Let’s start with what has been considered negative about Josiah Wedgwood’s impact on the history of ceramics. The 20th-century studio potter Michael Cardew admitted that Wedgwood was an “industrialising genius,” who married science, technology and entrepreneurship. But Cardew made an important technical criticism of the 18th-century potter. Wedgwood initially fired his wares at a high temperature. Once glazed and decorated they were re-fired in the lower temperature “glost” kiln. Although this system avoided breakages, for Cardew this meant “killing the body before you glazed it” and “gave the ware that cold appearance under its make-up of lavish ornamentation.” Cardew, more artist than industrialist, contrasted Wedgwood’s technique with that used to make Chinese stoneware in the 12th century, which he valued for its complete unity of glaze and clay body.
The art critic Roger Fry agreed. Though Wedgwood was a great technician, argued Fry, his approach to ceramics “probably contributed to the final destruction of the art, as an art, in England.” In contrast to the rugged beauty of medieval English pottery, in Wedgwood’s hands the qualities of the potter’s raw materials were “carefully obliterated by mechanical means.” Herbert Read took a somewhat more nuanced view in his 1934 Art and Industry, praising the good design of Wedgwood’s “useful” tableware for being presciently modern. But he dismissed Wedgwood’s neoclassical pots and plaques—the “ornamental” wares—as mere borrowing. The Greek vases that Wedgwood sought to emulate were, in Read’s view, “not good pottery.”
Today few would focus solely on Wedgwood’s aesthetics. Apart from a dwindling band of studio potters, not many feel passionately about kindly clay bodies, ceramic “warmth” and the unity of the clay body and glaze. In our anxiously picked-over national history, Wedgwood is now regarded as one of those pioneering industrialists Britain used to be known for and whose demise we lament. As long ago as the 1960s, historian Neil McKendrick had identified Wedgwood as an inventor-entrepreneur who pioneered innovative sales techniques and instituted time-and-motion discipline among his workforce through a careful system of labour division. From the 1980s, as academics sought to identify the origins of our consumer society, Wedgwood became a magus figure—the harbinger of a world of luxury goods to come. More recently again, he has been identified as the forerunner of such contemporary entrepreneurial titans as Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Bowerman of Nike.
But seeking out signs of modernity in the past can blur the distinctiveness of a quite different historical period. Tristram Hunt’s The Radical Potter does, I am afraid, make the Steve Jobs comparison in an otherwise beguiling introduction. Hunt is too good a historian to take the idea far. Since Robin Reilly’s 1992 study there have been further biographies by Anthony Burton and Brian Dolan. But Hunt improves on these in his confident understanding of the world in which Wedgwood moved, the English Dissenting background that formed his intellect, his radical views on American independence and the French Revolution, his specific forms of patriotism and his remarkable intellectual curiosity. But Hunt is not a ceramic historian—so this fluent study is not a pioneering work, and specialists will find his grasp of the finer points of ceramic history on occasion shaky.
But in his favour, Hunt discusses Wedgwood’s religious faith in depth, his nonconformist background the key to a spirit of enquiry that led to painstaking experimentation with clay bodies and glazes. And Wedgwood could see beyond the smoky ramshackle world of the “six towns,” later known as Stoke-on-Trent. Pots were made there—it was Britain’s Jingdezhen—but they had to be distributed, and Wedgwood’s lobbying for new toll roads and for ambitious canal-building projects benefitted the entire ceramics industry.
“Wedgwood’s career maps Britain’s industrial development within a wider political and economic landscape”
Nonconformity shaped not only his thinking, but also his friendships—above all with Liverpool merchant Thomas Bentley, who became his partner, overseeing the aspect of the business disapproved of by Herbert Read—the “ornamental” wares. Bentley was well-read, well-travelled, fluent in French and Italian, and classically educated; but he was also politically radical, an opponent of slavery who lived in a city made rich by the slave trade. The majority of the 1,300 letters from Wedgwood that survive are to Bentley—talkative, speculative and tender, they give us the great potter in all his complexity.
Hunt does not shy away from what he calls Wedgwood’s “messy array of ideologies”: he was a civic republican who courted royalty and aristocracy, and a passionate opponent of slavery who did good trade with families whose fortunes came from plantations. As Wedgwood explained to Bentley, he opposed “Old Corruption”—the system of well-paid government jobs and sinecures attacked by his hero John Wilkes—and he longed for “integrity in office and a passion for the common weal.” But in running a pottery, Wedgwood wanted to make “such Machines of the Men as cannot err.” To do so, he sought to lower his workers’ wages per piece, arguing that they could re-coup the lost money if they made “the greatest quantity possible in the given time.” That sounds shocking, but there were utopian aspects to his Etruria Works, opened in 1769, not least the well-designed workers’ village alongside the factory—even if the miserly logic of Wedgwood’s wage restraint ran in precisely the opposite direction to that later deployed by Henry Ford, who famously jacked up his workers’ wages to $5 a day to encourage retention and effort.
But maximising output was not only about keeping workers hungry: uniformity of production and the use of plaster moulds played their part, as did limiting the number of shapes in the tableware. An impression of unbridled consumer choice was created by the variety of decoration that could be applied to these plain shapes, either by hand-painting or innovative transfer prints. For his “ornamental” neoclassical wares he employed skilled artists, John Flaxman being the greatest. The more creative decorators—gifted and often troublesome—were sent to London, where Bentley supervised a painting studio in Cheyne Row. But the Etruria Works near Burslem had to function like clockwork. A hundred years later, Karl Marx pointed out the human cost of this transition from craftsmanship to a production line: “the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation.” Nonetheless, in the case of ceramics, division of labour can never entirely extirpate skill.
Wedgwood’s career maps Britain’s industrial development within a wider political and economic landscape. But Hunt makes sure that Wedgwood’s pots stay at the heart of his biography. There are accounts of major commissions, like the Frog Service made in 1773-1774 for the Anglophile Catherine the Great, and named after one of her palaces on a frog-infested marsh near St Petersburg. It comprised over 900 pieces, each carrying a different image of a British landscape or building, including industrial scenes, all with a green frog device and leafy border. These were hand-painted by a team of decorators, presenting an idealised vision of “a polite and commercial people.” As an undertaking, it contrasted strikingly with the dessert service given to Catherine by Frederick the Great of Prussia a few years earlier. Made in porcelain, a material Wedgwood avoided as unprofitable, that was a royal gift rather than a commercial transaction, dominated by figurines depicting the different classes of Russian society, together with the peoples of the Russian Empire and abject groups of captive Turks. It was remote in spirit, both politically and artistically, from the serviceable creamware of the Frog Service.
“Wedgwood cultivated his garden and expanded his understanding of ceramics in a biblical spirit”
The Frog Service was a loss leader that made no profit for Wedgwood but garnered huge publicity when displayed in London before being shipped to St Petersburg. The same can be said of Wedgwood’s copy of the famous Portland vase, then in the possession of his friend and patron William Hamilton. For this he employed his unique creation, jasperware—a high-firing material evolved in the mid-1770s that would absorb a mineral oxide stain in a wide range of colours. Blue jasperware combined with white low relief decoration still exemplifies the Wedgwood brand. A jasperware rendering of the Portland, a Roman cameo-cut glass vase depicting an obscure narrative, was a quixotic choice; and Wedgwood is thought to have sold only 10 of the 30 he judged successful. But imitating the precise shade of the dark glass, sculpting the white cameo figures, making accurate moulds, getting throwers to reproduce the curious shape of the vase and firing the whole was a technical triumph. And unlike the unimpressed critic Roger Fry, Hunt eloquently praises it as a work of art
Many humbler objects emerge equally triumphant in Hunt’s book. Wedgwood invented a pyrometer to track the temperature of his kilns, for which he was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Then there was a semi-secret intaglio depicting a rattlesnake with the motto “DON’T TREAD ON ME,” created in 1777 to mark his support for American independence. And, of course, there is his white and black jasperware medallion of a chained slave taking the knee, inscribed with the poignant inscription: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” made for the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Produced by the thousand at Wedgwood’s expense, the medallion was to become the dominant motif of anti-slavery activism.
In the final chapter, Hunt traces the endgame of the company that became Wedgwood & Son after Josiah’s death in 1795. As the former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central who campaigned to save the Wedgwood Museum and archives for the nation, Hunt sets out the damage wrought by Tony O’Reilly’s 1990 purchase of what had become Waterford Wedgwood with forensic passion. O’Reilly and his board’s mismanagement, coupled with their decision to shift production to the far east, meant that by 2008 what had been a successful and well-run business went into administration. After significant redundancies, a diminished Wedgwood emerged, which now has a (possibly) more stable future under the ownership of the Fiskars Group, best known as the Finnish scissor-maker.
Hunt’s melancholy epilogue takes us a long way from Wedgwood’s original vision. Early on, Hunt quotes the Methodist preacher John Wesley, writing in 1760: “I met a young man by the name of J Wedgwood who planted a flower garden adjacent to his pottery… He also had his men wash their hands and faces and change their clothes after working in the clay. He is small and lame but his soul is close to God.”
Wedgwood’s lameness, a result of childhood smallpox, can be classed as a creative malady, turning him away from the potter’s wheel towards the science of ceramics. He cultivated his garden and expanded his understanding of ceramics in a biblical spirit—part commercial enterprise and part his own divine project: “I saw the field was spacious and the soil so good as to promise an ample recompense to any who should labour diligently in its cultivation.” The Radical Potter reminds us how wealth and its creation have been increasingly distorted since his time and, in human terms, made sterile. Instead of Wedgwood’s “spacious field” we have a combination of a hedge-fund culture and a gig economy in which “ample recompense” often comes at a terrible price.
