THE RADICAL POTTER
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF BRITAIN TRISTRAM HUNT
Allen Lane, 323pp, £25 ‘Fabulously unputdownable,’ wrote Judith Woods in the Daily
Telegraph, adding that ‘in parts it reads like a thriller’. Richard Lambert noted that ‘Wedgwood’s remarkable story has been told in many biographies over the years’, in his
Financial Times review, but found that ‘the great contribution of... Hunt’s new book, is to place him in the context of the rapid economic and social changes during his lifetime that helped make his success possible.’ Hunt, a former Labour MP for Stoke-on-trent Central and now director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, has produced a ‘brisk and highly readable biography’, wrote Paul Lay in his review for the Times, which ‘places Wedgwood in a dissenting tradition that goes back to the civil wars ... It is a timely tale.’
Rowan Moore, in the Observer, felt that ‘Hunt performs the important task of telling the great potter’s story clearly and accessibly ... Wedgwood the man should be as famous as Wedgwood the brand. That he is not might be due to his business – there are more heroic and glamorous trades than making pots – and to the national tendency to undervalue manufacturing. Hunt’s book should help to correct that imbalance.’ For Sarah Watling, in
Literary Review, ‘one of the achievements of Tristram Hunt’s biography... is to bring into view the commercial and moral instincts of the man behind the powerhouse... Wedgwood emerges from this book as a man of voracious interest in the world. Canny and determined, he had both strong beliefs and the adaptability that marks any great innovator. Hunt... is as interested in what the man can tell us about the times as the times meant for the man.’
In the Daily Mail Ysenda Maxtone Graham said ‘this delicious, meticulously researched, wideranging but never long-winded book made me admire Tristram Hunt as well as Josiah Wedgwood’, while Kathryn Hughes in the Mail on
Sunday said, ‘Hunt is exquisitely alive to all the contradictions in Wedgwood’s achievements ... a rich portrait of the charismatic but contradictory man who made Georgian Britain the most stylish country in the world.’
Wedgwood emerges as a man of voracious interest in the world