How much did pottery workers know about classical art and civilisation?

Abstract

Charles Shaw’s When I was a Child, by ‘An Old Potter’ (1903) is a searing eyewitness account of child labour in the North Staffordshire potteries, where classically themed ceramics were always a major category of output. One of eight children of a Tunstall pottery painter, and born in 1832, at the age of seven Charles began working fourteen-hour days in the factory of Enoch Wood & Sons in Burslem, subsequently moving to Samuel Alcock’s pottery. His memoir contains horrifying descriptions of the hunger, brutality, dangerous working conditions, and degradation suffered by the workforce, as well as first-hand accounts of the Chartist riots.

Shaw was no classical scholar. He enjoyed Charles Rollin’s Ancient History, a universal history available in English translation since 1731,¹ which he came across at Sunday school;² Rollin, he wrote, ‘opened a new world, but I never supposed that world had anything to do with the one in which I was then living. It might have been a world whose development took place on some other planet’.³ He acquired most of his conventional education in literacy and numeracy as an adult in the Tunstall Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society. He became a Methodist minister, and studied further at Owens College, Manchester.

Shaw laments that the pottery industry has disfigured nature: the ‘lovely, peaceful, and fruitful valley is now choked with smoke and disfigured by mining and smelting refuse. If Cyclops with his red-handed and red-faced followers had migrated upwards from the dim regions below and settled on the surface amid baleful blazes and shadows, a greater transformation could not have taken place’.⁴ The classical figures painted by his father lingered powerfully in his imagination. He described a ruthless local magistrate as one who ‘ruled as the Jove of the pottery district’.⁵ The first Jove on which he will ever have laid eyes was probably the angry, thunderbolt-wielding figurine produced by his first employer Enoch Wood & Sons. This article asks how much the many thousands of working-class Britons like Charles Shaw working in the pottery industry learned from their workplaces about the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Etruscans from whose artefacts they adapted motifs. The popularity of classical designs remained steady, whereas alternative crazes waxed and waned, for example for Italian Renaissance maiolica or chinoiserie. Even companies which specialized in utilitarian ceramics such as chimney pipes and sanitary ware, such as the Stiff family’s company in Lambeth, often had a sideline in classical tableware.⁶

Pottery was a significant industry in Britain during the long nineteenth century, yet historians were long misled by its exclusion from Arnold Toynbee’s seminal study The Industrial Revolution (1884).⁷ He focused on the Manchester cotton industry and the iron and hardware works of Birmingham, probably because they were statistically speaking more significant. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that historians began to understand the contribution to the Industrial Revolution made by the technologies, machinery, and workforce management of pottery producers.⁸ This applied to several large pottery factories of the six towns which amalgamated to form Stoke-on-Trent in 1910, above all to Josiah Wedgwood’s pioneering purpose-built factory, Etruria, and to the Herculaneum factory at Toxteth in Liverpool, which manufactured stoneware with an applied jasper dip in direct imitation of the classical designs produced by Wedgwood.⁹ But other significant potteries, usually located to exploit the local availability of suitable clay, were swift to introduce new technologies, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well as England.¹⁰ Such was the consumer demand for decorated ceramics.

A rival enterprise to Wedgwood’s was Rockingham Works in Swinton, Yorkshire, founded in 1778, which produced ‘Brameld’ earthenware with white neoclassical figures in relief.¹¹ The Bishops Waltham Clay Company in Hampshire (founded 1862) used the region’s fine red clay to produce beautiful imitation Athenian terracotta items.¹² The Aylesford Terra-Cotta Works, established in Kent in 1850, made elaborate neoclassical vases from the native clay until 1906.¹³ Classical iconography abounded on the elaborate ‘Limoges-style’ later nineteenth-century ewers and pitchers produced by Royal Worcester.¹⁴ The Blashfield Terra-Cotta Company at Stamford (1858–75) provided neoclassical decorations for several buildings, for example Dulwich College, but also made classical vases.¹⁵

The many significant potteries in Wales included the Cambrian Pottery at Swansea, which, as we shall see below, aimed to produce reproductions of ancient pottery cheaply enough for them to be enjoyed by the working classes.¹⁶ In Scotland, the industry started in about 1748 and continued until World War II. It was centred in Glasgow. J. and M. P. Bell & Co. of Stafford Street made excellent earthenware and Parian, hard white unglazed authentic-looking reproductions of (or motifs attached to vases from) intricately carved ancient statues in marble (thus the product name ‘Parian’, since much ancient marble came from the island of Paros).¹⁷ Their exhibits at the 1862 Exhibition show several imitation red-figure amphoras.¹⁸ Bo’ness and Kirkcaldy also had important potteries, as did Greenock and Alloa.¹⁹ The Castle Espie works in County Down, Ireland, used local red clay to make neoclassical terracotta items, including a lovely vase depicting the three Graces.²⁰ At Belleek Pottery in County Fermanagh, Ireland, from 1863 onwards the workers made vases depicting classical ships and Tritons and Parian Ware.²¹

The taste for ‘Classics’ and the antique entered other spheres of British life—architecture, education, translating and publishing enterprises—at the dawn of the eighteenth century, a phenomenon examined from a class-conscious perspective in Hall and Stead (2020). The passion for the classical arose rather later in ceramic design, even though the pioneering Restoration potter John Dwight, who experimented with stoneware at his Fulham workshop and probably produced the earliest porcelain in England, occasionally attempted classical figures as well as innumerable busts of contemporary royalty, coffee pots, mugs, and noggins. His ‘Meleager’ is a 12-inch-high statuette of a nude youth with a hunting horn and boar’s head, cunningly made of brown stoneware salt-glazed to resemble bronze (around 1680), now in the British Museum.²² Figures by Dwight representing Flora and Minerva, Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, and Saturn are also recorded.²³ But his workmanship was of a level his contemporaries could not attain. The classical knowledge and technical skill needed to produce the ‘Meleager’ (of which the name of the actual sculptor remains unknown) were not generally available.

Another reason why classical ceramics were slow to become fashionable was the absence of materials suited to detailed modelling, a problem that was not solved until biscuit porcelain was introduced and Wedgwood’s jasper—a fine stoneware usually unglazed and coloured to form a hard body—was perfected in the 1770s.²⁴ It was not until the adoption of hard white unglazed Parian at the Copeland Factory in 1842 that authentic-looking reproductions of intricately carved ancient statues in marble became possible.²⁵ But technological progress was in itself less significant than the ideological shift which took place in about 1763, when the end of the Seven Years War produced a revision in the associations of porcelain. It had been intimately tied in the British mind to the old absolutist Continental regimes, but could now begin to be embraced by a far wider class base.²⁶ At exactly this point, Pierre-François Hugues, the son of a bankrupt cloth-merchant from Nancy (the adoption of the spurious title ‘Baron d’Hancarville’ was a personal vanity) introduced William Hamilton to collections of classical antiquities in Naples, all then conventionally labelled ‘Etruscan’: many were finds from the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii.²⁷ British classically themed ceramic art was effectively created when the images were circulated to individuals, including Wedgwood, which Hancarville and Hamilton eventually published as Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm.Hamilton (1776/7) (AEGR).²⁸ Wedgwood seems to have been sent some of the lavish plates from this volume by Hamilton’s sister, Lady Jane Cathcart.²⁹ The plates inspired the shapes and decorative art on the vases created by Wedgwood and his rivals, and their bas-reliefs, friezes, and designs on tableware.³⁰ Once Hamilton sold his first collection of Greek vases to the British Museum in 1772, they fed the new public appetite for replica ceramics which Wedgwood’s workers and those in other factories across Britain laboured to satisfy.

In the new political context, classically designed porcelain suddenly seemed to embody a purer, simpler, more ideologically progressive ethos than the rococo and baroque porcelain wares of the old European courts.³¹ Wedgwood expressed this himself in a 1769 letter to his partner Thomas Bentley, where he wondered whether they would be able to establish a good export business to France: ‘I say we will fashn. [sic] our Porcelain after their own hearts & captivate them with the Elegance and simplicity of the Ancients.’ But he doubts whether this can be successful, since he has observed how the French like their ceramics ‘cover’d over with ornament’.³² The fresh, authentic feel of Wedgwood’s ‘Etruscan’ wares to those who saw them in the late eighteenth century is conveyed in the 1792 discussion by the German antiquarian Carl August Böttiger about the provenance of the so-called Etruscan vases excavated in Italy. Böttiger describes a friend’s visit to the Wedgwood showrooms in Soho:³³ he felt as though he had been transported to a room in ancient Herculaneum at Portici, or into the cabinet of the Cardinal Borgia at Veletri. Catching sight of the most recent vases, flower-pots, coloured bowls, and tripods made by Wedgwood and his assistants after the genuine Hamilton antiques, one sees a perfect imitation not only in form and profile, but also in the intention to imitate the paintings through the re-invention of the Etrurian encaustic technique.³⁴

Böttiger’s reference to Wedgwood’s ‘assistants’ prompts the question of the extent of the knowledge of ancient art possessed by the large numbers of workers in the British ceramics industry. The way we think about cultural literacy was changed by Richard Hoggart’s The Use of Literacy (1957), which includes, under the heading of working-class literacy, activities quite other than the reading of continuous printed texts—the consumption of entertainments and culture via theatre, cinema, radio, television, pictures in magazines, and advertisements. Peter Burke has subsequently explored a range of ways in which we can use visual culture as a historical source.³⁵ These scholars would have approved of Sian Lewis’ reminder that that the slaves of ancient Greece poured their masters’ wine from vases decorated with mythical, ritual, and domestic scenes; since vase-paintings were ‘an open form of communication, available to every gaze’, their meanings were construed in the minds of slaves as well as those of free people.³⁶ One might add that the many hundreds of such vases on display in British collections have always been construed in the minds of viewers whether literate or not, and the same must go for the people who actually manufactured them. From the later eighteenth century, artisans were usually permitted to visit royal collections, and sometimes took lessons at the art academies, where they would have been able to pick up more information, and also see a variety of casts and paintings.

Museums in Britain were also visited by a wider class cross section than their equivalents in France, Germany, and Italy, where the admission of visitors to the princely galleries was closely monitored.³⁷ There was a sense that art and archaeology somehow belonged to the nation rather than exclusively to wealthy individuals, and free admission was customary. ‘These were spaces where, in theory at least, people of all classes were offered the same experience, and permitted to see objects that in the past would have been the preserve of the few. At a time of wild disparities of educational provision, this was already a considerable, if grudging, concession.’³⁸ Lower-class visitors were drawn to museums out of curiosity; their memoirs often imply that what they saw nurtured their impulse towards self-education.

When Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach toured the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1710, he was shocked at the vulgarity of the other visitors.³⁹ Ralph Thoresby, whose collection at the Museum Thoresbyanum which his father had founded in Leeds in the late seventeenth century included Roman British finds, complained bitterly about visiting hordes.⁴⁰ A Prussian traveller was surprised in the 1780s to find that the visitors to the British Museum, founded in 1753, were ‘various … some I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people, of both sexes, for as it is the property of the nation, everyone has the same right … to see it, that another has’.⁴¹ Museum keepers expressed fears about the bad behaviour which they associated with the policy of free admission.⁴² In 1815, the Principal Librarian of the British Museum, Joseph Planta, complained to its trustees that ‘our popular Visitors … in the fervour of independence, pride themselves in showing a disdain of order’.⁴³ Gustav Waagen was distressed by the chaotic and filthy masses crowding the National Gallery at around the same time.⁴⁴

The particular ‘filthy masses’ who themselves produced the reproductions of classical ceramics were always concentrated in Staffordshire. By the 1880s, more than 50,000 people were employed in or dependent on the manufacture of ceramics there.⁴⁵ Women and girls had always worked in potteries, especially as printers who transferred the outline designs to the clay, but Wedgwood discovered that they were often talented painters who could acquire manual skills fast and proficiently while being paid much less than their male counterparts.⁴⁶ By 1870, half the British pottery workforce was female,⁴⁷ a situation which made artistic portrayals in oil paintings of women pottery workers mildly fashionable, either in contemporary garb within neoclassical friezes, or in scenes where ancient ‘Etruscan’ women are depicted painting or carrying vases known from collections in museums.⁴⁸

In 1910, the six towns constituting the Potteries (Stoke, Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Longton, and Fenton) were amalgamated into the conurbation of Stoke-on-Trent. The three biggest firms were Copeland, Minton, and Wedgwood, but there were hundreds of smaller potteries, some of which produced classically themed wares. The Hill Top Pottery in Burslem, owned successively by Ralph Wood and Samuel Alcock, made delicate creamware and Parian goods. In Fenton there was the Minerva Works.⁴⁹ Tunstall had the Phoenix Works. In Hanley, the Old Hall Works produced Parian ware with elaborate classical mouldings,⁵⁰ and the Hope Street Works of the Dudson family made jasperware with white classical draped figures in the Wedgwood style.⁵¹ Hanley was until 1880 also home to the Castle Field Pottery, which made black-ground and gold-printed imitation Athenian earthenware vases.⁵²

In Stoke itself, the famous Spode Pottery was taken over by W. T. Copeland, which manufactured many neoclassical designs reproducing the shapes of and paintings on Athenian red-figure vases, for example one showing three female figures on a vase displayed at the 1851 Exhibition;⁵³ the detail on the central figure’s costume and headdress is spectacular. Minton & Co. made colourful tiles with classical imagery, and employed the doyen of pâte-sur-pâte neoclassicism, Frenchman Marc-Louis Solon, whose stunning vase portraying the romantic hero Paris with Erotes was displayed at the 1871 Exhibition.⁵⁴ Similar neoclassical pâte-sur-pâte was made at the Trent Potteries, whereas the specialities at the Wharf Street Works were busts and figures tinted to resemble ivory, including ‘Clytie’, ‘Apollo’, and ‘Penelope’, which sold well in the USA.⁵⁵

But the workers who made all these elegant products did not live luxurious lives themselves. The culture surrounding the industry was idiosyncratic; accounts even as late as the Edwardian era speak of a strong dialect, vocabulary impenetrable to outsiders, endurance feats, distance-walking races, al fresco swimming, outdoor games called ‘Prison Bar’ and ‘Burn Ball’ and strange songs that all locals knew off by heart.⁵⁶ Drinking sprees, especially but not exclusively at fair times, went on for three or more days. A journalist from Ireland who visited Stoke in 1809 reported that, on an ordinary summer Monday: ⁵⁷

I was surprized to find such crowds of people in a state of idleness, men, women, and boys: many of whom, even boys not exceeding 15 or 16, in a state of gross intoxication … I had formerly been a strong advocate for high wages to the working classes of the community, in hopes they might tend to increase their comforts and elevate their vices to some higher attainment of intellectual knowledge … The instance mentioned in a late commercial report, of the work people employed at the cotton factory at Rothsay [sic] in the Isle of Bute, purchasing a library, and employing their leisure hours in reading, forms a pleasing contrast.

Violent sports including boxing and the baiting of unfortunate animals were popular. The grim housing, squalor, and pollution of the Potteries was notorious, as documented not only in Charles Shaw’s memoir, and the fiction of local author Arnold Bennett,⁵⁸ but in numerous government and workers’ movement reports on the state of education, sanitation, and healthcare from the late eighteenth century onwards.⁵⁹ Until well into the twentieth century there was a grave problem with contamination from the toxic materials and chemicals involved in the production of ceramics, leading to an abnormally high level of early death, especially from lead poisoning.⁶⁰ The son of a Burslem potter born in 1915 recalls from his childhood the outside toilets of the pottery workers, and the impenetrable smoke that necessitated far more frequent washing of curtains and interior upholstery than in the agricultural villages.⁶¹

The story of child labour in the industry is grim. At Etruria, children were treated better than anywhere else, but in 1816, nearly a third were under eighteen and worked a nine- or ten-hour day. At other potteries they often did thirteen hours. Even by the time of the 1840–41 Report on the Employment and Education of Children, juveniles, often as young as five, formed an eighth of the workforce.⁶² Boys were usually employed as mould-runners, which meant dashing from one building to another, all day, in all weathers, to put newly made wares near a stove for hardening and then returning with an empty mould. Smaller children were put to being ‘jigger turners’, who worked raw clay to the necessary putty-like consistency. Girls were being used as ‘paintresses’ from the age of eight even in 1862.⁶³ And the plight of the child chimney sweeps used in the maintenance of all those ovens was as acute as anywhere in Britain.⁶⁴

The particular grievances of the pottery workers were that they were not paid unless the pieces they had made were taken ‘good from oven’ and that deep job insecurity resulted from the journeyman system, where skilled men were hired on a single-day basis, and from annual bouts of hiring and firing. The predicament of the pottery workers led to a high level of political consciousness and unrest even in the eighteenth century, but it was the aftermath of Peterloo in 1819 which gave the union movement its first impetus. The area between the Potteries and Manchester was known to house the early union organization called the ‘Philanthropic Hercules’, taking its example from the symbolic uses of Hercules as a symbol of the labouring man amongst French revolutionaries. By 1818 this Hercules had issued a handbill in the last days of the Manchester spinners’ strike, calling for the formation of a Philanthropic Society to which all trades would affiliate. After the Peterloo massacre a mass meeting was held at Hanley, chaired by William Ridgway, an example of the alliance between the industrial middle and working classes against the aristocracy.⁶⁵

The Journeyman Potters’ Union was formed in 1824, with a smaller one for the pottery printers; the Potters Union, with fifty-four Lodges, had emerged by 1836, when there was a strike and lockout and widespread Chartist activism.⁶⁶ In the riots of 1842, miners and potters inspired by the ‘Chartist rhymer’ Thomas Cooper took joint action.⁶⁷ Of the twenty thousand participants nearly seven hundred prisoners, including twelve-year-old boys and girls, were arrested and incarcerated in Stafford Gaols. The 1860s proved a turning point, especially after the extension of the Factory Acts to cover potworks in 1864; regulation from central government agencies then began to change life in Staffordshire. A few measures were taken to reduce the effect of the black smoke.⁶⁸ Things improved again by 1921, when the bottle kilns had been replaced by cleaner gas-fired tunnel ovens.⁶⁹

The picture of uniformly drunken, mutinous, and diseased pottery workers fails, however, to accommodate the evidence that they were better educated than their equivalents in many other industries. Literacy levels were relatively high: it is astonishing that even by 1816, the thirteen children under 13 at Etruria could almost all read and write.⁷⁰ Drama and variety shows were popular: in Hanley, itinerant actors used to perform behind the Sea Lion Inn, and Chartist theatrical performances as well as lectures were attended in the People’s Hall, even before surprisingly numerous theatre and hippodromes were built in the Potteries from the mid-nineteenth century.⁷¹ Entertainments on classical themes could certainly be seen: a poster advertising performances at the Royal Pottery Theatre, Hanley in the 1850s include a forthcoming performances of T. C. King’s drama Damon and Pytheas.⁷² And it is impossible that the men, women, and children involved in the production, transportation, and display of pottery did not pick up knowledge about the classical prototypes of these luxury wares. Once printing from copperplates was introduced in the mid-eighteenth century, the patterns were transferred from the plates (which had required enormous skill to etch) by cheap and unskilled labour. Women and children were often used to colour in between the lines transferred from the etching.⁷³ They must have been familiar with every minute detail. In reconstructing the workers’ experience, most of the best evidence comes from Etruria, which has amassed a large archive of documentation, not least Wedgwood’s own papers and correspondence. The oven books, for example, contain records created by the workers who fired the pots, and there are some fascinating small, anonymous drawings of different classical shapes of vases, each carefully drawn to serve as an aide-memoire.

Josiah himself was born into a family of potters in Burslem in 1730. As one of thirteen children, when after his father’s death the family fell on hard times, he started full-time work, throwing clay, at ten years old. His experience of poverty informed his own reformist political views. The hardships he underwent contrast with the privileged upper-middle-class childhood and young adulthood of the Scottish architect Robert Adam, who received a serious classical education at the Royal High School and then the University of Edinburgh, followed by the Grand Tour. But it was these two men who were chiefly responsible for the wholesale revival of classical forms in Britain. Wedgwood was largely self-educated and relied on others to translate Latin and Greek for him.⁷⁴ But he was fond of French Enlightenment authors and fashionable writers in the English language, especially James Thomson, a Scottish poet whose radical tragedy Agamemnon had done much to invigorate British interest in the ancient theatre, and the poems of his friend Erasmus Darwin.⁷⁵

Once Wedgwood had leased a small cottage with two kilns in 1759, in partnership with his cousin, he began to experiment with ceramic chemistry. Their business began to thrive. He then studied intensively the new art discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as the history of ancient vases.⁷⁶ A letter of October 1767 shows the excitement he had experienced when first looking at images of what he called ‘the Antiquitys’, and the ‘colours of the Earthen vases, the paintings, the substances used by the Ancient Potters, with their methods of working, burning &c’.⁷⁷ A year later, he is personally trying to create ‘two or three sorts of faithfull copys from Etruscan Vases & am quite surpris’d both at the beauty of their forms, & the difficulty of making them’.⁷⁸

Wedgwood’s London shop was opened in 1768, under his partner Bentley’s management, and ‘Etruria’ was built in North Staffordshire. Over the years it hired thousands of workers to produce the medallions, miniature sculptures, vases, and cameos that made the firm so successful. Wedgwood chose the name because, as we have seen, all ancient Greek and Italian vases were often subsumed under the name ‘Etruscan’: the very first six vases manufactured there, on 13 June 1769, bore the motto ‘Artes Etruriae Renascuntur’, ‘The Arts of Etruria are Reborn’. Wedgwood threw these pots while Bentley turned the wheel. The shape and the illustration, depicting three semi-naked Greek heroic male figures, were all drawn from an image in the first volume of Hamilton’s AEGR. The pots were black, 10 inches high, made of basalt and painted in the ‘encaustic’ enamelled manner with red figures then known as the ‘Etruscan’ style.⁷⁹

On employing John Flaxman and John Voyez, a superb modeller of busts, the association of Wedgwood’s name with classical shapes and imagery was consolidated. Another important collaborator was James Tassie (1735–99), a Scottish gem engraver and modeller, born into poverty in Glasgow and apprenticed to a stonemason. He was inspired to change direction after visiting central Glasgow during a fair and seeing the painting collection of the printers Robert and Andrew Foulis, of whom a relation of his own, a Glasgow barber, was a good friend.⁸⁰ Still supporting himself by his masonry work, with the encouragement of a Dublin medallion-maker Tassie developed a method of imitating ancient engraved gems in a hard enamel.⁸¹ This required taking impressions of hundreds of examples in museums and private collections. He became the greatest expert on this category of ancient artefact in Europe,⁸² and specialised in white enamel cameos of classical gods and heroes inspired by ancient artefacts.⁸³ Tassie provided numerous casts for reproduction by Wedgwood from 1769, and they constantly exchanged designs. Independently of each other they both made fine reproductions of the Portland Vase.⁸⁴

Etruria set an example to the pottery industry internationally. Wedgwood based his factory organization on the principle of the division of labour, requiring specialization in each of his workers, and single processes conducted in separate workshops. New types of ceramic product required the mastery of difficult new techniques in cutting, pressing, and casting. The expanding size of the market demanded increases in the volume and variety of goods.⁸⁵ In the enamel works he opened in Greek Street, London, the same system was adopted: designs moved from the painting room to the kiln room, then the account room, and finally the ware room to be stored. His workers were similarly separated:⁸⁶ the ‘fine figure Painters are another ord[e]r of beings’ compared with the common ‘flower painters’, he wrote,⁸⁷ and they were kept separate, better paid, and required to develop their single skill to consummate level: ‘We are preparing some hands to work at red & black [ware] … constantly & then we shall make them good.’⁸⁸ In June 1790, there were 278 men, women, and children employed at Etruria, of whom only five were ‘Odd Men’, general workers of the lowest status assigned to no specific task.⁸⁹

Wedgwood retrained his workers tirelessly, and was proud of his achievement in doing so. After his successful fulfilment of a 1765 commission for creamware from Queen Charlotte,⁹⁰ in 1773 Tsarina Catherine sent him her famous order for a 952-piece dinner service painted with ‘the most embelished views, the most beautiful Landskips, with Gothique Ruins, Grecian Temples, & the most Elegant Buildings’; Wedgwood was worried that many of his workforce would not be up to the task—‘hands who have never attempted anything beyond Huts and Windmills, upon Dutch Tile at three half-pence a doz!’ But, as he wrote to Bentley, if they could ‘succeed in this, tell me no more of your Alexanders, no more of your Prometheus’s neither, for surely it is more to make Artists than mere men’.⁹¹ Both the Macedonian monarch Alexander and the demiurge Prometheus, who had modelled the first humans out of clay, were the subjects of artworks made at Etruria by the very people Wedgwood was determined to make into artists himself. His visionary approach and encyclopaedic knowledge attracted requests for employment, for example from one Jos Mayer:⁹²

ETRURIA, on Accot [sic] of the Proprietor, as well as the delightful, salubrious situation, and beauty of the place, is thereby render’d to me the most eligible … [I would like to work in] a place that derives its beauty, elegance, and granduer [sic], from the embellishments, and decorations of so good a judge, and so great a Connoisseur of the Fine Arts, as Mr Wedgwood is universally and justly allow’d to be.

Despite his obsequiously flowery prose, poor Mayer did not secure a position.

One reason that pottery workers were keen to work for Wedgwood was that he invited them to participate in his vision that they were collectively engineering the renascence of the lost art of classical pottery, to make the Arts of Etruria live once again in Staffordshire. This was in the Enlightenment tradition by which workers in all kinds of trades identified classical ancestors or were compared with classical experts by admirers: the achievements of the late seventeenth-century potter John Dwight were summarized in 1677 by the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford thus:⁹³

In short, he has so advanced the Art Plastic that ‘tis dubious whether any man since Prometheus have [sic] excelled him, not excepting the famous Damophilus and Gorgasus of Pliny (Nat. Hist. lib. xxxv. c. 12).

Potters elsewhere were encouraged to participate in similar flights of fancy. When Samuel Worthington opened his new pottery factory in Toxteth near Liverpool in 1796, he recruited about sixty skilled pottery workers from Staffordshire, and shipped them up by canal to their new homes. He chose to name the factory and the settlement for workers adjacent to it ‘Herculaneum’, in direct imitation of Wedgwood’s ‘Etruria’ and in homage to William Hamilton’s seminal collection.⁹⁴ One of the earliest large commissions he received was for the dinner and dessert services of the Liverpool Corporation for use at the Town Hall, which had the Liverpool coat of arms, complete with resplendent figures of Neptune and Triton, printed on the rim of every item.⁹⁵

The stamp of Bell’s Pottery in Glasgow depicted a classically delineated mounted Amazon. Ransome’s Patent Stone Works in Greenwich had a single trademark—a winged genius grinding an arrow copied from an antique Roman gem.⁹⁶ The principal painter at Dillwyn’s Swansea works was William Young, who used to present himself as an ancient Roman painter by using the signature ‘YOUNG PINXIT’.⁹⁷ Instruction manuals for the novice potter conventionally ask the reader to remember that their art is an ancient one, which ‘originated in the minds of great Assyrian, Persian and Egyptian modellers some 3000 years b.c.’⁹⁸ When it comes to drapery, it is the ancient Greek and Roman sculptors who ‘handed down to posterity the finest draped studies … such as the Venus de Milo’.⁹⁹

Another attraction of employment at Etruria which throws light on the workers’ expertise in ancient culture and art is Wedgwood’s apprenticeship scheme, the plan for which he described in 1773 as ‘a regular drawing, & modeling school to train up Artists for ourselves’. The idea was to ‘pick up some likely boys of about 12 years old & take them apprentice ’till they are twenty or twenty one & set them to drawing’. He dreamed of imitating the proud ancient vase-painters who signed their works and made others in the workshop use their name, too: Exekias, Nikosthenes, Douris.¹⁰⁰ The highly trained apprentices would paint the vases and make Wedgwood and Bentley famous for eternity: ‘The Paintings upon these vases are from W & B school—so it may be s[ai]d 1000 years hence.’¹⁰¹ At first he brought well-known artists to Etruria to work alongside his more lowly employees, but the imported celebrities did not relish his factory regime. Instead he purchased their designs and implemented them personally in his workshops, where discussions of the necessary modifications were made: his workers, for example, were to bestow modest dresses and fig leaves on pagan, naked, and libidinous classical figures to render them acceptable to the consumer base.¹⁰² Wedgwood’s products drew on motifs copied, adapted, mingled, eclectically ‘cut and pasted’ from a vast variety of ancient artefacts—gems, intaglios, ivories, coins, bas-reliefs, frescoes, friezes, statues, sarcophagi as well as vases—and introduced figures copied from medieval, Renaissance or Palladian artefacts and monuments alongside antique ones: occasionally, the source is much more recent, for example female figures of the nymphs decorating the (thoroughly emasculated) statue of Priapus on a pale blue jasperware medallion of the 1780s. While Priapus’ head is copied from an ancient gem, the source for the nymphs is a design by Angelica Kauffman.¹⁰³ Working on the frontline of design for Wedgwood entailed an intensive education in the visual culture of antiquity based on his huge collection of books, manuscripts, drawings, and prints by everyone from the Italian antiquarian Antonio Francesco Gori to Winckelmann and Thomas Dempster, the Aberdonian expert on Etruria.¹⁰⁴

By 1790 he had effected a transformation in the ethos of his labour force that must have fostered a self-conscious professional identity and considerable pride in being the agents responsible for the renaissance of the arts of ancient Etruria. Many of them were female and a quarter of them were now highly skilled former apprentices—‘Wedgwood’s contribution to the tradition of the skilled artisan of the nineteenth century’.¹⁰⁵ He imposed strict rules about punctuality, attendance, cleanliness, tidiness, and abstinence from alcohol. For his occasional absences, he devised a system of delegating authority to a supervisor in each of the workshops, which was in itself an innovation in workplace administration that was to have far-reaching implications in nineteenth-century factories. Some workers were terrified of him; those who openly rebelled were soon silenced or replaced altogether. He smashed any products he deemed sub-standard: a figurine of Achilles proved particularly troublesome, as he wrote to Bentley in 1779: ‘We cannot master Achilles. I have had him demolished … more than once’; ‘I have broke some which were to have been sent to you.’¹⁰⁶ It would be fascinating to know exactly what was wrong with the figurines of Achilles he had smashed. But the narrative suggests intense altercations involving knowledge of both classical aesthetics and ancient mythology.

Another clue to the expertise of his employees lies in the serious problem Etruria faced with industrial espionage and emigration. Spies from rival potteries infiltrated the factory in order to steal plans for new designs; financial incentives attracted his excellent workforce to potteries abroad. In 1773, Wedgwood became so concerned about losses that he published an appeal to his workers, using an argument that implies he knew that they took pride in being part of his whole enterprise and in their unusually high levels of skill: he asks them to remember that emigrants would be ‘ruining a trade, which had taken the united efforts of some thousands of people, for more than an age, to bring to the perfection it has now attained? a perfection nowhere else to be found—an object exciting at once the envy and emulation of all Europe’.¹⁰⁷

His letters contain other indications that he discussed the products with his workers. He enjoyed being closely involved with them, in October 1769 writing: ‘I have been an Etruscan, & dined at the works every day, except Monday, this week. I have been turning models & preparing to make such Machines of the Men as cannot err.’¹⁰⁸ A few weeks later he says that he is spending all his time in the workshops: ‘I now give myself almost entirely to Vasemaking & find myself to improve in that Art & Mysterie very fast.’¹⁰⁹ He is concerned about whether to call them ‘urns’ or vases’, and decides that urns are monumental and need covers but no handles; vases, meanwhile ‘are such as might be used for libations, & other sacrificial, festive & culinary uses, such as Ewers, open vessels &c.’¹¹⁰ He records his impatience waiting for the first ‘Eturscan’ vases he tried to make himself to be brought from the kiln by a replacement fireman, because his usual ‘old fireman is ill’.¹¹¹ He laughs about having to do the job of ‘warehouseman’ at the London shop himself when two of the regular employees were out and Lord Bessborough came in to view the Etruscan vases.¹¹² He is aggravated by a man called Boot, who is supposed to be making terracotta figures of sphinxes, lions, and Tritons, but whose behaviour is regrettably ‘loose and wild’; fortunately Boot later settled down and made the Tritons and sphinxes, at least, ‘very well’.¹¹³ But Wedgwood is delighted with one new employee: ‘I hired an ingenious Boy last night for Etruria as a Modeler. He has modelled at nights in his way for three years past, has never had the least instructions, which circumstances considered he does things amazingly & will be a valuable acquisition.’¹¹⁴ Even in 1769, Wedgwood was still personally putting Etruscan vases in new styles with which he was experimenting ‘into the oven’ himself.¹¹⁵

Diverse routes into the ancient world are exemplified on products from other potteries as well. While in German-speaking lands Ovid was the Latin author universally favoured by pottery manufacturers, scenes from the Aeneid were reproduced in a combination of painting and printing on to plates produced at the Bow Porcelain Factory in London as early as the 1750s; one example in the Victoria and Albert Museum depicts Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius fleeing from Troy, with Creusa sorrowing in the background.¹¹⁶ The heyday of Enoch Wood’s pearlware figurines, which included Neptune with bright green dolphin and trident, a bearded Demosthenes in full oratorical flow, and a colourful, recumbent Antony and Cleopatra two-piece set, ran from around 1785 to 1820. Bell’s Pottery in Glasgow made elegant pitchers depicting three black-figure vases (this design was called ‘Athens’), an Amazonomachy, or Sappho, surrounded by books and ancient Greek ceramics herself.¹¹⁷ The workers at this factory enjoyed their own library, which included books on ancient Greece and Rome;¹¹⁸ it would have been difficult for workers at such a distance from London to visit the British Museum. One rare design from Copeland and Garrett (so between 1833 and 1847, when the firm worked under this name) embellished a dinner service in white, each plate painted with twenty-two replicas of known ancient Greek jugs, vases, and bowls—oinochoe, hydria, pelike, krossos, stamnos, pyxis, krater, and karchesion, whether geometric, black-figure, or red-figure. It resembles nothing more than a page from a textbook on ancient ceramics.

Brightly coloured porcelain ware, from tea services to replica ancient urns and pitchers, were produced at Samuel Alcock’s Burslem works in the mid-nineteenth century, in which ancient Greek figures are picked out in brilliant jewel-like colours against backgrounds of deep blue, turquoise, brown, pink, orange, black, or red, often with a key-pattern border. Favourite scenes are Greeks fighting Amazons, processions of musicians or victorious warriors, hunts, chariot-rides, sacrificial rituals, and weddings complete with fluttering Erotes. In the late nineteenth century, pictorial wall tiles became important after the introduction of cast-iron grates in fireplaces. Beautiful octagonal ‘mosaic’ tiles with classical heads were already produced by Maw & Co. in Shropshire in the early 1860s.¹¹⁹ The series ‘Classical figures with musical instruments’, produced by Minton Ltd (designed by John Moyr Smith) offered the workers involved in their mass production and their consumers an education in ancient Greek furniture and costumes as well as in different types of cithara, drum, cymbal, and aulos.

Pottery workers’ ability to study ancient art formally, rather than by absorbing information from their working lives, was slow to emerge. Public art lessons in the Potteries first became available at the Mechanics' Institute, after the benefits they would bring locally, especially the provision of highly skilled labour, had been identified by in a pamphlet written by the Reverend Benjamin Vale in 1825.¹²⁰ The Potteries Mechanics’ Institute was established eight years later and its first premises were in Frederick St., Shelton. But uptake was slow. The situation improved after Mr Ewart’s 1836 Select Committee of the House of Commons on Art and Manufacturers drew attention to the need for instruction in art amongst the working class.¹²¹ Such instruction was only available from private masters, who generally taught the children of the wealthy in their homes. The Government School of Design was then established at Somerset House in London under the Board of Trade, but similar schools were also established in industrial centres such as Manchester, York, Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Glasgow, and Norwich.

The workers in the Potteries themselves then began to agitate for a local school of design, and in 1845 the Hanley Mechanics' Institute applied to the Somerset House authorities for assistance. They responded by sending John Murdoch down from London to set up branch schools in both Hanley and Stoke.¹²² The schools were managed by a committee of master potters and businessmen, with Herbert Minton acting as treasurer. A series of lectures delivered there by Edward Villiers Rippingille (1798–1859), an art journalist and watercolourist, did much to stimulate public interest in this educational development. But when John Robinson, who had trained in Nottingham, replaced Murdoch, the workers were not impressed with his plan to deliver a set of freestanding theoretical lectures with the highbrow title ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Ornamental Art’ at the Mechanics' Institute in 1851. This particular initiative was abandoned after the first one because of the low turnout.¹²³

But working-class art education in practical skills had the potential to grow. The first art classes in Longton were begun in 1852 at the Athenaeum and Mechanics’ Institution, and the Burslem School of Design in 1853–58, in the Burslem Wesleyan Schoolroom.¹²⁴ Extremely popular and affordable practical classes (forty-three takers and many more turned away) were briefly given in a local inn in the evenings so the workers could attend them, in drawing, landscape, and perspective as well as figurative and ornamental design.¹²⁵ But once again, the initiative failed. The failure was blamed on the insalubrious venue and the failure of bosses, workers, and the art experts brought in to teach them to agree on the purpose of the classes:¹²⁶

… the manufacturers looked upon the working man as a sort of machine to produce marketable patterns, and the working man considered that by going to school a number of quarters, he should obtain the power of designing which would enable him to increase his wages; but a school of design had nothing to do with patterns, but was intended to make everybody recognise the great principle … of adding beauty to utility.

Nevertheless, the Minton Memorial Institute in Stoke, opened in 1858, included a museum to illustrate the history of pottery, a free library, and a studio for teaching art.¹²⁷ Fenton followed in 1889 with Fenton Art School in the Athenaeum (which had failed miserably as a Literary Institution),¹²⁸ and in 1899 the Sutherland Institute opened at Longton.

Yet the most important art education establishment to be founded was surely the Wedgwood Institute itself, which was opened along with its free library and school after its construction was completed in 1869; its foundation stone had been laid by William Ewart Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1863. It was a response to the continuing need for a Burslem School of Design as well as for a memorial to Josiah Wedgwood. Arnold Bennett himself was to study there in 1885. The architectural designs, by George Benjamin Nichols of West Bromwich, were chosen by competition, but the actual decorations were by Robert Edgar and John Lockwood Kipling (father of the famous author Rudyard). Kipling had risen from being a modeller at Hope’s Factory, Fountain Square, Burlsem (and we have met him earlier as the voice decrying the failure of the earlier Burslem art classes). His life had been transformed by winning a National Scholarship to South Kensington and experience in India as Curator of the Central Museum, Lahore. The modellers of the decorations were also upwardly mobile Burslem men.¹²⁹ There are twelve ‘zodiac panels’ with female personifications of the months, imitating draped figures on the Parthenon frieze. But there are also two sets of ‘process’ panels, with animated working figures depicting all the various processes of pottery manufacture, described in an article the designers published in 1864.¹³⁰

Could pottery workers ever afford to buy the goods they created? In the case of the Cambrian Pottery in Swansea, there is evidence that they were permitted to take home ‘seconds’ rather than having to watch them being smashed. Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, the Swansea industrialist responsible for a famous line of inexpensive ceramics imitating ancient Greek models, produced in his factory, the Cambrian Pottery, in the mid-nineteenth century.¹³¹ At the time he employed no fewer than 162 workers, including at least sixteen women. Using moulds, the potters and painters produced pottery in most of the canonical Greek shapes and decorated them with figures from Greek mythology including Odysseus, Amazons, Poseidon, Eros, Hector, Zeus, Hera, and Helios driving his horses.¹³²

Dillwyn had joined the management of his father’s company in 1831. His wife Bessie created the designs after studying vases in the British Museum. Their ambition was to fuse ancient designs with the local clay of the family estate at Penllergaer near Swansea, which, when fired, produced a fine red colour similar to the terracotta hue of ancient black- and red-figure vases. The pots were not only made by members of the local working class, but also aimed at a much less wealthy class of consumer than, for example, Wedgwood pottery: Dillwyn ware was far cheaper to produce, because it was moulded rather than thrown on a wheel. An advertisement in Art Journal claimed the pots ‘promise much towards carrying into the more humble homesteads of England forms of beauty in combination with useful ends, and in placing in the hands of all, ornaments of a high character at a cheap rate’. In fact, they cost between 2 shillings and 3 shillings and sixpence—just about affordable as an occasional luxury even by the local miners, who earned around £50 annually. The brand soon failed. Perhaps no miner could see the point. People who could afford porcelain assumed that cases made from ‘flower-pot’ clay would be coarse and rustic; others were suspicious of merchandise which looked so refined yet was available at such an affordable price. But Dillwyn ware continued and continues to be viewed in museums from Swansea to Bethnal Green.¹³³

Finally, from the early nineteenth century onwards, pedlars selling inexpensive miniature plaster reproductions of famous busts and statues become a common sight on the streets of British cities, especially near museums and galleries. Better-quality plaster figures had been available for decades at London shops, including the one run by John Flaxman’s father (also named John) at the sign of the Golden Head, New Street, Covent Garden, London.¹³⁴ A broadside catalogue of around 1803 advertising the ‘FIGURES BUSTS &c. IN PLASTER OF PARIS’ available at Robert Shout’s store in High Holborn lists more than three hundred items, a large proportion of which are classical.¹³⁵ But street pedlars brought the products to a wider public; from towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this business was dominated by Italian immigrants. Gangs of beggar boys would be recruited from the province of Lucca in Tuscany by adult figure-makers, who would take them all over northern Europe to make and vend their wares.¹³⁶ The youth working on London streets depicted in John Smith of Covent Garden’s lively etching ‘Very Fine. Very Cheap’ (1815) is therefore, most likely, Italian.¹³⁷

The voices of people who worked in potteries across the British Isles, including in Ireland, during the heyday of the taste for classically themed ceramics, are almost silent to us. Compared with, for example, miners and weavers, pottery workers seem rarely to have penned memoirs or diaries, and very few have survived until the early twentieth century. But other sources, if read and viewed and thought about with care, cumulatively build up a picture of skilled workers familiar with a large variety of ancient artefacts and with books visually reproducing and discussing them. At least in the Etruria and Herculaneum factories, pottery workers were encouraged to see themselves as participants in the rebirth of the ancient Mediterranean ceramic arts; they were trained in painstaking reproduction of details not only from ancient vases but from ancient gems, intaglios, ivories, coins, bas-reliefs, frescoes, friezes, statues, and sarcophagi. They were familiar with the stories of a substantial number of ancient mythical and historical figures, and the different aesthetic conventions of classical Athenian, Hellenistic, and Roman art. Some of them were able to study ancient art in their free time at institutions of adult education, and had access to well-stocked workers’ libraries. A few may even have taken home a few products to use at home, or purchased an inexpensive Dillwyn plate or a plaster reproduction Farnese Hercules from a street pedlar in Holborn. Recovering the history of intellectual, artistic, and cultural encounters experienced by historically silent communities and individuals is methodologically challenging, but that does not mean we should avoid attempting it altogether. Pottery workers, like all the other working-class people who were systematically excluded from most educational opportunities until the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 deserve honoured places in the gallery of People’s Classics simply because their access to the ancient world was by an unconventional route and their knowledge often won at a heavy price. But they also offer us an important new community to include in a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.

Footnotes

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