The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The Steve Jobs of the teapot?
Tristram Hunt wants us to see Josiah Wedgwood, inventor and radical, as so much more than a potter
THE RADICAL POTTER by Tristram Hunt
315pp, Allen Lane, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
We remember Josiah Wedgwood today for his elegant china, but as Tristram Hunt shows in this new biography, he was much more than a potter. Hunt argues that Wedgwood was the Steve Jobs of his age, a defining figure who connected creativity with technology. Wedgwood was a hero of the industrial revolution, a groundbreaking entrepreneur and a political radical who campaigned for slave emancipation and welcomed the fall of the Bastille.
Tristram Hunt’s passion for Wedgwood began when, as MP for Stoke-on-Trent (2010-17), he encountered Josiah, “King of Stoke”. When Hunt became director of the V&A, he came across Wedgwood again. In the V&A there can be seen the badge that Wedgwood designed for the anti-slavery campaign: a medallion of white jasper with a black relief depicting an enslaved male African inscribed, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” The V&A also holds Wedgwood’s masterpiece as a virtuoso potter, a copy of the Roman Portland Vase in blue-black jasper.
In this book, Hunt positions Wedgwood within the wider history of Britain’s 18th-century industrial revolution. He uses Wedgwood’s archive, but doesn’t dig into 18th-century records to find new material. Nor does he give an art-historical perspective. Wedgwood sometimes becomes invisible in the narrative of the history of ceramics or the rise of an industrial society, but Hunt eventually succeeds in the aim of the book, which is to show that, in the 21st century, Wedgwood still matters.
Wedgwood was an unlikely success story. He was born in 1730, the 12th child in a family of potters in Burslem, one of the six pottery towns that later became Stoke-onTrent. Stoke’s combination of clay and high-quality coal for firing the kilns enabled the potters to manufacture white salt-glazed stoneware, but they were no match for the imported Chinese porcelain that dominated the luxury market.
Wedgwood’s father died when he was nine, and he was apprenticed to work as a potter’s apprentice to his brother. Aged 12, he contracted smallpox, which left him with a permanently damaged right knee. The leg was later amputated (without anaesthetic). Prevented by his disability from becoming a thrower of pots or using a potter’s wheel, Wedgwood applied himself to design and business. Aged 22, he became a partner to a leading potter who encouraged him to inno- vate. “I saw the field was spacious,” he wrote. Relentlessly experimenting with glazes and designs for cups and teapots, he grasped the commercial opportunities afforded by Georgian England’s addiction to tea drinking. Soon he was earning enough to set up on his own.
Wedgwood was a unitarian, brought up to question privilege and authority. But as a businessman he was shameless in wooing the aristocracy, exploiting the endorsement of high society in order to sell his china to the middle classes. Queen Charlotte ordered a tea service in green and gold creamware, and Wedgwood was appointed Potter to the Queen. In a stroke of genius, he changed the name of creamware to Queen’s ware.
Wedgwood’s sales and marketing strategy distinguish him in business history just as much as the beauty of his designs. Soon there was a showroom in London. When the Adam brothers started the rage for neoclassicism, Wedgwood was quick to commission Flaxman’s classical nudes on his Roman vase designs. Perhaps Wedgwood’s greatest commission was for Catherine the Great, who ordered a dinner service of 952 pieces, each painted with a green frog and decorated with views of the English picturesque – a cultural manifesto for Britain. His “most important contribution to ceramic history” was Jasperware – often pale blue and decorated with white reliefs – which he invented in the 1770s, shutting himself away in his laboratory with kilns and glaze.
As an employer, Wedgwood was in some ways enlightened. At Etruria, in Stoke, he was the first factory owner to build a model village for his workers. But he complained of the laziness and indiscipline of the workforce, and he
considered the only way to deal with this was to apply the strictest division of labour (Adam Smith’s pin factory), each worker repeating one small part of the process again and again. As Hunt points out, it is an irony that a man so committed to personal creativity as Wedgwood should have created a robotic production line.
Hunt ends the book with the sad story of the decline and fall of Wedgwood plc in 2008-10. “From cost control to product design to marketing to technology to back stamping to brand equity, the inheritors of the Wedgwood legend killed value by upending the business ethos that had first been established back in 1759.” Hunt is surely right to argue that Wedgwood has something to teach us about business today.