“I scarcely know,” he wrote, “whether I am a landed gentleman, an engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other characters by turns.”
In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of the Tiber in Italy.
By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with thousands of flourishing houses and workmen. And he himself was the mainspring of it all—the moving spirit.
Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice of the Queen—Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full development of that “cream” ware whose first beginnings had dawned on his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known the “Queen’s Ware,” and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might call himself “Potter to the Queen.”
And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered a “jasper dip,” and he invented a special kind of ware of which he made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for Wedgwood’s vases. “A violent vase mania,” he called it himself. The mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation against the curse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure: “Am I not a Man and a Brother?”
Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he had been as a boy—hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays labelled and classified.
Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing “scamped.” Well did the workmen know the “thud” of his wooden leg on the floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any article he did not think perfect.
“That won’t do for Josiah Wedgwood!” he would say.
As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs, for he was very particular about having it often renewed. Partial blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his perseverance never failed.
As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his family noted his failing powers—not of mind, but of body. Asthma was added to his other sufferings.