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Maybe someday
25
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
15/100Critics
35/100Scholars
Author:
Tristram Hunt
Publisher:
Metropolitan Books
Date:
October 26, 2021
From the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, a biography of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated eighteenth-century potter, entrepreneur, and abolitionist.
What The Reviewers Say
[Hunt's] focus is the man and his times, in a book that, with its yellowed maps and extensive quotations from ye olde correspondence, is both utterly transporting and extremely cozy.
... engrossing.
Almost everything you need to know about the heroic age of Britain’s Industrial Revolution – its energy, hypocrisies, almost unstoppable curiosity and inventiveness – is neatly parcelled in the life of the one-legged Nonconformist potter who built an international industry from the clay and coal of Staffordshire.
If there was a dark side to Wedgwood, you won’t find it in Hunt’s book. He was certainly a tough competitor with his business rivals, and he sometimes had to muddy his hands in the corrupt politics of his day. Nor was he above playing on snobbery and class, gaining prestige for his wares by placing them in aristocratic and royal homes before selling them to wider markets. But he can hardly be blamed for pulling such levers as were available to him in the social machinery of the time.
