Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ 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:

      Wo^d 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.*

Wedgwood understood the benefits of publicity in all its varied forms. His most tried and trusted method was to get nobility (if royalty were not available) to promote his wares for him. In 1776 he had some new bas-relief vases to sell. He fired off yet another missive to Bentley: ‘Sir William Hambleton,* our very good Friend is in Town—Suppose you shew him some of the Vases, & a few other Connoisieurs not only to have their advice, but to have the advantage of their puffing them off against the next Spring, as they will, by being consulted, and flatter’d agreeably, as you know how, consider themselves as a sort of parties in the affair, & act accordingly.’⁵⁷ To make sure of success, before the vases went on sale Wedgwood and Bentley had private viewings for Mrs Chetwynd (their conduit to Queen Charlotte), the dukes of Northumberland and Marlborough, the earls of Stamford and Dartmouth, Lords Bessborough, Percy, Clanbrazil, Carlisle and Torrington, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and, by comparison, the rather humble-sounding MP Mr Harbord Harbord (who was, however, later to become the 1st Baron Suffield).⁵⁸

‘Fashion,’ as Wedgwood recognized, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects…It is plain from a thousand instances that if you have a favourite child you wish the public to fondle & take notice of, you have only to make a choice of proper sponcers. If you are lucky in them no matter what the brat is, black, brown or fair, its fortune is made.’⁵⁹ And with his ‘sponcers’ Wedgwood started at the top, believing that the greatest in the land would influence the lesser: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile ‘till authoris’d by their betters—by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’⁶⁰ Queen Charlotte had started him on his way with Queensware; after a queen, who but an empress? In 1770 Catherine the Great had commissioned a Queensware service decorated with wheat husks. Three years later came a greater challenge: she wanted a service for state occasions: a 680-piece dinner service and a 264-piece dessert service, plus tureens, salvers, fruit baskets, ‘glaciers’ (ice-cream bowls) etc. to accompany them.† Each piece was to have on it an image of an actual country house, or a park or garden, or a palace, or even industrial ‘sights’ such as the Plymouth docks or the Bridgewater Canal. The cost was fantastic—not for the manufacture, but for an artist to be sent around the country to make drawings, and then for the 1,200 drawings to be worked up so they could be transferred to the dishes. But Wedgwood was a born publicist, and he had planned a coup de théâtre—he would show the entire service before it was shipped off to Russia, and, whatever he had lost on the manufacture, ‘it would bring an immense number of people of fashion into our Rooms—would fully complete our notoriety to the whole Island, & help us greatly, no doubt, in the sale of our goods, both useful & ornamental. It would confirm the consequence we have attain’d, & increase it, by showing that we are employ’d in a much higher scale than other Manufacturers.’⁶¹ His one anxiety was that some of his noble patrons would be offended that their houses were not included, or were put ‘upon a small piece, or not flattering it sufficiently’. To make the event even more exclusive, admission to the showroom would be by ticket. It was all a great success, with the King and Queen of Sweden paying a special visit, as well as Queen Charlotte, Prince Ernst of Mecklenberg, and hordes of the aristocracy. No one was aggrieved to find their great houses represented on some of the smaller dishes; on the contrary they came time and again to point their lasting fame out to friends.⁶²

      The difference between Wedgwood and earlier craftsmen who had relied on the nobility and gentry for their livings was that, as far as Wedgwood and Bentley were concerned, the nobility were a means to an end:

      The Great People have had these Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the Middling Class of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior, in number to the great, and though a great price was, I believe, at first necessary to make the vases esteemed Ornament for Palaces, that reason no longer exists. Their character is established and the middling People would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced СКАЧАТЬ