Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?

No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles of Self-Help fame, they admired this industrious, inventive, uxorious and religious man as a harbinger of their own age.

It surely helped that his story, if not exactly one of rags to riches, was certainly a tale of triumph over adversity. His biggest obstacle was one he did his best to conceal from a carefully constructed public image. Though Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and George Stubbs did a family study showing Josiah, his wife Sarah and their seven children in the grounds of his country house, Etruria Hall, neither likeness hinted that Wedgwood had a wooden leg.

His lower right leg was removed without anaesthetic on what he cheerfully christened ‘St Amputation Day’ in 1768, when he was 38, following complications after a carriage accident. But it had hobbled him for much longer, since a bout of smallpox at the age of 12. That, as Tristram Hunt explains in his impassioned, wide-ranging biography, put an end to Josiah Wedgwood as a hands-on potter, despite the early promise that he had shown in the art: ‘Crucially, this disability would prevent him from operating the foot pedal on the potter’s wheel. Smallpox meant that the 12-year-old Wedgwood could never be a thrower.’

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Monica Porter

The black cab is dying out. Good.

It would be tempting to say that art’s loss was commerce’s gain; but Hunt shows that Wedgwood’s pioneering career as manufacturer, marketing savant and scientific innovator never strayed far from a conviction that what his kilns produced was art, even if, as the business thrived, it was divided between its ‘useful’ and ‘ornamental’ sides. From that moment, Wedgwood concentrated on the ornamental, leaving the other side of the business in his cousin Thomas’s care, who ever after was known as ‘Useful’ Thomas Wedgwood.