The Potter's Hand E-Book

A.N. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 746

Beschreibung

LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION. In 1774, Josiah Wedgwood, master craftsman possessed with a burning scientific vision, embarks upon the thousand piece Frog Service for Catherine the Great. Josiah's nephew Tom journeys to America to buy clay from the Cherokee for this exquisite china. Tom is caught up in the American rebellion, and falls for a Cherokee woman who will come to play a crucial role in Josiah's late, great creation: the Portland Vase. As the family fortune is made, and Josiah's entrepreneurial brilliance creates an empire that will endure for generations, it is his daughter Sukey, future mother of Charles Darwin, who bears clear-eyed witness. A novel of epic scope, rich in warmth, intellect and humanity, The Potter's Hand explores the lives and loves of one of Britain's greatest families, whose travails are both ordinary - births, deaths, marriages, opium addiction, depression - and utterly extraordinary.

Leseprobe

THE POTTER’S HAND

ALSO BY A. N. WILSON

Fiction

The Sweets of Pimlico

Unguarded Hours

Kindly Light

The Healing Art

Who Was Oswald Fish?

Wise Virgin

Scandal: Or, Priscilla’s Kindness

Gentlemen in England

Love Unknown

Stray

The Vicar of Sorrows

Dream Children

My Name Is Legion

A Jealous Ghost

Winnie and Wolf

Lampitt Chronicles

Incline Our Hearts

A Bottle in the Smoke

Daughters of Albion

Hearing Voices

A Watch in the Night

Non-Fiction

The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott

A Life of John Milton

Hilaire Belloc: A Biography

How Can We Know?

Landscape in France

Tolstoy

Penfriends from Porlock: Essays And Reviews, 1977–1986

Eminent Victorians

C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith And Doubt in Western Civilization

The Victorians

Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her

London: A Short History

After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

Betjeman: A Life

Our Times

Dante in Love

The Elizabethans

Hitler: A Short Biography

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2012

The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-951-5 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-952-2 E-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-916-3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

The Men that invent new Trades, Arts or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may be properly called Fathers of their Nation

~Benjamin Franklin

Contents

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

INTERLUDE: AN EARLY ATTEMPT AT PHOTOGRAPHY – 1803

PART TWO

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

INTERLUDE: A BURIAL IN TRAFALGAR YEAR

PART THREE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

LAST

AFTERWORD

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

PART ONE

The Frog Service

1

THE UNOILED HINGE JOINED ITS MELANCHOLY WHINE TO the opium-dosed whimper of the patient who sat gagged in his chair, and to the swift rasping of the saw. The door creaked ajar in the very moment that the doctor sawed off the leg of Sukey’s Pa.

—B-b-best done fast, Dr Darwin was saying, and whether Mr Bent, who performed the operation, was following advice, or moving fast by instinct, to get the whole cruel necessity over as quickly as possible, who was to say? Certainly not a child aged two, who saw it through the crack in the door: the saw going through flesh and bone, the blood splashing.

No one had intended the child to be within earshot, or sight, of the gruesome event. But the Brick House was not especially large. When the child was born, her mother’s screams could be heard not only in every corner of the house, but in every house for yards around in Burslem, that undulating little village. Indeed, all the thirty hands in the adjoining works had heard her hollering. But today, when the Master was to undergo his ‘execution’, as it had been termed by Heffie Bowers, the hands were quiet, going about their business in a subdued mood, speaking in hushed voices, as if a death had occurred. As well it might. Most died from the pain and the shock of amputation, which is why, both doctors said, it could not be done fast enough. Heffie said that when one of her uncles, who went for a soldier, had his arm off, he’d passed out just at the sight of the saw. Rusty. It wunna clane, lahk, and looked as if the blood of other executions still clung to it.

You’d hope better from Mr Bent, of course. He was the best surgeon in the district, and rode over from Newcastle-under-Lyme to administer potions to the hands. Bent had delivered all three of Mrs Wedgwood’s children.

Richard, the baby, was scarcely a year old on the day of the execution, and himself sickly that day. John, almost always known as Jack, was a puling twenty months. It was the knowing little Sukey who was at large, in the next room. Sally, her mother, had assumed that Heffie was minding her. Baby Richard was screaming, it was only colic, Heffie was sure, and he had woken Jack, who was letting out his usual roars, and Annie the nursery maid was unable to quiet either of them. Such a commotion was the last thing that either Mr Bent or Mr Jos would want at that moment, and Heffie had gone upstairs to loll and lah and rock the little ones.

So Sukey was alone in the little panelled eating-room. In the adjoining parlour, with its pretty apple-green panels, the patient sat, without his breeches, in a chair covered with Turkish towels. His wife, Sally, held one of his hands, and Dr Darwin stood with a hand on one of his shoulders. Mr Bentley was there too, Josiah’s friend and business partner.

—Oh, Jos, said his wife.

—Do you feel the effects of the laudanum, sir? Mr Bent had enquired. There was a quaver in his voice as he had produced the fret-saw from its case.

—What must be done, must be done, said Josiah Wedgwood.

The evenness with which he spoke, the absence of slurring, demonstrated to his horrified hearers that he was still conscious.

—Perhaps w-w-we should wait a few more minutes, s-s-sir, for the narcotics to take effect, stammered Dr Darwin, whose large fleshy hand stopped kneading the patient’s shoulder and reached out for Sal’s hand.

It was then, with the whine of the unoiled hinge, that the door had swung open a few inches. It was easily wide enough for Sukey to view the spectacle. Afterwards, it became part of the family legend that she had spied on the execution. She ‘remembered’ the story, but whether she remembered the event was a matter about which she would change her mind in the course of the next forty-nine years. Was memory something which was carried about in one’s brain, or did the brain, so to say, retain the capacity to repeat stories to itself, supplying images and incidents which fluctuated and altered with the perspective of time? Their friend Coleridge would write about images on the surface of a stream passing away when a stone was scattered, and then re-forming – though not in his mind.

Mr Bent had lifted the linen sheet in which he had wrapped his patient. When Dr Darwin, partly with an involuntary pleasantry, partly in deadly earnest, spoke, he did so for both the Wedgwoods.

—Remember to c-c-cut off the right leg, I entreat, he said.

Darwin wedged the gag into his patient’s mouth. There reaches a point where the surgeon’s task is inseparable from the torturer’s, which is why the faint-hearted should never enter the medical profession. Her husband squeezed Sally’s hand so tightly that she thought he would crunch her bones. The saw began its work. The first thing to happen was a fountain of blood, spattering all the towelling which had been laid in circles round the chair as well as the clothes of those who stood by. With each motion of the saw, with its dreadful butcher’s-shop scrapings, Wedgwood flinched and shook his upper body.

—If you were able, sir, to remain stiller, said Mr Bent.

The scrunching changed to a slithering, as when the chump chops have been placed on the butcher’s board, and he has turned to slice steaks. All the colour from Josiah Wedgwood’s normally rosy face had vanished. He inhaled deeply through his nose, and then out through his mouth, several times, but no further whimper, no cry came from him.

—It is done, sir. And now I must dress the wound.

—It were clumsier than the way our Caleb ud darn a sock, not that ah’d let ’im loose wi’ me needles!

So Heffie had declared, when she had helped to dress the wounds in after days. And, however clumsy the needlework, during all this, the stitching and the swabbing, Wedgwood was unable to remain silent. The first stabbing of the darning needle made him yelp. Darwin held out a small phial of laudanum to the patient’s lips. When he had swallowed some more of the narcotic drops, Wedgwood let out the little yowl which a dog might emit while he thrashed, and then he slumped. This was the moment, as Mr Bent would later confess, when a patient often dies, either through loss of blood or through sheer pain.

Sukey, a thin little fairy with wavy mouse-blonde hair and a long face un-childlike in its attentive stare, its pallor, its obliquity, looked at the participants in the drama: Mr Bent, swabbing and dabbing; her mother being comforted by the gargantuan, stammering figure of Dr Darwin; and the remarkable person who sat in the chair minus his right leg, her father, Josiah Wedgwood, Master Potter.

One day, far in the future, when her father was dead, Sukey would marry the son of Dr Darwin. Her child, the grandchild of Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, would be Charles Darwin, whose theories about the Origin of Species by Natural Selection would revolutionize the world. From the loins of Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin would spring a great intellectual dynasty. From thence came Tom Wedgwood, Josiah’s son, who was the pioneer of photography; Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music captured the English soul; Veronica Wedgwood, whose histories of the Civil Wars evoked the English past; Gwen Raverat the engraver; and dozens of others. But at present, as the little girl Sukey watched them patch up the stump of her father’s leg, it was 1768. Across the seas, the Massachusetts Assembly was dissolved for refusing to assist in the collection of taxes. Louis XV had just completed the building of Le Petit Trianon at Versailles for his mistress Madame de Pompadour. The author of Tristram Shandy had just died in London. His body would be snatched from its grave and appear a few days later on a slab in the Cambridge dissecting room of Charles Collignon. One of the students standing by was a parishioner of Sterne’s and passed out at viewing the corpse of ‘Parson Yorick’. Such are the strange quirks which occur in real life, but which we dare not introduce into fiction. It was not Josiah Wedgwood who would die at this date. He had other works to do. It was Richard Wedgwood, the baby whose cries could be heard while his father’s leg was removed, who died five days after the amputation.

2

AND NOW, SEVEN YEARS HAVE PASSED AND WHAT SWISS goose supplied the feather which is now being clutched by a secretary in a wig, as he sits at a small table in the Château de Ferney hard by Lake Geneva?

Beyond the long window, overlooking the back of the château, is framed a view of formal gardens and, beyond the low box hedges, there are the Alps. And in obedience to his master’s voice, the secretary scratches the words across the page. The wet ink shines on the quill’s tip, as, hopping from one leg, at the other end of the bedchamber, a very old, very thin man gets dressed. He smells, the old man. He smells partly of urine, and partly of that decayed old-man smell which almost all ancient people have when they emerge from a night’s sleep.

François-Marie Arouet skips gently, thrusting the withered hams into his breeks. François-Marie has been left behind in sleep. It is once again Voltaire who arises, Voltaire whose words echo across the world, threatening thrones and altars, but above all altars. From this Swiss château the famous playwright has become the voice of dissent everywhere. From this new-built famous spot, he has vowed to wipe out the Infamy – the Infamous Superstitions of the Roman Church, the Infamous Privilege of the Old Order – and to replace it with Reason, with Reasonableness, with Light.

His playful spaniel larks about as the great man balances on one leg and inserts one skinny calf into his breeches, his nightshirt rides up his scrawny shank, and his nightcap, a forlorn mitre, droops on his head. He is now over eighty. His cheeks are quite hollow. His nose and chin are sharp as a corpse’s. His eyes luminesce, coruscate, with irrepressible glee, for he senses the world going his way.

As the philosopher-playwright paused, stocking in hand, his little dog grabbed the sock and nearly pulled him over. Voltaire shook the garment.

—Let go! Yeki, let go!

He named the spaniel bitch Yeki after Yekaterina, the great Empress of Russia, for they lived in times when the hierarchies of things were reversed. Though he could be a courtier with the best of them, and lard the enlightened despots – Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia – with compliments to their learning, their foresight, their musicality, and in the case of the substantial German ruler of Russia, their sexual allure, both sides in these courtly friendship-games knew who was the master. Frederick and Catherine, perhaps alone among the European potentates, were intelligent enough to understand the inexorable march of change.

—Yeki, I say, let go!

The dog pulled vigorously on the well-made stockings, but the old man’s grip was tighter than a spaniel’s jaw, and he pulled the sock, moist with dribble, out of the animal’s mouth. He sat down again on his bed to pull on the stockings.

—Should we write to Mr Franklin? he mused aloud to the secretary. He is in Paris, and wrote to us yesterday. It would be good to hear at first hand.

Voltaire shrugged, smiling to himself. Franklin was a coarse fellow, but a brilliant one. Not only was he tapping, with his experiments in Natural Philosophy, the very forces of Nature itself – tapping the electrical power of lightning, even – but he also, this Boston tallow-chandler, was alive to the no less explosive convulsions which prepared themselves to ignite the world. His ‘Edict of the King of Prussia’ a few years back had been enjoyed by Frederick himself as well as by Voltaire. In the Edict, Frederick had imposed taxes on the inhabitants of England because they were a colony, so to say, settled long ago by Angles, Saxons and Jutes from old Germany. All the arguments deployed by the King in Franklin’s satirical pamphlet were the ones used by Lord North’s ludicrous Ministry in London to impose taxes upon their colonists in America. And now Franklin had himself been in London, and in Paris, arguing the colonists’ case. It would have been good to discuss these matters with him. Voltaire was an Anglophile and the dispute between the thirteen colonies and the old country was a distress to him. But there could be no doubts about where justice lay. The English would win the battles in the short term. It was said that the Virginians had sent a ship to France to buy ammunition, but what could untrained farmers from America do against the thousands of German mercenaries at King George’s disposal? The English would send their redcoats to put down any insurrection which the Americans might offer. The colonists would, Voltaire had little doubt, submit. But it was ideas, the idea of Liberty, the idea of an independent republic without kings, that would ultimately prevail.

So, to whom should the next letter of the morning be written? Letters had been flooding in to express sympathy upon the illness of his beloved niece Madame Denis. The ancient cynical face creased with contempt as he read them. These bloodhounds wanted him, by one hint or phrase, to admit in writing what everyone knew, that this woman, his niece, was also his lover. Since ‘everyone’ knew it, why should he bother either to confess to it, or to deny? God knew the truth.

With his breeks, breeches and stockings on, Voltaire now padded to the window. It was a beautiful March day in this year of 1775. He could see the new church which he had recently had built – with its Latin inscription in its porch: DEO EREXIT VOLTAIRE. ‘Voltaire built this for God’. Was it an act of piety, or was it like his letters to King Frederick and the Empress Catherine – a polite reminder to an old potentate that they both knew now who truly was the Master? His correspondence, and all his sycophantically expressed courtship of Frederick and Catherine, were elegantly disguised instructions: that if monarchy was to survive, it could do so only on Voltaire’s enlightened terms. God too had been served notice. If He were a mere hypothesis, and explanation for how things be – well and good. If He were the First Cause of Mr Franklin’s electricity, then the First Cause could rest secure, with Voltaire’s blessing, untroubled by His creation. He could sit back, having set in motion the intricate machine of the universe, and allow the more intelligent men and women of Europe and America to set it into some kind of reasonable order. But if God thought He could come back with all the mummery of the Middle Ages and all the power over human minds of the Inquisition, then He must think again!

Unable to think, for the moment, of anything further he had to say to his Creator, Voltaire said to the secretary,

—Let us write to the Empress of Russia.

Madame, vous avez posé une question à l’ancien malade de Ferney au sujet des Anglais, toujours un sujet—

Madam, you have put a question about the English to the old sick man of Ferney—

—Let me see her last letter, said Voltaire to the secretary. Fumbling in the bureau, the secretary found the last effusion of the Empress, written in French, in her large-bottomed German hand.

The Empress kept up a regular correspondence with the old gentleman and each of her letters made clear her fervent admiration. His Lettres Philosophiques, of which she was especially fond, described his visit to England in 1726 and his belief that, with all its faults and foibles, England was freer and more enlightened than his own benighted France. He was always too ironically subtle and yet too sycophantic to spell out the fact that England was, and always would be, a good deal more enlightened than Catherine’s benighted Russia!

The old sage, who had visited London nearly fifty years before, had in fact, as a young man, been dazzled by the extent of toleration, political enlightenment, freedom of expression and thought. It puzzled him all the more, this quarrel with America. Was George III trying to behave like a Russian tyrant? He could hardly ask the question in a letter to Catherine. For a while, having cleared his throat, he dictated generalities. By the time a prolific and opinionated man has reached Voltaire’s age, he can scarcely hold back the flow of self-parodying generalization.

—and taken all in all, Madame, the English are a reasonable Nation. But it would be a mistake ever to take this Reasonableness for granted. In the matter of Shakespeare, for example, there is an incomprehensible national madness. I told their most celebrated actor, M. Garrick, that I could see no merit whatsoever in Romeo and Juliet. A young man meets a thirteen-year-old girl and decides that his whole happiness depends upon marrying her sur le coup. With no canonical precedent or justification, a member of the Franciscan order not only consents to this, but administers narcotics to the young woman which will render her totally insensible – giving her the appearance of death itself. And this is the stuff of realism! This is their great love drama! Garrick is a reasonable man, and by his acting he tries to make natural, and reasonable, passions which Shakespeare has only disfigured and exaggerated in the most ridiculous manner! Garrick merely chided me for being ‘an amiable barbarian’!

But, Madame, you ask of M. Wedgwood. Naturally, I have heard of his prodigious invention of an English pottery to rival even the finest productions of Sèvres. Indeed, he has flattered me by producing a portrait bust of this ancient invalid of Ferney, which the old man is vain enough to have in his library alongside Houdon’s portrait-bust and another of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. I also possess a portrait medallion of myself in M. Wedgwood’s exquisite white biscuit ware. (Where does he find such white clay outside China?)

He has arisen to prominence in England long since my own departure from that mysterious land. As well as being a distinguished ceramicist he is also a Natural Philosopher, who has made many experiments into geology. He belongs to a philosophical circle who discuss such developments of human knowledge as Electricity, and the properties of Matter. His friends are M. Priestley, Dr Darwin, M. Watt, a pioneer of industrial engineering and whose invention of a steam-powered engine I should love to import into my small manufactory at Ferney. So, all in all, a group of philosophes likeminded with Your Imperial Majesty and myself. It was a happy chance that Lord Cathcart had been the British Minister at St Petersburg. Lady C., as Your Imperial Highness knows, is the sister of Sir William Hamilton, whose discoveries of Italian and Etruscan antiquities have done so much to inspire M. Wedgwood, and it was a happy fortune that M. Baxter in London was able to facilitate your order and to put you in touch with M. Wedgwood.

The dinner service which M. Wedgwood has already made for Your Imperial Highness sounds exquisite. Twenty-four pieces of the most formidable ceramic work – not china, I note, but M. Wedgwood’s own invention of ‘Creamware’ – a new word to add to my English vocabulary! I myself possess a tea set and a dinner service made by M. Wedgwood and I can only echo Your Majesty’s delight, not only in their beauty, but in their practicality: the jugs truly pour, the lids of the bowls and tureens actually fit. When piled up, the plates fit together as neatly as if they are made of paper.

And now, Your Imperial Majesty has decided on a truly Imperial commission for M. Wedgwood – nearly a thousand pieces for your palace of the Finnish Frogs, the Kekerekeksinen. Our English friends would find a drollerie, perhaps, in Your Majesty asking the advice of a famous ‘Frog’ Philosopher for your ‘Frog’ Palace.

But, I pray you, do not listen to Sir William when he requests a dinner service of a design which he deems to be ‘classical’. True, M. Wedgwood makes exquisite copies of Etruscan and Roman originals. And if Your Imperial Majesty wanted to eat soup from a dish of gambolling Dryads, and sturgeon from a plate depicting Poseidon or Aphrodite, M. Wedgwood would be the best man in Europe to gratify your Imperial desire. But would it not be in every way more original, more amusing and more comme il faut to ask that honest son of English clay to celebrate his own country – to decorate Your Imperial Highness’s service with Topographick and Architectural Scenes of the Island of Britain? Here you could view a great Duke’s house, as it were Chatsworth or Blenheim. Here you could see the poor huts of Hebridean fisher-folk. Here a park, and there a mountain. And so through the hundreds of views which M. Wedgwood could supply Your Majesty you would begin to build up a picture of this strange kingdom. We watch – we enlightened ones of the world! – with wonder as the Ministry in London quarrels with the coarse but honest colonists of America! Come what may, England, that land of paradox, will always hold a special place in the heart of the sickening, and ageing, Methuselah of Lake Geneva.

3

—THEY DON’T SEEM TO COMPREHEND, THOSE MERCENARY fools they sent over here – we’re all trained fighters! Trained to shoot. Trained to use a gun. More than any Englishman is likely to be.

—Yes, sir, but we are trained to shoot the wolf and the bear. To defend our homes against the Indian savage. Not to fight fellow Englishmen.

—It won’t come to that.

—Didn’t you just hear what Bowood said? The fighting has started.

—It was a skirmish that got out of hand. A skirmish is not a battle. Still less a war.

—I tell you, my boy came down from Concord last night. That was no fuckin’ skirmish. If Paul Revere hadn’t ridden out and warned ’em to reach for their muskets, those boys in Lexington would have been slaughtered. As it is, there were boys killed up there.

—Hal, no one doubts there’s been some shooting. But a shooting don’t make no war. Don’t you remember what John Adams keeps a-sayin’ – we’re part of the British Dominions!

—And what do we get for it? Sausage-eating mercenary soldiers shootin’ our little boys. By Christ, Bowood, one of them lads up at Lexington was sixteen, fuck it.

While this conversation took place in Strong’s, the good new coffee-house lately opened in Pell Street, New York City, a young man of twenty-four sat in a neighbouring booth reading his correspondence from England. Tom Byerley was well made, and well dressed. His angular, bony face was divided by a pronounced Roman nose. His chin was sharp. His eyes, which were of so dark a blue that many, when they remembered him, thought of them as brown, were deep set, and shone with an intelligent knowledge of the effect which he produced upon his company. He knew himself to be highly attractive to women, and it was a knowledge which had led to his present predicament – love affairs with two women at once, and the near certainty that he was about to conquer a third.

Time was when Tom Byerley would have been highly contented with this state of things. But the affair with Mrs Aylmer, the wife of the theatre proprietor, was quite out of control. Mrs Aylmer, a handsome woman some fifteen years Tom’s senior, had professed herself so inflamed with love that she was going to inform her husband. This course of action would not only have cost Tom his employment in the theatre company, but it would also have thrown him back, penniless, on the sole company of the lady herself. And the truth of the matter was that, however happy he was when they were alone together in the lady’s bedchamber, her conversation was so tedious that he could scarcely endure the hours of dinner with her after their lovemaking. The prospect which she held out to him – of their eloping with her small savings and fleeing to some other city, perhaps to the capital, Philadelphia – was the stuff of which nightmares are made.

There was also the disagreeable fact that, were his intrigue with Mrs Aylmer to become public, he would be constrained to own the affair to Polly Dwyer, an actress of his own age with whom he sometimes supposed himself in love. Whenever the occasion permitted, and when Mrs Aylmer was required by her husband to attend to costumes or props or other aspects of theatre management, Tom and Polly would repair to her dressing-room. Polly Dwyer’s white skin was paler even than Cherokee kaolin clay, baked into the snowiest jasperware. Her hair was raven black and her Irish eyes were sea-green. Tom had enjoyed love affairs with numerous women, but there had never been anyone to match Polly for sheer insatiability, for the gusto with which she went to it, for the almost literal hunger with which her rosy lips curled on the object of their passion. Nor, when Polly was naked, had any painter or sculptor, not Rubens himself, envisaged so great a wonder.

But, in the works of Shakespeare, there was indeed a phrase for every situation, and ‘appetite increased by what it fed on’. The more Mrs Aylmer offered Tom her all but unwanted devotion, and the more Polly accepted his amorous attentions, the more Tom found himself in a haze of lust which felt as if it could never be satisfied. And he had of late become preoccupied by a young married woman who was staying in the inn off King Street which served as Tom’s temporary lodgings.

She was a redhead, tall and unscrupulous-looking, as, with one gloved hand on her husband’s arm, she shot shy glances at Tom across the breakfast-room. Her name was Mrs Sternfeld, her husband being German. Her nationality was hard to guess. He fancied she might have been German also, but perhaps she came from the Low Countries. They had not advanced their affair very far on an emotional level. A week since, however, as they passed one another in the lobby of the inn, she had asked his help with a portmanteau which needed to be taken to her room. The inn was well supplied with slaves, and there was absolutely no need for one of the guests to lift luggage on his own account. Indeed, it was a place of sufficient gentility that for one of the guests to lift so much as a pocket handkerchief would excite notice, for the slaves were there to attend your every bidding. But Tom did not need Mrs Sternfeld’s intentions spelling out, and he had carried the case – light as it turned out – to her chamber on the first floor. Once they were alone together in the room, her hand had reached, not for his hand, but for his breeches.

Seated as he now was in the Coffee-Room of Strong’s, one of the more fashionable establishments in this new part of town, Tom Byerley surveyed the same nankeen breeches with a mixture of self-congratulation, amusement and wistfulness. The escapades into which he was constantly being led by the most overpowering of passions were, after all, not merely exciting. They were also a little sad.

Over the nankeen breeches, Tom wore an elegant, pale green top coat and a yellow vest, double-breasted and much adorned with brass buttons. His ruffle of white cravat beneath his chin could have been a spoonful of the purest whipped cream. His chin was freshly shaven. His brow was framed by a brown tie-wig. This alone marked him out to any intelligent observer to be an Englishman, since, even in fashion-conscious New York, the defiant mood of the political moment somehow decreed with an urgency that could not logically be explained that the colonists should cast off not merely the political shackles and ecclesiastical restraints of the Old World, but also its wigs.

Dear Tom,

he read as he sipped his coffee – and damned good coffee it was. The proximity of Jamaica meant that you could drink coffee in America which was fresher and stronger than anything you ever tasted in London. As for Burslem! Tom smiled as he recollected his mother sniffing the beans which his Uncle Jos gave her.

—Sister, I’ve made you these elegant coffee-cans. Surely you will at least try the drink?

—I don’t think coffee-housing would be quite my line, Mother had said with one of her satirical snorts of laughter. And the little coffee-mill which Uncle John had once brought from London and the costly bag of beans imported from Ceylon were left unused, unground and untasted.

—I should conjecture it were very rich, had been her final dismissive judgement of the matter.

When it came to people, Mrs Byerley did not mind how rich they were: the richer the better. When it came to comestibles, ‘rich’ was a term of disapprobation.

Tom sipped eagerly from the crude Delftware coffee-can in front of him – where did the Americans find these things? – and read on.

It is now nearly a year since we heard from you directly, though your good mother keeps us informed of your welfare. She keeps up the shop and is, I believe, doing pretty brisk business. Believe me, my Boy, I love you as a son and would never have wished to stand in your way of success either in the literary line or on the stage. A part of me hopes that you will be the American Garrick!

But another part of me wishes you home. Your brave mother has never indicated that she resents your going, but I know how much she misses you – as we all do. And now, Tom, I renew a request for you. When I asked you last year you said that my request was impossible, and that it came at an inopportune moment. If once again, you refuse me, well and good, but please, my dear Boy, I should be in your debt were you to reply instanter, either direct or via Mr Griffiths the agent.

May I repeat what I wrote last year. As you will recollect, ’tis eight years since – when you, dear Nephew, were still working as my boy clerk – that we persuaded an unwilling Mr Griffiths to sail the Atlantick Ocean and, having dock’t at Boston, to make the laborious journey southwards to the country of the Cherokee. There, by supreme good fortune, good sense and industry, he managed to acquire five tons of this exquisite white kaolin. As you know, Tom, there are spies abroad, and I dare not communicate to you my reasons, my desperate reasons, for requiring more of this precious commodity! If it were injudicious, in the Extreme, to communicate the exact Formulae of my experimental Ventures, however, it is equally no secret that I need white china clay for two of my most distinctive Inventions: the Creamware which has made my name, not only in England but in Europe, not only in Europe, but in the world; and the Jasperware which has become my hallmark.

Tom, an opportunity has arisen which is without parallel not only in my life, but in the history of European pottery manufacture. I cannot tell you what it is, but I need white china clay in enormous quantities. If I were able to acquire it from Cornwall, I should do so, without putting myself to the expense, and you, dear Boy, to the danger and worry, of travelling into the country of a strange people. But, dear Tom, the dispute over the rights of ownership and purchase of Cornish china clay goes on and on. My old enemy Cookworthy (worthy to be roasted alive more than to be cooked, in your old uncle’s opinion!) continues to hold on to the patent for china clay and the exclusive right to purchase Cornish clay.

I need white clay and I need it in great quantities. If you were able, my dear Tom, to journey to the Cherokee country, you would place yourself everlastingly in the debt of your loving old Uncle. Ever since your father died, I have looked upon you as a son. Your dear mother, my sister, depends upon me as a protector, but she depends upon you for her emotional sustenance. I need not labour these points to you, since you know them.

The Cherokee are not a race of Savages, despite what some of the Americans will tell you. You will perhaps recollect that when thou wast a lad, three noble Cherokee tribesmen visited London and had the honour to be presented to His Majesty the King. I had been going to write that the Chief of them, Ostenaco, was their equivalent of my Lord North or His Grace the Duke of Grafton. But this would be to mislead you, since, in so far as I have been able to establish the truth of the matter, the Cherokee would appear to have no kings, dukes or princes. Ostenaco, if he has an English counterpart, would appear to be a theocratic personage, perhaps the equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. (I am no more a judge of Church matters than you are and rejoice in my ignorance!) These people do not have politicks, but they have warriors, and their craftsmanship is not to be despised. The pots they make are not unlike – in shape – the old Greek vases lately excavated by Sir William Hamilton in Italy. But they are not of your Italian terracotta. Rather, they are of the most exquisitely delicate white clay. Tom, this clay of the Cherokees is whiter than anything in Europe – it is as white as the Chinese kaolin itself!

They were assured by His Majesty that the British Crown would protect Cherokee lands from the colonial settlers and that there would be an everlasting alliance between the English and the Cherokee peoples. So if you penetrate Indian country, Tom, you will be among friends – so long as you are able to persuade them that you are not an American!

The American colonists have Justice on their side in their quarrel with the Crown. All decent men and women at home support the American cause, certainly all my friends the Lunar men do so, but in Parliament even Mr Pitt and Mr Burke take the colonists’ side against the intemperate Toryism of Lord North. In their quarrel with the Cherokee, we can be less certain of the righteousness of the American cause. But I am sure that you are as able as I am to keep the two matters separate in your mind. Whatever the rights and wrongs of individual colonists’ disputes with the Indians, it is impossible to doubt the overall rightness of the American position. They have no representation in our Parliament. All decent folks must sympathize with the Americans in their grievance against the various taxes and Stamp Duties &c. imposed upon ’em by the Ministry. As for the punishments and embargoes meted out to the good people of Massachusetts since that unfortunate incident in Boston Harbour with the consignment of Indian tea, we can only hang our heads in shame, as Englishmen, that such pettiness and lack of generosity could be exercised by a sovereign Government against the courageous and independent-minded colonists. None of us here supposes for one moment that the hostility at present erupting between the Americans and the Ministry could possibly result in violence.

I should be most grateful of a reply, my dear Boy, as soon as at all possible, and not least should I be grateful for your American news. Some here say that the colonists desire a complete liberation from their dependent status. My own judgement coincides with that of my closest friends Mr Bentley and Dr Darwin: the inflated rumours of American Independence are nothing but wild talk. I remain trustful and confident that the Americans have no intention whatsoever of breaking away from Great Britain, still less of fighting a war against us. I am sure that the dispute will be settled peaceably, and without loss of blood. Indeed, it is unthinkable that good English soldiers should fight their colonist brothers to the death over Townsend’s Stamp Duty. In this, all my ingenious friends in the Lunar Society – Dr Darwin, Mr Edgeworth, Mr Boulton and the rest – are in entire concurrence and agreement. My partner Mr Bentley, however, is of the view that the longer the dispute goes on, the worse it will be for trade – not only in pots but in all branches of Commerce. So any Intelligence which you were able to supply would be received with the utmost gratitude by your ever-loving uncle, Jos.Wedgwood.

p.s. Whatever fine feelings I might have expressed for our friends the Cherokee, this is not to say that I wish to offer them one penny more per ton for their excellent china clay. It would, indeed, set a very unhappy precedent if we paid them more than Five Pounds per ton. Do not permit them to haggle, Tom! Were you to do so, it would not merely excite greed on their part, it would, even more dangerously, arouse the suspicions of my trading rivals were it to be known that I am intending to buy more Indian clay in great quantities.

Upon the completion of reading his uncle’s letter, Tom nodded, for an attentive slave was at his elbow with a coffee pot, offering to refill his cup. Instinctively, Tom looked at the cup. It was a crude blue and white thing – Dutch, Tom should not have been surprised to hear. One of the things about the New World which excited his Uncle Josiah was not merely its progressive political outlook and its freedom of thought and expression in matters of religion, but the fact that none of the thirteen colonies had, as yet, a pottery manufactory of their own; and in consequence, all crocks, even ones as debased as this heavy Delft cup and saucer, must be imported from Europe. Even though Josiah did not believe that the colonies would ever opt for full independence, he could see, as could anyone with eyes in their head, that America was achieving, year by year, an independence of a general kind. It was only a matter of time before there were American potteries, and old Jos wanted to cut in on the deal. There had even been the idea, expressed in more than one of his letters over the last four years, that Tom Byerley himself might like to preside over a Wedgwood manufactory in New York or Philadelphia.

But the immediate question now was how to answer Uncle Jos’s strange request:

p.p.s. Eight years ago, I paid Tom Griffiths Fifty Pounds to fetch home the Cherokee clay. This involved him in crossing the Ocean and returning. If you undertake this work for me, my Boy, I will pay you the same sum, even though it be that you are already in America and would only have to make one Ocean crossing compared with Griffiths’s two! JW

This was a consideration: fifty pounds was more than he would make in eighteen months on the stage. Last year, he had earned so little as an actor that he had been obliged to supplement his income by school-teaching and by taking pupils. And he had more than once, while so employed, asked himself in the manner of the Prodigal Nephew of the Parable whether he would not be better off to arise and go unto his uncle and beg him to kill the fatted calf.

In boyhood, Tom Byerley had possessed no ambition to be a potter, so he had not been apprenticed to the trade. From an early age, his way had been with words, not clay, and it had seemed, as he entered his teens, that he would merely have to choose between the profession of Letters or that of the Stage. Perhaps, like Mr Garrick, he would excel in both fields. He was young enough, and held a high enough opinion of his own accomplishments, not to have heeded Johnson’s warning that the writer’s life was attended by Toil, envy, want, the Garret and the Jail.

His mother’s pleading, and the sheer necessity of life, led to him accepting work at his uncle’s Burslem manufactory. He laboured there for five years as a clerk, serving at the end as his uncle’s personal assistant and secretary.

In all that time, the impression formed during early childhood of his uncle’s genius and benevolence was confirmed. Jos set himself high standards and he expected others to do likewise. He could seem harsh as an employer, but never cruel, and never unjust. Were it not for the overwhelming tedium of the work, Tom Byerley might well have settled to it. In time, Jos would probably have allowed him to go to join Uncle John, who, together with Mr Bentley, ran the London end of the business, and in London he might have combined the duties of his work with the dissipations at which he had already become adept. There might even have been time left over for Letters and the Theatre.

In the end, however, he had decided to cut loose before his uncle made any such offer. Tom Byerley left Staffordshire behind him when he was aged twenty. He went first to Dublin, where he enjoyed a modest success, followed by a period of failure on the stage. The chance to join a travelling theatre company which was sailing to New York was leapt at. He had been in America nearly five years. And now he sat in a coffee-house, many plays, many periods of worklessness, many spells of sorrow and self-doubt, many cheap lodgings and un -healthy garrets, many enjoyable amours later – and some acutely painful.

His Uncle Jos was a man of power. There was something compelling about the energy of the man. Also, Tom felt a deep reserve of affection and gratitude to the uncle who had quietly helped Mother set up the draper’s shop in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and continued to allow her the – illusory? – sense of independence. In those years that he had worked for Jos, he had been awestruck by the amount the man had achieved, not merely in his two – and at one stage three – manufactories, but also in his public works, his campaign for canals to be built, his supervision of turnpike roads, his many scientific discussions with his friends in the Lunar Society, all remarkable figures in their own right but also – you could sense it when you were with them – all sharing some of Tom’s awe for his uncle.

Indeed, at that stage it would seem to Tom that the only person who was not aware of Jos Wedgwood’s genius was his wife, Sally. Nothing he did seemed to please her and Tom became increasingly embarrassed both by her impatience with her husband and by the tenderness which she displayed towards himself. Indeed, one of the delicacies of Jos’s character, in his nephew’s eyes, was that Tom was unable to ascertain whether Jos was aware of the ‘situation’. They were miles away from the danger of an affair, but nephew Tom knew that Sally’s love for him was disproportionate, intense and physical. Was it for that reason that Jos had been prepared not only to allow Tom to go to Dublin, but also to be generous in financing the escapade – for an escapade was all, five years later, it had been. Of that Tom was quite well aware. He was no Garrick. He was never going to make a distinguished career out of acting, and he now knew that he did not possess the stamina for this profession: the emotional stamina, that is to say, to live with the long periods of rejection and waiting for work.

It would be inevitable – he had known this for a very long time – that one day an opportunity would arise for him to leave the theatre, and he should seize it. The only question in his mind was whether this bizarre opportunity – the chance to ride south to the Cherokee country in quest of china clay – was the moment to leave the theatrical world and its ladies. Ah! Its ladies! Should he not string things out a little longer with Mrs Aylmer, and the divine Polly? Should he not continue his run as Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera at Mr Aylmer’s theatre? It was a leading role, but not a well-paid one. But it was some money, which was better than no money and it enabled him to put up at the same inn as the very distinctive redheaded Mrs Sternfeld. (The vision when, in her bedroom, she had lifted her petticoat and revealed that dark, moist red thatch was not to be forgotten.)

Or had he reached one of those staging-posts in life when some inner voice makes it plain that it is time to move on? Should he return at once to Griffiths, the agent, where he had collected his mail hard by Trinity Church on Broadway? Griffiths, already a pot-bellied, middle-aged successful man of commerce, had made his own purchase of the first consignment of clay into an epic, and it was with a memory of the man’s stories that Tom now felt a tingling of excitement. He knew what would be involved. A ride by the stagecoach to Philadelphia would be followed by meeting an Indian agent. There were always a number of Indians who travelled, either for reasons of trade or politics, up and down the roads south of the capital. Griffiths would either know where to meet them, or, quite possibly, their names. From there, the adventures would begin.

But for one last time, to hold Polly in his arms! And for one last time, to make an attempt on the highly questionable virtue of Mrs Sternfeld. And did he not owe it to the accommodating wife of his employer to give one last bed-shaking rogering to poor Mrs Aylmer? For one last time – ah! He smiled, the conceited smile of the young and amorously successful, and summoned the slave-waiter so as to pay his bill.

4

THE FINE ROMAN CHARACTERS READING M. BYERLEY MIGHT have signalled, to the coarser-grained inhabitants of Newcastle-under-Lyme, no more than the name of a draper’s shop. The proprietor, however, was of the opinion that they were of such classical elegance that they would not have disgraced a triumphal arch in the Forum at Rome in the days before its lamentable decline. The fact that she had not had the opportunity to visit that former centre of useful commerce did not in her view diminish the justice of the comparison.

Beneath the sign was a clean shop window, displaying four or five rolls of the best Macclesfield silk, in different colours, suitable for upholstery or clothing. Some customers had the temerity to suggest that the sign would have been improved by the addition of the word draper after the surname, but in Mrs Byerley’s view the rolls of silk in the window provided a sufficiently clear signal of the nature of her business. Besides, as far as the local population were concerned, Mrs Byerley felt she could, without immodesty, have applied to herself the Miltonic line Not to know me argues yourself unknown.

Any person with the discernment to press further into Mrs Byerley’s establishment would not be disappointed. The little bell, dancing upon a spring at the top of the door, made a welcoming jingle-jangle. The clean, oft-swept boards of the well-ordered interior, the tasteful pale blue paint of the panelled doors of cupboards which ran round the whole of the shop interior, concealing the wares of cloth, of lace, of sewing materials and various items of haberdashery as well as of drapery; the gleaming polished elmwood of the counter, all set the visitor at ease, and the atmosphere of civilized calm was enhanced by the faithful ticking of the eight-day clock on the chimney piece at the end of the shop, a clock on either side of which stood two elegant vases. All these things attested to the fact, never once doubted or controverted by anyone of discernment in Newcastle-under-Lyme, that Mrs Byerley ran a tidy shop, and an efficient one. She was, after all, a Wedgwood. The circumstances which had led her to open the establishment in the first instance had been sad, even humiliating. She had been left a widow young, and she had no means of support. Her younger brother gave what assistance he could, but she did not expect him to keep her and her boy, and she believed in the virtue of standing on one’s own feet.

How they’d laughed, incidentally, when, a few days after her brother’s leg had been sawn off, Heffie had said,

—See, Josiah, it’ll only be a wick or two afore they’s back, standin’ on they oon two feet. Oh there I go! Ah’s put mah foot in it when they asna but the wun.

When circumstances decreed that Meg Byerley should open a shop, she determined to make it the best draper’s establishment in the district. Fifteen years on, and there were few people in Newcastle-under-Lyme, or as far afield as Hanley, Stoke or Longton, if requiring yards of black crepe for a funeral, or ticking for their mattresses, or ribbons for their summer bonnets, who would not have the sheer common sense to place such requirements in her capable hands.

In consequence, Mrs Byerley seldom left her neat, well-appointed premises, unless it were to repair to her apartments above the shop itself, which she did twice a day. The purpose of the first of these ritualized withdrawals from the world of commerce, which took place in the middle of each morning as the clock struck ten, was, as she invariably explained to Everett, her assistant, ‘to make herself tidy’. Since Mrs Byerley had been born tidy, and had remained a model of tidiness in the elapsing fifty-seven years, there was no discernible difference in her appearance before and after her first withdrawal. The second withdrawal, which occurred as the clock noisily, slowly and portentously announced the coming of noonday to Newcastle, was the opportunity for something a little more radical than tidying. Each day, Everett would be informed that Mrs Byerley thought the time had come ‘to nip up and change’.

Unlike her younger brother, who positively revelled in the alterations coming, not only upon Staffordshire, but upon the world, Mrs Byerley was a Tory of the old school, who deplored change itself as a concept. While young Josiah hollered with enthusiasm for Wilkes and Liberty, bought – though Mrs Byerley saw small evidence of his actually reading – stories by Mr Voltaire, an old gentleman in Mrs Byerley’s estimation who should keep his thoughts to himself, and revelled in the philosophical discoveries of his friends Messrs Priestley, Watt, Boulton and Darwin, Mrs Byerley would have been perfectly content if change could be stopped, like a clock. She heard one and all praise her brother’s part in the building of turnpike roads, and she was prepared to concede that it was now possible for a cart in winter, bearing the precious cargo of Wedgwood creamware, to make its way from Burslem to Stafford without falling into a mud-hole and smashing into pieces. But no change in Mrs Byerley’s estimation was ever more than a mixed blessing, and did it, she asked, advance the general good to permit any Dick or Harry to gad about the country? And though it might be of profit to her brother to speed the journey from Burslem to London, should they really rejoice at the prospect of Londoners – she slightly shuddered at the notion – having ease of access to Burslem?

No, when Mrs Byerley said she was going up to change, all that was connoted by this daily explanation to Everett was that she was climbing the narrow stairs to her apartments to change her clothes. It was only proper for a lady, and Mrs Byerley aspired to that status in her imagination, even if birth had not bestowed the privilege, to change her clothes at midday. The change was mitigated by the oxymoronic trick of always taking the same form. She would remove the mob cap with which she had covered her head in the morning, and replace it with one all but identical. She would in a similar fashion take off the starched pinafore she had been wearing in the morning, and replace it with a newly laundered specimen of the same garment. Then, having spent a few meditative minutes at her dressing table, prodding hairpins, applying powder to her cheeks, and looking closely into her own eyes, she would arise, and descend the small narrow staircase into the shop once more and announce,

—There! That’s better.

If Mrs Byerley deplored her younger brother’s political outlook, she was prouder of Josiah’s success in life than words could properly express. It was something, to have altered, in the space of a decade, the domestic habits of an entire nation. Before Josiah Wedgwood, your English family ate off pewter or wooden platters, or from salt-glazed lumpen affairs that scarcely merited the name of crockery. What passed for Delftware on the tables of the middling sort of people was crude and easily chipped. Since he had completed his apprenticeship and set up his works in Burslem, all that had changed, and within a decade of his production of creamware, there was hardly a respectable household in the kingdom which did not eat its dinner off well-glazed, delicate plates, and pour its milk from jugs manufactured as like as not in Staffordshire, and drink its tea from pots imitated from her brother’s catalogues.

She loved Josiah best of all her – alas too few! – surviving siblings, perhaps especially because he had so narrowly avoided the fate of so many brothers and sisters, death of smallpox. She loved him for his childhood vulnerability, and for his courage, and for his having triumphed over these adversities and built up so great a business. Jos had been the last child in a family of twelve. Meg, with whom destiny would one day reward Mr Byerley as his bride, had looked on the little boy as her child. Their father had died when Jos was nine years old, and the pox had swept through the fatherless family like a plague in Scripture, taking eight of them. It had returned when he was eleven, and he had contracted the disease, and very nearly died of it. He’d survived, but the disease had permanently weakened his leg.

The survivors had felt instinctively that they owed it to the vanquished dead, as to the unborn future, to make a success of things. None of the siblings had made so stupendous a success as Josiah. He had been apprenticed to his elder brother Thomas, but though many in Staffordshire had thrown fine pots, there was no one who had ever matched the genius of Josiah Wedgwood.

Where did such genius come from? The Wedgwoods were a clever tribe. It was an observation of simple fact to say that, and Mrs Byerley thought none could accuse her of vainglory for so believing. But whereas her other surviving brothers, and her cousins, with their small pot banks spread over the fields surrounding Burslem’s small village, had been good jobbing craftsmen, in Josiah a spark of genius had always been alight. Even as a child with virtually no schooling, he had collected minerals and fossils. His skill at the potter’s wheel was matched by an intellectual curiosity which made of their ancestral craft a branch of Natural Philosophy. How to improve, how to blend clays, mix different varieties of what was, after all, no better than dirt, and transform them into the gleaming glories of the dinner table – that had been Josiah’s fought-for, struggled-for and yet somehow instinctive skill.