Josiah Wedgwood

 

The Radical Potter, published October 20

Another really good book that I just read: Tristram Hunt's biography of the polymath 18th century industrial leader Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795). Hunt manages to condense the economic, political, social, and military history of Wedgwood's era into a very readable story, showing the accomplishments of this really interesting figure. Wedgwood had an incredible sense of beauty, of justice, of scientific curiosity, and of ambition to make his pottery works profitable. He hired skilled artisans and graphic artists to create the forms and decorate the pottery, and he treated his workers very well. 

While I found the entire portrayal of the man and his age fascinating, in the following paragraphs I'm going to concentrate just on Wedgwood's amazing accomplishments.

Wedgwood Vase, 1770-1780. (V&A Museum)

A remarkable sense of the style and taste of his time characterized Wedgwood throughout his life. His production included both useful objects like cups, plates, bowls, etc, as well as totally decorative medallions of famous people such as "Captain Cook, Samuel Johnson, the Earl of Chatham and Sarah Siddons." (p. 166). He invented several styles of pottery, always with a great understanding of what the market demanded.

Despite holding very progressive social views, Wedgwood catered to customers who mainly came from the the upper classes, including royalty. His most famous sale was of a 900-piece set of china to the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. However, he cared deeply about social issues, and about the scientific and intellectual issues of the Age of Enlightenment: "to Wedgwood and his friends, this age of discovery involved the systematic taming of nature and the marshalling of science for the progress of mankind. Behind the jasper tea sets and the basalt urns, almost embedded within them, was the passionate commitment to Enlightenment rationalism which underpinned Wedgwood’s ceramic breakthroughs, business endeavours and creative ability." (p. 192). 

Wedgwood's Anti-Slavery Medallions from the Wedgwood Museum.

One very famous product of the Wedgwood pottery works was an anti-slavery medallion, or cameo, with a depiction of a black slave in chains and the words "Am I not a Man and a Brother." At his own expense, Wedgwood produced and donated large numbers of the medallion to the anti-slavery movement in both England and the American colonies (and later the new United States) where it was a symbol of many people's commitment to the project of abolishing the slave trade and also the institution of slavery. The author writes: "For all our twenty-first-century concerns with its racialized depiction of the African slave and denial of agency, the cameo deserves to be remembered as one of the most radical symbols in modern history and one of Wedgwood’s most significant contributions to material culture." (pp. 228-229). 

His dedication to quality production was uncompromising, so that his ceramics were sold widely for high prices.  "His consistent mantra was that ‘low prices must beget a low quality in the manufacture, which will beget contempt, which will beget neglect, & disuse, and there is an end of the trade.’" (p. 95). 

Business considerations also drove Wedgwood: "the strategy for growing profit was through volume production, lengthening the run of certain product lines and keeping a much closer eye on sales and marketing costs. It also informed his decision to limit the number of shapes available, ... but at the same time to offer a wider choice of decoration once they had been fired; he could thus maintain the impression of consumer choice, without having to tie up capital in a large stock of different designs." (p. 176). 

At one point the Wedgwood enterprise suffered a downturn in sales. Wedgwood applied himself to understanding this, and "inaugurated a root-and-branch audit of the company’s cost base, beginning with vases, to find inefficiencies. ‘For this purpose I am forming a price book of Workmanship etc which is to include every expence of Vase making as near as possible from the Crude materials, to your Counter in London,’" he wrote, and he audited all the expenditures and activities of his firm: "What emerged from this crash course in finance was Wedgwood’s ‘price book of workmanship’, which stands as one of the earliest works of cost accountancy in the history of British manufacturing." (pp. 174-175).

Wedgwood personally made scientific advances that were needed to better his production using the technology of his time, and frequently extending it. He worked also with other industrialists to enhance his understanding and his production methods. He met regularly with a number of still-famous men including James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestly, and occasionally Benjamin Franklin -- in other words, he was part of the intellectual current of his time.

As a practical scientist, he experimented with materials to create the still-recognizable blue glaze on his most famous ceramics, as well as many other glazes and techniques of pottery-making. He developed a method of measuring very high temperatures to gain better control of the heating and cooling of the pottery kilns, and published a paper about this research with the British Royal Society. He was also interested in other science, such as the search for fossils, which were already recognized to be millions of years old -- that is, he had a concept of evolution that considerably pre-dated that of his famous grandson Charles Darwin!

Antiquities from the excavation of Pompeii were becoming known in England, and
Wedgwood created many still-famous works in imitation of the classical style.
This vase, the Pegasus Vase, is a stunning example. (British Museum)

Family life was also important to Wedgwood, whose wife Sarah was his lifelong companion. He deeply loved their children, and was concerned with their welfare and upbringing. Their stately home, Etruria Hall, and life within it, sounds fascinating:

"Etruria Hall was a square three-storeyed red-brick house with stone dressings and three central windows surmounted by a pediment, to which two flanking wings were added in the 1780s. In addition to the entrance and staircase halls, the household comprised thirty-four rooms, as well as dry cellars, coach houses and servants’ quarters. Such accommodation was quite necessary: by the end of his life, Josiah Wedgwood’s household would include a butler, under-butler, footman, groom, coachman, postillion, gardener and housekeeper, as well as a large staff of female servants." (pp. 130-131)

Above all, Wedgwood left a legacy of lastingly beautiful ceramic art work. His enterprise continued to produce great pottery for some time after his death, though his descendants lacked his business skill, his artistic judgment, and his technological savvy, so they didn't leave a lasting legacy as he did. The Epilogue to the book describes the decline of the Wedgwood firm in the 19th century, and its final unfortunate end in the twenty-first century. 

I'd love to tell you more about Wedgwood and his era, but it's time to stop! I've read about Wedgwood before, in The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, by Jenny Uglow (blogged here). This blog post © 2021 by mae sander, images as credited.