Josiah Wedgwood

• 1. Introduction

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  Josiah Wedgwood was baptised on the 12th of July 1730, the thirteenth and last child of a Staffordshire potting family, in a village where every pot-works owned a single bottle kiln. By the time he died he had been called "among the greatest and most innovative retailers the world has ever seen". He sold to an empress and to ordinary households on the same trick of desire. He lost a leg to a childhood illness and never made porcelain, yet his name still means fine pottery today. How does a sickly apprentice from Burslem end up grandfather to Charles Darwin, friend to chemists, and a fighter against slavery? And how did a man working in clay invent the machinery of modern selling?

• 2. A Potter's Bloodline

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  Around 1650 the village of Burslem was the main centre of the Staffordshire Potteries, and several related Wedgwood families lived there. Thomas Wedgwood set up the Churchyard Works near St John's parish church, and the business passed down a line of master potters who bought a family pew. Josiah belonged to the fifth generation of a family of potters, and that traditional occupation continued through another five generations after him. His mother Mary was the daughter of Josiah Stringer, a dissenting minister whose church had been outlawed by the Corporation Act. She raised her children on her father's belief that knowledge based on reason, experience, and experiment was preferable to dogma. That principle would shape everything Josiah later did at the wheel and in the laboratory. After his father died in June 1739, Josiah finished school and began an informal apprenticeship, learning to throw pots. When he was nearly twelve a severe bout of smallpox struck his right knee, an injury that would follow him for the rest of his life.

• 3. The Science Of Clay

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  After his smallpox left his right knee weak, Josiah turned from the potter's wheel to moulded ware and small ornaments. He took out a formal indenture on the 11th of November 1744, apprenticed under his eldest brother Thomas at the Churchyard Works. His brother thought his ideas for improvement unnecessary and refused a partnership, so in 1751 or 1752 Josiah managed a pot-works near Stoke. He soon partnered with Thomas Whieldon, a maker of high-value small items such as snuff boxes. After six months of research, Wedgwood produced an exceptionally brilliant green glaze, and demand for it was immediate. Wedgwood was keenly interested in the scientific advances of his day, and that interest underpinned his methods. Every new invention he produced was quickly copied: green glaze, creamware, black basalt, and jasperware. His unique glazes set his wares apart from anything else on the market. When a knee injury once forced him to convalesce for months, he read literature and science, helped by visits from William Willet, the Newcastle-under-Lyme minister who had married his sister Catherine in 1754. In 1783 he was elected to the Royal Society for a pyrometric device that measured the high temperatures inside kilns by the principle of clay contraction.

• 4. Selling To A Queen

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  By 1763, Wedgwood was receiving orders from the highest-ranking people, including Queen Charlotte. He convinced her to let him name the line she had bought "Queen's Ware", then trumpeted the royal association across his paperwork and stationery. Anything he made for the Queen was automatically exhibited before delivery. Wedgwood marketed Queen's Ware at affordable prices, everywhere British trading ships sailed. In 1767 he wrote that demand for the creamcolour, alias Queen Ware, alias Ivory, still increased, and that its use had spread rapidly over the whole globe. He understood that a patron's name carried social weight. He gave his wares titles like Royal Pattern, Russian pattern, and Bedford, Oxford and Chetwynd vases. He felt his flowerpots would sell better if called "Duchess of Devonshire flowerpots". The plan was to monopolise the aristocratic market, win a special social cachet, and let it filter down to all classes. Whether a customer owned the original or only a Wedgwood copy mattered little to them, and that was exactly the effect he engineered.

• 5. Vases All The Cry

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  In 1769 "vases was all the cry" in London, and Wedgwood opened a new factory called Etruria, north of Stoke. His most important early achievement was perfecting a black stoneware body he called "basalt", which could imitate the colour and shapes of Etruscan or Greek vases being excavated in Italy. He declared he had become what he wished to be: "Vase Maker General to the Universe". Around 1771 he began experimenting with Jasperware, but held off advertising it for a couple of years. The taste of the moment turned against ornament, banishing the exuberant colours of rococo, the splendours of baroque, and the intricacies of chinoiserie. The demand was for purity, simplicity and antiquity. Gilding proved unpopular, so around 1772 Wedgwood reduced the "offensive gilding" on the advice of Sir William Hamilton. When English society found the naked figures of the classics too warm for their taste, he added gowns for the girls and fig leaves for the gods. To clinch his place as leader of the new fashion, he chased the famous Barberini vase as the final test of his skill. His obsession was to duplicate the Portland Vase, a blue-and-white glass piece dating to the first century BC. He worked on it for three years and produced a copy he considered satisfactory in 1789.

• 6. The Machinery Of Marketing

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  Wedgwood first opened a warehouse at Charles Street, Mayfair, as early as 1765, and within two years his trade had outgrown his rooms in Grosvenor Square. His showrooms became one of the most fashionable meeting places in London, with workers laboring day and night and crowds that showed no sign of abating. He set up warehouses and showrooms at Bath, Liverpool and Dublin, in addition to Etruria and Westminster, timing the openings carefully and holding back new goods to heighten their effect. To give customers a feeling of rarity, he strictly limited the number of jaspers on display at any time. In 1773 he and Thomas Bentley published the first Ornamental Catalogue, an illustrated catalogue of shapes. That same year Empress Catherine the Great ordered the Green Frog Service, 952 pieces with over a thousand original paintings, for a palace on a frog swamp later known as Chesme Palace. For over a month the fashionable world thronged his rooms and blocked the streets with their carriages. Catherine paid £2,700, and the service can still be seen in the Hermitage Museum. By 1784 Wedgwood was exporting nearly 80% of his total produce, and by 1790 he had sold in every city in Europe. He pioneered direct mail, money-back guarantees, travelling salesmen, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogues.

• 7. Am I Not A Man

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  Wedgwood was a prominent abolitionist, remembered for his anti-slavery medallion bearing the words "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?". It was commissioned by Joseph Hooper, a founder of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and used that society's seal as its design. The actual modelling of the cameo was probably done by either William Hackwood or Henry Webber, modellers at his factory. He mass-produced the cameos and distributed them widely, making the image popular and celebrated. Thomas Clarkson recorded that ladies wore them in bracelets and fitted them as ornamental pins for their hair. He wrote that fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was for once seen promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom. Large-scale copies were painted to hang on walls, and the design appeared on clay tobacco pipes. His daughter Sarah Wedgwood, born in 1776, was very active in the movement and a founding member of the Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, the first anti-slavery society for women.

• 8. A Family Of Thinkers

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  On the 25th of January 1764, after long negotiation by attorneys over the marriage settlement, "Jos" married his distant cousin Sarah at Astbury parish church near Congleton. Her father Richard, a wealthy Congleton cheesemonger, had insisted on assurance that his son-in-law had sufficient means. The couple had eight children. Their eldest daughter Susannah, known as "Sukey", married Robert Darwin and became the mother of Charles Darwin, who later married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Among the other children, Thomas Wedgwood, born in 1771, is best known as a pioneer photographer. Wedgwood moved in a circle of scientific minds. During negotiations for the Trent and Mersey Canal he befriended Erasmus Darwin, and while recuperating from a knee accident in 1762 he met the chemist Joseph Priestley, who became a close friend. He was an active member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, often held at Erasmus Darwin House. As a Unitarian aware of the legal limits on nonconformists, he supported dissenting academies such as Warrington Academy, where he lectured on chemistry and was made a professor of metallurgy. After Bentley died in 1780, Wedgwood turned to Darwin for help running the business, and the bond between the two families deepened into marriage.

  Continuing trouble with his smallpox-afflicted knee made amputation of his right leg necessary on the 28th of May 1768, not long before the Etruria Works opened in June 1769. Over the main entrance to those works he inscribed the motto Sic fortis Etruria crevit, meaning "Thus Etruria grew strong". The factory would run for 180 years. At Etruria he built a village for his workers and combined his experiments with an interest in improved roads, canals, schools, and living conditions. In January 1788 he commemorated the landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove with the Sydney Cove Medallion. He used clay from the cove given to him by Sir Joseph Banks, who had received it from Governor Arthur Phillip. Wedgwood died at home, probably of cancer of the jaw, in 1795, and was buried three days later in the parish church of Stoke-upon-Trent. As early as 1774 he had begun preserving samples of all the company's works for posterity. That collection became the Wedgwood Museum, whose archive was inscribed in UNESCO's UK Memory of the World Register in 2011.