PREFACE
This account of the potting industry in North Staffordshire will be of interest chiefly to the people of North Staffordshire. They and their fathers before them have grown up with, lived with, made and developed the English pottery trade. The pot-bank and the shard ruck are, to them, as familiar, and as full of old associations, as the cowshed to the countryman or the nets along the links to the fishing population. To them any history of the development of their industry will be welcome.
But potting is such a specialized industry, so confined to and associated with North Staffordshire, that it is possible to study very clearly in the case of this industry the cause of its localization, and its gradual change from a home to a factory business. The rise of capitalism, the attempts at revolt on the part of the workers, the increase of machinery and steam power, all these can be studied very closely in the potting industry, just because the history of the district is the history of potting and of the inhabitants’ whole lives. So that I venture to hope that many students of history and of sociology will find such a trade history as this of some value in their researches.
The collector, too, may I hope find his special studies assisted by the identification and linking together of the relationships of the old master-potters, of their inventions, and factory sites and dates.
A hundred years ago Simeon Shaw wrote a book of this nature. It had its merits, but since then research among ancient documents, systematic collection and excavation, the publications of the William Salt Archæological Society, and, above all, the modern work of such men as William Burton and Professor Church, have made it possible to restate far more exactly what happened, and when, to potting in North Staffordshire. Mr Burton’s “History and Description of English Earthenware” and his various works on porcelain have been drawn upon very largely in the following pages.
Both to him and to Professor Church, M. Solon and to many others, who have given me so much personal assistance in this work, I desire to express my gratitude. I can only regret that my own contribution to original research on the subject has been confined to the Tunstall Court Rolls, kindly lent me by Mr Sneyd, and to the MSS of my great-great-grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, now in the museum of the Wedgwood firm at Etruria. Lastly I would express my indebtedness to my brother Frank Wedgwood, who has read through the proofs and made many corrections, such as would occur to one whose whole life has been devoted to the practice of the art of potting.