The most remarkable revolutions change the world so completely that no one remarks on them any more. And, in a way, Wedgwood did change the world, a new book argues
Wedgwood wanted to “astonish the world…for I hate piddling”. And for a time his pottery did. Austen admired it; Edward Gibbon collected it; Empress Catherine II of Russia ordered a job lot of it. Then, suddenly, it fell out of fashion, coming to be seen as piddling, not astonishing. Wedgwood’s own grandson, Charles Darwin, evinced an “insensibility to Wedgwood ware”. When the author J.B.
That only proves Mr Hunt’s case. The most remarkable revolutions change the world so completely that no one remarks on them any more. And, in a way, Wedgwood did change the world. When he started out in the 1740s, pottery was such a small-scale, rackety industry that some potters got the clay they needed by digging it out of holes in the road—“potholes”.
The history of pots matters because they do. Pick one up and in its lines you can trace trade routes and chronicle empires. The rise and fall of Rome can be charted in the words of its historians, but it is observed more accurately in the rise and fall of the Roman pot trade. At its imperial peak Roman ceramics—cheap, trademarked, perfect—were shipped everywhere from Africa to Iona; after Rome fell it would take centuries for European pottery to recover such excellence.
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