New technology, component costs and product placement

The fashion for novelty is scarcely, well, novel. In the 18th century Dr Johnson warned that the frenzy for the new had reached such a pitch that men would even look to ‘be hanged in a new way’. New fashions, new fabrics, new furniture, new decorations and ornaments, all cascaded out of workshops and factories. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, his 1776 summation of the new theory of supply and demand, talked about the ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’.

And leading the way in supplying the voraciously consuming masses for the previous two decades was Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ as he proudly styled himself. His was a Samuel Smiles rags-to-riches story (and indeed Smiles included him in his Self-Help, and remain- ed fascinated enough by this proto-Victorian to return to him in a later biography). Wedgwood was the son and grand- son of struggling potters in the small town of Burslem (later part of the Five Towns, now subsumed into Stoke-on-Trent).