A way with clay

Most cultural tourists, apart from the Japanese, skirt the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent.  They are wrong. The bottle kilns have tumbled and the smoke-ridden skylines are no more. Yet museums teem with quality. And remaining pottery firms disclose glimpses of the design and craftsmanship admired throughout the city’s history.

The founding father of Stoke’s global pre-eminence was Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the most talented all-rounder among British industrial revolutionaries. His achievements are the subject of A.N. Wilson’s latest novel, The Potter’s Hand. It closes with Wedgwood’s death.

Nearly 30 years ago Wilson completed a biography of Hilaire Belloc, an even more prolific writer than he himself. He explained that towards the end of the bellyacher’s life a friend enquired whether his best books were written for love or money? ‘Always money,’ rasped Belloc. This novel of Wilson’s was conceived through love, even passion. His father was managing director of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons when Wilson was a child. He began the book on hearing about the threatened demise of the Wedgwood Museum.

Perhaps it might have been easier for Wilson to place history before art by writing another biography of Wedgwood on the heels of Brian Dolan’s Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment, published eight years ago? Wisely, he avoided the temptation, as well as curbing several colossi of the age from overshadowing the narrative of his novel. They are mostly given cameo roles.

Thomas Paine, corset-maker and half-cocked revolutionary, huffs in Philadelphia. George Stubbs, the brilliant sporting artist, botches a portrait of humans. John Wesley is dismissed by the Unitarian Wedgwood as a windbag and inciter of collective hysteria. And even the Lunar and Royal Societies, where the master potter beguiled a galaxy of fellow members, receive just passing salutes.

Instead, the novel spotlights the everyday tales and relationships of a close-knit group of pottery folk performing extraordinary deeds.