When tea became fashionable, in the early eighteenth century, it naturally became necessary to have the right accoutrements to brew it in and from which to drink it. We have seen that as late as the 1690s hot-drink utensils were rarely to be found domestically, while by 1725 most prosperous households had some.50 In the early part of the century porcelain had been imported from China, before local production stepped in to capture the market with equipment better suited to British rather than Chinese tea-drinking habits. In China, tea was brewed in a kettle, then cooled before drinking; in Britain, it was brewed in a teapot and poured out while still hot. Therefore the British teapot shape was adapted not from a Chinese tea kettle, but from a wine flask, with a handle added so that the tea could be poured before it was cooled; equally, handles on cups were useful for hot tea.51 Further, the British drank their tea sweetened, and with milk, so both a sugar bowl and a milk jug needed to be designed, along with a new size of spoon—the teaspoon—and a saucer on which to place the wet spoon, creating by the eighteenth century a British tea set that was considerably different from its Chinese ancestor.
Many manufacturers rushed to fill the void. In 1757 James Watt, soon to be known as the inventor of the steam engine, was working as ‘Mathematical Instrument Maker to the University’ in Glasgow. Despite living a fairly straitened life, he wrote to his father asking him to send ‘1/2 Doz afternoon China tea cups a stone teapot not too small a sugar Box & Slop Bowl as soon as possible’.52 The use of such precise terms is fascinating—a relatively poor man, Watt still specified ‘afternoon’ cups, as distinct, one assumes, from breakfast china, and a stoneware teapot, not an earthenware or porcelain one; also, the sugar and slop bowls* were not to be omitted. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Josiah Wedgwood had such an immediate success when he produced his Queensware in 1765.†
It is almost impossible for us to realize today what a sensation china was when it first appeared. Before the eighteenth century, the rich in
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Britain used silver and pewter; moderately prosperous households used pewter or, sometimes, early forms of earthenware; the poor used wood. European porcelain factories were set up under royal patronage after the secret of hard-paste porcelain was discovered by Meissen in 1709. The hard-paste porcelain from China, however, remained highly prized. The Dutch, who at that time held the monopoly on trade with the Chinese, sent drawings of their pewter and stoneware utensils for the Chinese to copy in porcelain: in this way the goods that arrived in Europe were at once startlingly new in material and reassuringly familiar in shape. A few factories began to produce soft-paste porcelain in Britain—Bow, Derby, Pomona, and Longton Hall in Staffordshire—but the cost of production was staggering: before any work could be carried out, for example, the clay had to be weathered for nearly three years. Without a beneficent monarch to pay the bills, these works had little chance of survival: Longton Hall was bankrupt by 1760, Bow in 1763.54
While this was bad news for porcelain manufacturers, it opened up the earthenware market to the manufacturer with an eye to the market. No one would have picked Josiah Wedgwood as that man of destiny at his birth: the twelfth child of a cadet branch of a family of potters in Burslem,* he started in the general trade, as one of dozens of earthenware potters selling to the local retailers at the cheap end of the market. Earthenware was porous, and chipped and broke easily; stoneware, fired at higher temperatures, was a slightly better product, having a shiny, non-porous surface, but it was still fragile. By the 1760s, however, Wedgwood had produced his first technical breakthrough, which moved him from a local to a national market: creamware, an earthenware that could withstand sudden temperature changes without shattering, had a richly glazed surface, and was still relatively inexpensive. It also had a purer colour than had ever been achieved except with porcelain, and its worth was quickly recognized: in 1765 Queen Charlotte ordered a creamware tea set from him. The technical breakthrough was essential, and through his life Wedgwood continued to work at new methods and processes. Even when he was not the inventor himself, he always recognized important advances and quickly made use of them. In 1750 a mezzotint engraver had developed a way of using transfer printing on earthenware, to decorate it to look like hand-painted porcelain. Wedgwood swooped, and soon creamware was carrying black, rust or purple images of flowers, birds, garlands, genre scenes, classical groups, even Masonic emblems and designs to commemorate people and events—the King and Queen, Frederick the Great, Pitt, Wesley and John Wilkes were all immortalized in earthenware.
These advances would have occurred sooner or later, with or without Wedgwood; it was how he parlayed his successes into an empire that marked out Wedgwood—and his unfairly overlooked partner Thomas Bentley—as unique. Wedgwood saw the route ahead the minute the royal tea set had been ordered. He immediately renamed his creamware Queensware, and asked for the right to call himself ‘Potter to Her Majesty’. He wrote to Bentley:
The demand for this said Creamcolour, Alias Queen’s Ware, Alias Ivory, still increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread allmost† over the whole Globe, how universally it is liked. How much of this general use, & estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction—& how much to its real utility and beauty? are questions in which we may be a good deal interested for the government of our future Conduct…For instance, if a Royal, or Noble introduction be as necessary for the sale of an Article of Luxury, as real Elegance & beauty, then the Manufacturer, if he consults his own interest will bestow as much pains, & expence too, if necessary, in gaining the former of these advantages, as he would in bestowing the latter.55
In 1770 Wedgwood wrote, as always, to Bentley:
Wod you advertise the next season as the silk mercers in Pell mell do,—Or deliver cards at the houses of the Nobility & Gentry, & in the City,—Get leave to make a shew of his Majesty’s Service for a month, & ornament the Dessert with Ornamental Ewers, flower baskets & Vases—Or have an Auction at Cobbs room of Statues, Bassreliefs, Pictures, Tripods, Candelabrias, Lamps, Potpouris, Superb Ewers, Cisterns, Tablets Etruscan, Porphirys & other Articles not yet expos’d to sale. Make a great route of advertising this Auction, & at the same time mention our rooms in Newport St—& have another Auction in the full season at Bath of such things as we now have on hand, just sprinkled over with a few new articles to give them an air of novelty to any of our customers who may see them there,—Or will you trust to a new disposition of the Rooms with the new articles we shall have to put into them & a few modest puffs in the Papers from some of our friends such as I am told there has been one lately in Lloyd’s Chronicle.56
Barely pausing for breath, he had suggested in just a few lines many of the major new selling techniques of the century: advertising in the press—by paid advertisements, by auction announcements and by getting friends to insert ‘puff ‘ pieces; delivering trade cards to customers and potential customers; various forms of exhibition—by displaying a service he had made for the King, with its concommitant ‘royal’ publicity, and more conventionally by auction and in his showrooms; highlighting new goods to attract the fashionable; and redesigning his showrooms, again to attract the fashionable by novelty. And this is a single letter from the hundreds that poured out over the decades.*