cameos, medallions, tablets, and so on. Valuable sets of old porcelain
were frequently intrusted to him for imitation, in which he succeeded so
well that it was difficult to tell the original from the counterfeit,
except sometimes from the superior excellence and beauty of the latter.
When the celebrated Barberini Vase was for sale, Wedgwood, bent upon
making copies of it, made heavy bids against the Duchess of Portland
for it; and was only induced to desist by the promise, that he should
have the loan of it in order that he might copy it. Accordingly, the
duchess had the vase knocked down to her at eighteen hundred guineas,
and Wedgwood made fifty copies of it, which he sold at fifty guineas
each, and was thus considerably out of pocket by the transaction. He did
it, however, not for the sake of profit, but to show what an English
pottery could accomplish.
Besides copying from antique objects, Wedgwood tried to rival them in
the taste and elegance of original productions. He found out Flaxman
when he was an unknown student, and employed him, upon very liberal
terms, to design for him; and thus the articles of earthenware which he
manufactured proved of the greatest value in the art education of the
people. We owe not a little of the improved taste and popular
appreciation and enjoyment of the fine arts in our own day to the
generous enterprise of Josiah Wedgwood, and his talented designs.
In order to secure every access from the potteries to the eastern and
western coasts of the island, Wedgwood proposed, and, with the aid of
others whom he induced to join him, carried out the Grand Trunk Canal
between the Trent and the Mersey. He himself constructed a turnpike road
ten miles in length through the potteries, and built a village for his
work-people, which he called Etruria, and where he established his
works. He died there in 1795, at the age of sixty-five, leaving a large
fortune and an honoured name, which he had acquired by his own industry,
enterprise, and generosity.
A remarkable memorial to the genius and artistic labours of Wedgwood was
erected in 1863, and some reference to it should undoubtedly be made in
these pages.
It is a twofold memorial: a bronze statue at Stoke-upon-Trent, and a
memorial institute, erected close to the birth-place of the Great Potter
at Burslem. The foundation-stone was laid on the 26th of October by the
Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in
the presence of a very large and enthusiastic assemblage. The Chancellor
delivered a public address, which in eloquent terms did homage to
Wedgwood's great mental qualities and his services to his country.
He described as his most signal and characteristic merit, the firmness
and fulness of his perception of the true law of what we term industrial
art, or, in other words, of the application of the higher art to
industry--the law which teaches us to aim first at giving to every
object the greatest possible degree of fitness and convenience for its
purpose, and next at making it the article of the highest degree of
beauty, which compatibly with that fitness and convenience it will
bear--which does not substitute the secondary for the primary end, but
recognizes as part of the business the study to harmonize the two.
Mr. Gladstone observed, that to have a strong grasp of this principle,
and to work it out to its results in the details of a vast and varied
manufacture, was a praise high enough for any man, at any time and in
any place. But he thought it was higher and more peculiar in the case of
Wedgwood than it could be in almost any other case. For that truth of
art which he saw so clearly, and which lies at the root of excellence,
is one of which England, his country, has not usually had a perception
at all corresponding in strength and fulness with her other rare
endowments. She has long taken a lead among the European nations for the
cheapness of her manufactures, not so for their beauty. And if the day
should arrive when she shall be as eminent for purity of taste as she is
now for economy of production, the result will probably be due to no
other single man in so remarkable a degree as to Josiah Wedgwood.
* * * * *
We conclude with a lively extract from the Chancellor's exhaustive and
interesting address:--
"Wedgwood," he says, "in his pursuit of beauty, did not overlook
exchangeable value or practical usefulness. The first he could not
overlook, for he had to live by his trade; and it was by the profit
derived from the extended sale of his humbler productions that he was
enabled to bear the risks and charges of his higher works. Commerce did
for him what the King of France did for Sevres, and the Duke of
Cumberland for Chelsea, it found him in funds. And I would venture to
say that the lower works of Wedgwood are every whit as much
distinguished by the fineness and accuracy of their adaptation to their
uses as his higher ones by their successful exhibition of the finest
arts. Take, for instance, his common plates, of the value of, I know not
how few, but certainly of a very few pence each. They fit one another as
closely as cards in a pack. At least, I for one have never seen plates
that fit like the plates of Wedgwood, and become one solid mass. Such
accuracy of form must, I apprehend, render them much more safe in
carriage....
"Again, take such a jug as he would manufacture for the wash-stand table
of a garret. I have seen these made apparently of the commonest material
used in the trade. But instead of being built up, like the usual and
much more fashionable jugs of modern manufacture, in such a shape that a
crane could not easily get his neck to bend into them, and the water can
hardly be poured out without risk of spraining the wrist, they are
constructed in a simple capacious form, of flowing curves, broad at the
top, and so well poised that a slight and easy movement of the hand
discharges the water. A round cheese-holder or dish, again, generally
presents in its upper part a flat space surrounded by a curved rim; but
the cheese-holder of Wedgwood will make itself known by this--that the
flat is so dead a flat, and the curve so marked and bold a curve; thus
at once furnishing the eye with a line agreeable and well-defined, and
affording the utmost available space for the cheese. I feel persuaded
that a Wiltshire cheese, if it could speak, would declare itself more
comfortable in a dish of Wedgwood's than in any other dish."
* * * * *
The worthiest successor to Wedgwood whom England has known was the late
Herbert Minton, who was scarcely less distinguished than his predecessor
for perseverance, patient effort, and artistic sentiment. We owe to him
in a great measure the revival of the elegant art of manufacturing
encaustic tiles.
The principal varieties of ceramic ware now in use are:--1. Porcelain,
which is composed, in England, of sand, calcined bones, china-clay,
and potash; and, at Dresden, of kaolin, felspar, and broken
biscuit-porcelain; 2. Parian, which is used in a liquid state, and
poured into plaster-of-paris moulds; 3. Earthenware, the _Fayence_ of
the Italians, and the _Delft_ of the Dutch, made of various kinds of
clay, with a mixture of powdered calcined flint; and, 4. Stoneware,
composed of several kinds of plastic clay, mixed with felspar and sand,
and occasionally a little lime.
It is estimated that our English potteries not only supply the demand
of the United Kingdom, but export ware to the value of nearly a million
and a half annually. The establishments are about 190 in number; employ
75,000 to 80,000 operatives; and export 90,000,000 pieces.
The Miner's Safety Lamp.