Wedgwood sold taste with science-tuned clay bodies
Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) founded his pottery firm in 1759, experimenting systematically to improve ceramic bodies. Classical mania of the late 1760s–70s powered sales to elites while cheaper lines taught middle classes to emulate them—and he backed abolition.
Josiah Wedgwood was baptised on 12 July 1730 into a family of potters in Burslem, then the main centre of the Staffordshire Potteries, where a relative had set up the Churchyard Works. His mother raised him to prize knowledge from reason and experiment over dogma. After his father's death in 1739 he learned to throw pots, but smallpox before he turned twelve damaged his right knee, and when the pain returned he switched to moulded ware and small ornaments. He was formally apprenticed to his eldest brother Thomas in November 1744.
In partnership with Thomas Whieldon, a maker of snuff boxes and similar small luxuries, he spent six months developing a brilliant green glaze that sold at once. He expanded into the Ivy House Works in Burslem around 1759, the year he founded his own firm, and in 1764 married his distant cousin Sarah after long haggling over the settlement. A 1762 knee injury led him to Thomas Bentley, later his partner, and to the chemist Joseph Priestley, and canal negotiations brought him the friendship of Erasmus Darwin.
By 1763 Queen Charlotte was a customer, and he persuaded her to let him call her service Queen's Ware. He perfected a black stoneware he named basalt, imitating the Greek and Etruscan vases being dug up in Italy, and in June 1769 opened his Etruria Works beside the canal. Green glaze, creamware, basalt, and jasperware were all copied quickly. He made no porcelain, favouring cheaper fine earthenware and stoneware, used transfer printing to mimic hand painting, and is credited with early direct mail, money-back guarantees, free delivery, and illustrated catalogues, backed by London showrooms from 1765.
A Unitarian, he lectured on chemistry at Warrington Academy and campaigned against slavery, producing the "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" medallion for the society fighting the slave trade. His daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin and became Charles Darwin's mother, and his son Josiah II fathered Emma, whom Charles married; another son, Thomas, was a pioneer of photography. Wedgwood died on 3 January 1795.
Source: Josiah Wedgwood
