WEDGWOOD: THE 18TH CENTURY STEVE JOBS
The Radical Potter Tristram Hunt Allen Lane £25 ★★★★
When Catherine the Great of Russia ordered a dinner service from Josiah Wedgwood in 1773, the industrialist’s pottery had already become a byword for sophistication around the world. Naturally, the Empress was keen to outshine every other king, princess or duke of her acquaintance, so she stipulated a 944-piece service, each item to be decorated with views of England. It was the biggest order that Wedgwood had ever received, and so exquisite that fashionable London society was urged to buy a ticket in order to view the marvellous sight before it was dispatched to St Petersburg.
This was a stunning endorsement for a working man who had grown up in Burslem, Staffordshire, a muddy town mostly associated with making sturdy earthenware. Within 30 years, and thanks to his unique blend of scientific know-how, artistic flair, managerial rigour and knack for publicity, Wedgwood had turned his family’s ‘crocks and pots’ business into a global phenomenon.
By the 1780s, foreign sales accounted for 80 per cent of the company’s production. From the salons of Paris to the drawing rooms of New York you would now find Wedgwood’s exquisite dinner plates, vases and medallions, in everything from black basalt and ‘Etruscan red’ to the delicate blue glaze and off-white of his signature Jasperware (above). Tristram Hunt reckons that Wedgwood’s inter-disciplinary dazzle qualifies him as the Steve Jobs of the 18th Century.
What makes Wedgwood’s achievement all the more remarkable is that he was disabled. Smallpox swept through the Potteries area when he was a child, leaving him with a damaged right leg that had to be amputated in 1768. This meant that he was unable to work the potter’s wheel that was the foundation of the modest family fortune. Rather than holding him back, he was spurred on to even greater achievements. In addition to coming up with innovatory glazes and artistic shapes, he introduced modern industrial discipline to the workforce and pioneered the building of Britain’s canals and turnpike roads. This transformed the country from a series of sleepy rural communities into a hyper-connected, ultraproductive economic powerhouse. Hunt is exquisitely alive to all the contradictions in Wedgwood’s achievements. For while the potter ruled his workers with an iron hand, imposing fines for latecomers and poor workmanship, he was also passionately opposed to the Atlantic slave trade on which Britain’s economic boom depended.
At his own expense he designed and distributed medallions with a chained African slave bearing the famous abolitionist slogan: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ And despite his own weak spot for royalty – the Queen had her own signature ‘Queensware’ – he was also a passionate supporter of the American and French revolutions with their calls for a republic and an end to aristocratic rule.
This is tricky territory but Hunt, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and ex-MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, is the ideal person to guide us. The result is a rich portrait of the charismatic but contradictory man who made Georgian Britain the most stylish country in the world. Until, that is, Queen Victoria arrived and things started to turn ugly again.