Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science

by J. Hamilton Fyfe

III.—JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.

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.