Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature 9781350354869, 1350354864

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object – its medium and physicality – are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called ‘Thing Theory,’ and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930, Edited by Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism, 1918–1940: Adornment and Beyond, Simon Bliss Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700–Present, Edited by Megan Brandow-Faller Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers, Edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary, Edited by Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Georges Rouault and Material Imagining, Jennifer Johnson The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives and Afterlives of the Domain, Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion, Freya Gowrley Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920, Edited by Claire Moran Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge, Sarah R. Cohen Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art, Edited by Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century, Edited by Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek Transformative Jars, Edited by Anna Grasskamp and Anne Gerritsen The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914, Sarah Laurenson

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature Rachel Gotlieb

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Rachel Gotlieb, 2023 Rachel Gotlieb has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image: William Holman Hunt, Honest Labour Has a Comely Face, c. 1861, oil on panel, 30.4 x 20.3 cm. Private collection. Photo: Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-5484-5 ePDF: 978-1-3503-5485-2 eBook: 978-1-3503-5486-9 Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements

viii xi

Introduction 1 1 2 3 4 5

Ceramics as an agent of design reform and Aestheticism 21 Willow pattern: A mutable agent of British design and art 57 Teacups tell such wondrous tales 87 British pottery: Pride and piety 117 A Victorian pitcher speaks a thousand words 149

Conclusion 183 Notes Bibliography Index

189 249 272

Illustrations Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Charles Meigh & Co, vase, 1846–51 Richard Redgrave, The Deserter’s Home, 1847 ‘The Height of Commercial Morality’, Punch, vol. 14, 1848 James McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864 1.5 James McNeill Whistler, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 1864–5 1.6 James McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 1864 1.7 Albert Joseph Moore, Pomegranates, 1866 1.8 Albert Joseph Moore, Azaleas, 1868 1.9 Albert Joseph Moore, Oranges, 1885 1.10 Richard Redgrave, ‘Well Spring’ vase, 1847–65 2.1 ‘The School of Bad Designs’, Punch, vol. 9, 1845 2.2 Plate, Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, gold anchor period, 1759–69 2.3 Mary Gow, The Willow Pattern Plate, ‘Art in June’, The Magazine of Art, vol. 9, 1886 2.4 Harry Parkes, book jacket cover, Mary Jane’s Memoirs Compiled from Her Original Collection, 1887 2.5 Cinderella Panel, designed by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, illustrated by Lucy Faulkner 1862–5 3.1 ‘Principal Teapots to the Celestial Court’, c. 1843 3.2 Crockery, John Johnson Collection: Puzzle Pictures, Folder 3 (66b) 3.3 China, John Johnson Collection: Puzzle Pictures, Folder 3 (66a) 3.4 Thomas Faed, When the Day Is Done, 1870 3.5 Thomas Faed, A Wee Bit Fractious, 1874 3.6 Thomas Faed, Where’s My Good Little Girl?, 1882 3.7 Frank Holl, Widowed, 1879 3.8 Frank Holl, Peeling Potatoes, c. 1880 3.9 Frank Holl, Despair, 1883 3.10 Hubert von Herkomer, ‘Old Age: A Study in Westminster Union’, The Graphic, 7 April 1877

28 33 41 46 47 48 52 53 53 55 64 70 72 76 85 93 94 94 98 100 101 103 103 104 105

Illustrations

3.11 Cup and saucer, Minton & Co, 1851 4.1 Mary Ellen Best, A Farm Kitchen at Clifton, York, 1834 4.2 William Henry Hunt, Hearing Lessons, 1842 4.3 ‘The Discovery’, Anonymous, The China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story c. 1865 4.4 Sir John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–9 4.5 Gravy drainer with ‘Indigenous [formerly Indian] Scene of the St Lawrence’ – from the Lake Series, 1845–61 5.1 La cruche cassée, after Jean-Baptiste Greuze, engraved by Jean Massard, 1773 5.2 Robert Sayer and John Bennet, A Young Hussy Charging Old Toothless with an Impossibility, or the Cracked Pitcher, 1778 5.3 Frank Stone, Last Appeal, engraved by Samuel Bellin, 1845 5.4 Worcester Cabbage-leaf milkmaid’s jug, c. 1768  5.5 ‘A Pleasant Duty’, Eglanton Thorne (Elizabeth Emily Charleton), The Old Worcester Jug; or John Griffin’s Little Maid, c. 1882 5.6 Syrup jug, US Pottery Company, Bennington, Vermont, 1852–9 5.7 ‘Punch’s Milk Jug’, Punch, vol. 14, 1848 5.8 Lilly Martin Spencer, Young Wife: First Stew, 1854 5.9 ‘The British Lion in 1850; or, the Effects of Free Trade’, Punch, vol. 10, 1846 5.10 Toby Jug, c. 1780 5.11 Thomas Webster, Good Night!, 1846  5.12 James Collinson, Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, 1850 5.13 Sir John Everett Millais, A Flood, 1870 5.14 Jug after the Portland Vase. Samuel Alcock & Co., Hill Pottery, Burslem, Staffordshire, c. 1850

Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Richard Redgrave, The Governess, 1844 Richard Redgrave, Country Cousins, 1847 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Rosa, 1867 Albert Joseph Moore, Apples, 1875 Albert Joseph Moore, Beads, 1875 Albert Joseph Moore, A Sofa, 1875 Dinner plate, willow pattern, attributed to Minton & Co., 1875–6

ix 115 134 136 139 143 146 153 154 157 159 160 163 164 166 168 169 171 174 177 180

x

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23a 23b 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Illustrations

Sir John Everett Millais, Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), 1889 Elgar Hicks, The Sinews of Old England, 1857 Sir Edward Colby Burne-Jones, Cinderella, 1863 Walter Crane’s New Toy Book, George Routledge and Sons: London, p. 7 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Girl at Lattice, 1862 William Holman Hunt, Honest Labour Has a Comely Face, c. 1861 Thomas Faed, A Time of War, 1876 Frank Holl, Hushed, 1877 Frank Holl, Hope, 1883 Hubert von Herkomer, Eventide: A Scene at the Westminster Union, 1878 Thomas Webster, A Tea Party, 1862 Joseph Clark, The Labourer’s Welcome, n.d. Sir Edward John Poynter, Portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones, 1870 William Holman Hunt, Lady Fairbairn with Her Children, 1864–5 Mary Ellen Best, Dining Room at Langton, Family at Breakfast, c. 1832–3 Minton, ‘Water Lily’ flowerpot, c. 1860 Sir John Everett Millais, Trust Me, 1862 Elizabeth Pearson Dalby, Interior of House Compton Basset, c. 1849 William Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1868 Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress, 1846 Edward Henry Corbould, Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser’s Dairy, 1861 George Elgar Hicks, Woman’s Mission: Comfort of Old Age, 1862 Lilly Martin Spencer, Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses, 1856 Frederick George Cotman, One of the Family, 1880 James Campbell, Girl with Jug of Ale and Pipes, 1856 James Collinson, Home Again, 1856

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Janice Helland and Susan Surette for their insight and unreserved support of my project from start to finish. Susan Surette went beyond the call of duty in editing this book. Several scholars and colleagues have read my manuscript in parts or its entirety giving important commentary for which I am eternally grateful. They include Elise Hodson, Martha Kelleher, Peter Kaellgren, Margaret Leighton, Michael Prokopow and Gord Thompson. I am also indebted to colleagues and experts who shared their knowledge on the subject: Anne Anderson, Lisa Binkley, Judith Bronkhurst and John Sandon. At Bloomsbury, I thank Michael Yonan, Alexander Highfield and Ross-Fraser Smith for helping bring this book to fruition. I am also grateful to Scott Shields at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and Sequoia Miller at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, who appreciate the power and agency of ceramics. To my friends and family who provided wholehearted support and bearing with me throughout the many years researching and writing this book, thank you. You are Fanny Dickson, Joe Dickson, Marc Gotlieb, Gail Graham, Lindsay Kertland, Sandy Moore, Denise Oleksijczuk, Karen von Hahn, Andrea Wood and my dear, late friend and colleague Sandra Alfoldy. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Allan Gotlieb (the collector) and Sondra Gotlieb (the reader), who encouraged me to study Victorian material culture, art and design.

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Introduction

Do not banish them and their tin pans and brown pitchers from art for aesthetic rules. Let Art always remind us of men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things.1 So pronounced the narrator in George Eliot’s first novel Adam Bede, an important passage that calls for artists to find beauty in the homely and the everyday. Faithful reproductions of such brown quotidian pitchers, along with high-end Worcester jugs, as well as other utilitarian and ornamental ceramics in earthenware, stoneware and porcelain are the centre of my book, Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature. For the most part, the ceramics represented in genre and social realist paintings as well as in fiction are easy to overlook since they comprise everyday domestic ware: brown and beige crocks and jugs, pearlware and blue transferware dishes. But their commonness, as Eliot points out, did not diminish their agency in nineteenthcentury Britain since they operated as carriers and containers of meanings and metaphors extending beyond their original functions and, therefore, can offer rich insight into Victorian stratified society. Whether realistically rendered or fancifully represented, ceramics in the Victorian period played a strong role in both painting and literature. They might visually beckon the viewer to enter a painting or a written narrative through their compositional role while symbolically embodying issues that touched upon art and culture, commerce and consumption, and social relationships between people and objects. This book argues that a rhetoric and a set of conventions developed in the British representation of pottery and porcelain, emerging in the late eighteenth century and continuing in the Victorian period. Building upon Thad Logan’s idea of mapping household items in the Victorian parlour to establish a grammar between objects and subjects, I concentrate on ceramic dishes to assess how they negotiated a syntax with their subjects and other objects inside literary and visual spaces.2 Primarily, my work mines the diverse archive of Victorian painting and literature from the avant-garde to the sentimental, from the well known to the more obscure to shed light on the at once complex and simple

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

implications of ceramics’ agencies at this time. To paraphrase Elaine Freegood, I begin with objects – teapots, cups, saucers, plates and jugs, rather than with subjects and narratives, in text and visual culture and stay with them a bit longer than scholarly interpretation generally allows.3 And this lingering enables me to move objects that often disappear into the background into the foreground to restore them to the period eye.4 It has often been said that Victorians were obsessed with things, and these preoccupations were reflected in contemporary literary and visual culture.5 The vast nineteenth-century novel and the minutely detailed British genre and PreRaphaelite paintings give ‘evidence’ of the strong and interconnected subject– object relationships within the artistic conventions and biases in which they were produced. Moreover, the presence of ceramic dishes in so many manifestations of Victorian artistic production makes it clear that their significations often operated outside, as well as inside, the intended visual construction of the painting or literary construction of the text. My decision to consult a large number of texts and pictures rather than a few is to illustrate just how pervasive china dishes were in Victorian culture between 1840 and 1890. The parallels between artists and writers in their interpretations of the meanings of ceramics are remarkable, and these similarities also confirm what current scholars have observed, that Victorian novelists and artists borrowed ideas and images directly and indirectly from each other.6 As such, the ceramic objects that I study are for the most part remediated and while most were based on works found in the marketplace some were imagined. Here I borrow the term ‘remediation’ from Jay David Bolter and Richard Gustin, who argue that new media (video and digital) ‘refashion prior media forms’.7 In my project, I discuss ceramics that have been remediated in text and image, admittedly neither of which are new media, but nonetheless offer an important filter to collect meanings and metaphors to show that they were active agents of British Victorian culture. While the sensory engagements of touch and smell are absent in my investigation, the majority of remediated work are often based on real objects, and therefore function as valid facsimiles, allowing a material cultural analysis. Literature and painting serve as useful archives to track Victorian ways of seeing things, and I balance this remediated evidence with more conventional documentation for corroboration, such as trade journals, newspapers, decor magazines and when possible, the objects themselves. In this way, giving equal weight to textual and visual sources together activate the period eye. Using ceramic objects as a filter in the assembling and synthesizing of nineteenth-century texts and paintings allows

Introduction

3

for deeper cultural readings that can decode their multiple meanings. As French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu observes, ‘a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code into which it is encoded’.8 I frame my research in the current overlapping theoretical discussions that prioritize the agency of objects, drawing from thing theory and actor-network theory (ANT).9 Bill Brown states in his important contribution on thing theory that there is ‘slippage between having (possessing a particular object) and being (the identification of one’s self with the object)’.10 He adds that ‘objects and subjects animate one another’.11 Similarly, I argue, there is slippage between a cup personifying the subject and the subject personified as a cup. Bruno Latour goes further, positing that objects are equal to humans in their intentions and their impact on courses of action.12 This may be said of a simple decorative plate giving moral instruction or a humble jug lending a helping handle or inversely causing havoc in the kitchen or the tavern.13 Numerous scholars have pointed out that questions often prove to be more effective than the application of restrictive and formulaic theories.14 The overarching questions that I ask are these: Do ceramic objects bestow meaning in text and painting or is it the author and painter, reader and viewer, who imbue them with agency? If Victorian identities and cultures were expressed, represented and reinforced through the ownership of things, how did ceramics – portable, functional and often decorative objects – assist in and contribute to shaping these modes of experiences. How were they used in reality and how did they participate in the discourse of allegory and metaphor? I contend that since ceramics embodied much of the contradictory social values and attitudes of the time, they also served as agents affecting actions and perceptions of character transmitting these messages. In this way, ceramics helped shape and reflect the contemporaneous actions and perceptions of Britons. The placement of the teapot, cup, saucer or jug (broken or intact) on the floor, mantel or table signified mutable meanings: cleanliness, duty, virtue, faith, pride, nationalism, humanity or lack thereof. The material clay body of earthenware, stoneware or porcelain denoted attributes of class, gender and strength of character. Ceramic displays of crockery in cottages, cellars and garrets became motifs that functioned as metaphors for social, gender and economic identities and emotional states such as comfort, hope or despair. The wide variety of patterns of decoration available on jugs and other dishes served as agents to instigate and implement the major design reform principles of fitness for purpose and judicious adoption of schematic ornamentation rather

4

Ceramics in the Victorian Era

than pictorial naturalism to attain morally sanctioned good design. Ceramic dishes not only assisted in domestic tasks and provided companionship; their decorative patterns afforded pleasure delighting the eye or, like books, presented stories for moral interpretation or to entertain. As such, the representation of ceramics imposed a grammar of conventions adding to their agency which was implemented, critiqued, discarded or individualized in Victorian artistic production. In the next section of this introductory chapter, I examine why British ceramic studies, for the most part, prioritized rare eighteenth-century porcelain over ubiquitous commercial nineteenth-century ceramics. I then turn to recent innovative ceramic scholarship both inside and outside the field, arguing that the disciplines of design history, women’s studies, material culture and literary studies are reshaping the field of critical ceramics scholarship by inspiring scholars to pose innovative questions and thereby better integrate the genre into multiple and wider discourses. While the production of ceramics is thousands of years old, ceramic historiography (the study of ceramics and its methodology) has a relatively recent past.15 Ceramic history is a subset of decorative arts history and craft history, both of which are subsets of art history. Decorative art history is a genre or material-based discipline that has been largely documented by specialists or antiquarians and originated in the privileged museum and collecting spheres. Craft history focuses on the history of studio craft that began with the Arts and Crafts Movement but which encompasses broader histories of skills, materials, functional objects and aesthetic vocabularies associated with making integral to the studio craft movement. A major goal of this book is to reinvigorate the sub-discipline of ceramic history, in particular the scholarship of mid-nineteenth-century ceramics. This is not to say that the tools of connoisseurship are irrelevant – far from it: they are necessary for accuracy of attribution and explicating the correct processes of making and materiality. I have depended on connoisseurship publications as scaffolding to build my arguments.16 However, broadening the subject allows for deeper and more focused questions to be asked, which benefits the understanding of the objects themselves and the visual and literary cultures representing them. While I am not proposing that the examination of ceramics in paintings and literature should replace the study of their meta-narratives, I do contend that objects replicated by artists can inspire new questions and perspectives about art history and material and literary culture, just as the images and texts ask more insightful questions about the objects themselves.17

Introduction

5

Marginalizing nineteenth-century British commercial ceramics Current and historical scholarship has generally ignored Victorian ceramics between 1840 and 1860, a time when the British ceramic commercial industrial and market forces were at their height, and before the reforming changes of the Arts and Crafts Movement influenced production. Without doubt, the difficulty and expense of making porcelain prior to this period, whether in Asia or centuries later in Europe, account for its privileging in scholarship and in the marketplace. As has been well documented, the formula to make milky white, translucent hard-paste porcelain was the arcanum of Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century and only the elite could afford to purchase it.18 The Meissen factory in Germany was the first European manufacturer to discover the secret and secure the critical ingredient of kaolin (white clay) and petuntse (ground rock) in 1709–10, some seven centuries after China. Typically, early scholarship centred on the connoisseurship of the material itself: high-fired porcelain (soft paste or bone china) and stoneware or low-fired earthenware, as well as artistic form and decoration. Unlike continental hard-paste porcelain, early English porcelain was labelled an artificial porcelain or soft paste, since it was physically weaker, lacked kaolin and fired at a lower temperature. For softpaste porcelain, ball clay was mixed with soapstone, glass, frit and bone or other materials. A formal methodology for British soft-paste porcelain scholarship was developed in the 1940s by W. B. Honey, keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A), Department of Ceramics, who analysed documented pieces with known provenance in terms of colour, texture, glaze, foot rims, handle forms and ceramic bodies. From this, ceramic scholars compiled their pioneering reference books as a starting point and were subsequently able to conduct thorough comparative analyses with unknown works.19 These practices established much of the current framework for the dating and attribution of English ceramics still used by specialty journals: their focus is intentionally narrow and deep rather than interdisciplinary or cross-cultural to build taxonomies.20 Hilary Young, the former senior curator of the V&A, writes that the elite’s prioritizing of porcelain shaped British consumption habits from its inception and continued over the centuries. He cites Mrs Papendiek, assistant keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte, who wrote in her 1761 journal: ‘Our tea and coffee set were of Common India china [Chinese], our dinner service of earthenware, to which for our rank there was nothing superior, Chelsea

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

porcelain and fine India china being only for the wealthy. Pewter and Delftware could also be had, but were inferior.’21 Her observation reflected the hierarchies of ceramic tableware: that in noble households porcelain was favoured for the dessert course and Staffordshire ware (named for the region in which the pottery was produced) was for daily functions. These deeply ingrained taxonomies continued in the nineteenth century. They prevailed at the first major world trade event that was the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (London, 1851): organizers designated hard-paste porcelain category A, while delegating other ceramic bodies, like stoneware, lower down the alphabet to category D.22 Interestingly, design reformers Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and members of the British ceramic industry elected to use the term ‘pottery’ rather than ‘ceramic’ as the inclusive term for clay products because they believed it was distinctly English, a theme I will probe further in Chapter 4. While they acknowledged that ‘ceramic’ was the preferred terminology on the continent, its Greek etymology made it foreign for them.23 In this book, I use the word ‘ceramics’ to encompass porcelain, pottery and china as an effective and neutral term for analysis. I also employ china and crockery interchangeably in keeping with Victorian usage. The historiography of British ceramics emerged in the nineteenth century with Simeon Shaw’s detailed History of the Staffordshire Potteries (1829).24 Shaw toured the burgeoning industrial region to research individual pottery manufacturers in Northern England with the objective to gather facts related to size of operations and record biographies of the founders, which drew upon information he recorded from residents of the region and of individual pottery manufacturers. Shaw’s survey provides biographical information of the founders as well as technical and statistical information about the clay materials and sizes of the potteries, although the latter was not always accurate. Indeed, many of the featured potters were subscribers to the publication, resulting in their preferential treatment. Fifty years later, Llewellynn Jewitt also undertook first-hand research into British pottery production. The second volume of his study, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain: From Pre-historic Times Down to the Present Day (1878), focused on contemporary British potteries and comprised an assembly of articles that he covered for the Art Journal. Visiting the factories and meeting the owners, he gathered much of the information on site, and for those he was unable to visit, he wrote inquiries to the factories or sent a proxy.25 Like Shaw’s 1829 history, Jewitt’s book became a standard source for collectors and scholars. Guidebooks targeted to collectors grew in popularity in the nineteenth century and contributed to ceramic historiography. Joseph Marryat’s 1850 publication

Introduction

7

recorded the names of collectors and their collecting choices, mostly porcelain – high-end Sèvres and Chelsea – and in subsequent published editions less expensive Worcester and Lowestoft, affirming the prevailing taste for porcelain.26 The eminent dealer William Chaffers advanced the popularity of collecting with Handbook of Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain (1863), tapping into the chinamania craze that gripped Britain and America after the opening of Japan to the West in 1853; he too emphasized ‘old china’ European porcelain over English.27 As a counterpoint to the prevailing taste for porcelain, Josiah Wedgwood’s late eighteenth-century innovative ceramics – in particular his high-end black basalt and jasper ware (stoneware) of neoclassical designs – ranked high in the collector’s canon, especially with patriotic patrons, such as the politician William Gladstone.28 Eliza Meteyard solidified Wedgwood’s place in history with her lionizing two-volume The Life of Josiah Wedgwood (1865).29 The privileging of eighteenth-century ceramics was true, as well, of the American market, revealed in the publications The China Hunters Club (1878) and China Collecting in America (1892) that additionally included Chinese export porcelain, along with Wedgwood and Liverpool wares of historical views and heroes.30 Late nineteenth-century collectors and experts also developed a growing interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cottage-type production of British salt-glazed stoneware and slip-glazed earthenware, signalling a nostalgic and nationalistic taste for pre-industrial ware. French artist Marc-Louis Solon, active at Minton between 1870 and 1904 and formerly from Sèvres, wrote The Art of the Old English Potter (1874), highlighting seventeenth-century slipware but, like the title suggests, ignored present-day pottery because he deemed it too industrial.31 By the early twentieth century, it was still much the same: Victorian commercial ceramics were disregarded in the collecting and connoisseur circles. Notably, British Museum and V&A publications and exhibitions on English pottery elected to stop before 1800.32 In English Porcelain (1928), W. B. Honey stated, ‘With few exceptions, nineteenth-century wares have been very briefly treated. . . . Little can be said in praise of other Staffordshire productions.’33 However, J. F. Blacker beseeched collectors to ‘not despise the potter’s art of the nineteenth century’.34 To make up for its lack of documentation, Blacker reprinted (1912) a large segment on Victorian ceramics from the Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Another early exception was G. W. Rhead and F. A. Rhead’s Staffordshire Pots & Potters (1906) who devoted several chapters to Victorian pottery and who notably drew heavily on Shaw’s publication.35

8

Ceramics in the Victorian Era

The major breakthrough for the scholarship of Victorian ceramics occurred with Hugh Wakefield’s Victorian Pottery (1962), targeted to collectors and part of a larger series of volumes on Victorian decorative arts that he edited as keeper of the Circulation Department at the V&A.36 For some of his research he drew upon the archives of the Patent Design Registry Office, a new untapped resource for the field that was also useful for attribution.37 Another contribution to this series that reflected the long and prevailing hold of specialty collecting was Geoffrey Godden’s volume on Victorian porcelain. The conventional privileging of porcelain and eighteenth-century ceramics remained evident as well in the larger survey texts, such as Robert Charleston’s World Ceramics (1971), which served as the seminal textbook of the field, codifying a universal history of ceramics to show its key moments. Charleston, keeper of Ceramics from the V&A, organized the subject in nine parts: the eighteenth century received the most coverage, and forty-five pages were devoted to porcelain, while the nineteenth century received short shrift with a mere eighteen pages.38 These old habits and prejudices die hard, even in the early twenty-first century. Howard Coutts’s 2001 European Ceramic Design 1500–1830, an important survey that focuses on the ‘visual impact’ of ceramics and their place, also ends in 1830.39 Robin Hildyard’s English Pottery 1620–1841 (2005) casts a wider net than the narrow and deep monograph approach established by his predecessors.40 However, Hildyard terminated his survey in 1841, before the British pottery industry became commercialized and in his words ‘created a demand for cheap crudely moulded pottery hidden beneath pervasive and inappropriate decoration’.41

New approaches in ceramics scholarship Despite these inherent hierarchies and protocols, ceramic scholars and collectors acknowledge that the scope of ceramics should be widened. Remarkably, in 1999 Hilary Young stated, ‘[I]t is time to open the subject beyond connoisseurship to new readers, such as students of design and applied arts, and historians of material culture.’42 Worcester porcelain expert and dealer Simon Spero reiterated this concern during a talk significantly called ‘What We Do Not Know about 18th-Century English Porcelain’, given on the occasion of the 500th meeting of the English Ceramic Circle (2005). He stated that the ‘under-researched topics require widening our ceramic parameters and broadening the perspective from which we view the study of early English porcelain, placing it within its

Introduction

9

social, cultural, economic, commercial even political context’.43 Calls by Spero and Young for a wider approach in the writing of ceramic history constitute a significant turn within the narrow confines of the museum and the collector’s world. Young’s own 1999 publication English Porcelain 1745–95 breaks away from the monographic, factory-by-factory chronological order format to frame his discussion within larger issues centred on marketing, entrepreneurialism, material technology and distribution between the metropole and the provinces. The title of Sarah Richards’s Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (1999) is notable because it reflects her inclusive methodological approach by addressing all ceramic categories within one publication.44 A design historian by training, her main interest is middle-class consumption and she argues that regardless of whether it was fine porcelain or utilitarian Staffordshire ware, the ceramics brought a measure of civility and comfort, and introduced new decorative imagery and colour to all levels of society in both urban centres and rural communities.45 Richards’s studies offer a widening approach in the field of ceramic scholarship that was once so specialized. Chinese export and European porcelain are similarly being reinterpreted to demonstrate how they fundamentally transformed Europe as instruments of imperial power.46 Coming from outside the field, historian Robert Finlay (1998) applies social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of exchange to examine how blue-and-white porcelain became a global brand in the ecumene, altering local customs and cultures.47 His contribution to ceramic scholarship encourages academics to think about the ways in which blue-and-white porcelain created common networks and patterns in the early modern world, constructing a ‘global culture’. 48 However, in comparison to rarefied porcelain, the study of British pottery (earthenware, creamware, pearlware and stoneware) benefited earlier from interdisciplinary academic approaches focusing on production, distribution and consumption. Economist Neil McKendrick’s groundbreaking research on Josiah Wedgwood, completed in the 1960s, examined Wedgwood as a businessman and marketer, dismissing earlier hagiographic texts, which claimed that the potter was only concerned with invention and innovation.49 Historian Lorna Weatherill (1974) foregrounds the method of studying unexplored probate inventories, account books and archaeological ceramic shards as primary source material to map the growth of the industry, labour conditions and wages and markets.50 More recently, Neil Ewins’s ‘Supplying the Present Wants of Our Yankee Cousins . . .’: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775–1880 focuses, as the title suggests, on marketing and distribution and explores how the British

10

Ceramics in the Victorian Era

pottery industry segregated its markets to the Americans.51 Expanding upon American archaeologist George Miller’s studies, but from a British perspective and employing new sources, Ewins also examines lesser-known firms and merchants in an effort to identify how design decisions were made independently of the larger manufacturers. The influence of gender studies on ceramic scholarship has been considerable and is especially appropriate since so much china was collected and consumed by women, and since women made up so much of the workforce within the potteries industry itself. Literary scholar Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s seminal work (1997) on the consumption of porcelain by eighteenth-century women focused on ‘the history of the representation of women and their things, rather [than] a history of women and her things’.52 She identified two very distinct definitions of femininity within the culture of china consumption: one that shows empowerment and the other victimhood. While china fever swept both genders and all classes, women, more often than men, were blamed for this taste for the exotic, a theme I will expand upon in Chapter 3. Kowaleski-Wallace changed the scope and direction of eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholarship, influencing Karen Harvey (2008), Stacey Sloboda (2009), Christine Jones (2013) and Eric Weichel (2014), among others.53 Additionally, Jones’s publication, which represents an important new area for porcelain studies, illustrates how porcelain is part of a broader discourse that contributes to a nation’s national identity, an approach that I consider in Chapter 4. The renewal of interest in aesthetics by scholars has been beneficial for the genre of ceramics. Editors Alden Cavanaugh and Michael Yonan, in their important volume The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (2010), apply the Henry James criteria of pursuing the ‘conceptual and metaphorical implication of porcelain’ over its technical invention because the former ‘may have been more important to eighteenth century consumers’.54 Yonan, with literary historian Eugenia Zuroski, has continued the pursuit of exploring psychological and social interpretations of eighteenth-century ceramics and other material objects in their co-edited volume for the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2018).55 Contributions by Kowaleski-Wallace on the agency of the English Toby Jug, Joanna M. Gohmann’s artful ceramic pineapple and Emma Newport’s case study on Lady Dorothea Bank’s fictile collection afford new insights into ceramic vessels as metaphors of colonialism and identity, themes I incorporate in the upcoming chapters.56 I also heed Yonan’s earlier call to fuse art history and material culture by conducting visual analyses of how artists represented

Introduction

11

ceramics: how they depicted them in the idealized or imaginary interiors, who used them and how these objects negotiated with other objects in the room. My aim in this is to track how their signification might change depending on the different protocols.57 Considerable advances in the discourse of nineteenth-century ceramics can be attributed to scholars trained in literary and cultural studies.58 Notably, Patricia O’Hara (1993), John Haddad (2007) and Elizabeth Hope Chang (2010) build upon Edward Said’s concept of ‘the Orient’ in their discussions of the pictorial imagery of the blue willow pattern.59 Indeed, as they acknowledge, for many Western consumers, the tableware represented their first encounter with China. They deftly situate the willow pattern in larger cultural and material histories, and I expand upon their research in Chapters 2 and 3. Material cultural studies historian Ann Smart Martin (2001) similarly addresses Victorian ceramics from an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating contemporary text and painting to enhance and broaden the narrative. She contends that ceramics are a catalyst ‘for moral redemption by aesthetics into a better world’.60 My work advances Smart Martin’s research on the integration of ceramics, Victorian morality tales and painting. Her insightful observation that vessels carried more than water and tea because of their metaphorical powers is relevant to my project. Gender studies and recognition of class influences have influenced scholarship on nineteenth-century ceramic production, collecting and display. One of the earliest studies of women labour practices in the Potteries in the nineteenth century was initiated by Cheryl Buckley.61 Moira Vincentelli’s work on women’s strategies of collecting and exhibition is particularly important for analysing the language of ceramic presentations. Her contention that the practice represents an expression of women’s personal identity contextualizes my own thinking on the popular theme of displaying china in the cupboard in both literature and painting. Recent and current scholarship has turned to the collector and the act of collecting as a dynamic form of investigation, which has benefited ceramic studies.62 Ann Eatwell’s pioneering 1995 article on Lady Charlotte Schreiber and her majestic donation of 1800 English ceramics to the V&A contribute greatly to the subject of women and collecting in the nineteenth century.63 According to Eatwell, the usual pattern of women collectors was to disperse their collections at auction or bequeath them to family. Schreiber broke from this convention and not only practised the male custom of gifting to an institution but was also a scholar who catalogued and documented her collection. Such activity was not expected of women, who were believed to collect for decor and fashion

12

Ceramics in the Victorian Era

rather than for provenance and classification, understood as a man’s pursuit. Eatwell also shows that early collecting books reinforced this gender divide and concludes that the number of women collectors increased in the last quarter of the nineteenth century because more information became published and the popularity of genteel china painting both fuelled and legitimized the hobby. Hildyard expands upon Eatwell’s history of collecting in the final chapter of his survey of English pottery but focuses on ‘the eminent and cultured men who collected humble pottery’.64 Patricia Ferguson’s comprehensive publication (2016) adds to the discussion on ceramic collecting in relation to the English country house, a subject which has largely been ignored since Ann Somers Cocks’s insightful investigations (1985) on how the aristocracy used nonfunctional ceramics in their estates.65 Art, design and cultural historians have mainly, and quite rightly, focused on chinamania in the nineteenth century, the passion for collecting blue-andwhite china. Linda Merrill, Charlotte Gere and Anne Anderson’s essays on Victorian chinamania (2010–15) broaden the discussion of ceramics in the context of gender, orientalizing taste and Aestheticism.66 Their work serves as a direct foundation for my own research, but I suggest that more study is needed to thoroughly understand how the ceramics operate as simulacra in visual Aesthetic painting, which I address in Chapter 3. I also turn to Julie Codell’s (2014) incisive discussions of William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: she proposes that theatricality and hyperrealism are critical components of the artists’ representation of objects – important ideas that I develop further when I examine their ceramic facsimiles.67 Chinamania, however, was not restricted to blue and white but embraced as well Victorian majolica, a lead-glazed earthenware reproduced in exotic and innovative shapes. Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, published in 2021, demonstrates that the malleable clay body expressed imperialism, orientalism and colonialism of the Victorian period.68 Co-edited by Susan Weber, thirty-four essays from sixteen distinguished scholars and curators examine retailing, botany, dining, architectural decor, Darwinism, racism, company histories and British potters immigrating to the United States all from the lens of majolica. The three-volume set makes an important statement: high and low majolica are worthy of the same attention that rare and elite eighteenthcentury porcelain has received in academic discourse. Recent infusions from design history, cultural history and material culture have laid valuable groundwork by asking significant questions and establishing innovative organizational strategies. Penny Sparke’s publications on gender and

Introduction

13

the cult of the middle-class Victorian domestic ideal, especially As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995), sharpen and advance my contextual analysis of ceramics personifying women’s attributes and how these objects negotiated agency in literary and painted interiors.69 Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (2008) and John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2009) frame my own discussion of how Victorians valued portable household ceramics. Charlotte Gere’s extensive Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (2010), which looks at the representation of jewellery and its metaphorical role in Victorian society, notably painting, literature and exhibitions, serves as an important road map to structure my line of inquiry.70 The arguments in my book are also informed and contextualized by the excellent research and analyses by Erika Rappaport (2006) and Julie Fromer (2008) and others on how the act of drinking tea unites gender and class binaries, reflects nationalism and signifies women’s work, and how shopping shapes the modern experience of women’s lives. However, these studies unfortunately rarely focus on ceramics and its specific influences.71 Similarly, the 2016 volume of essays in Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain does not include ceramics, despite their ubiquity throughout the nineteenth century. The following chapters address this regrettable and surprising void in nineteenthcentury studies.

Chapter overviews Themes and chronologies overlap throughout the five chapters of this book allowing the reader to make connections about the materiality, function, form and ornamentation with social aspects of Victorian society, such as gender roles, class, labour and imperialism. For the most part, I group paintings in which ceramics are represented largely following the conventions of art history: genre painting, social realism, Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism. The underscoring leitmotif that unites all the chapters is that pottery and porcelain should be viewed as portable tools of Anglo-imperialism embodying empire, whether they were made in Britain or imported from China. In the latter case, they performed transculturation through appropriation, absorption and subjection of Chinese culture. As Mary Pratt explains, ‘transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’.72 A connecting thread throughout all five chapters is that

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

ceramic dishes, whether rare or plentiful, metaphorized spoken and unspoken social realities. Chapter 1 examines how ceramics worked as agents of both the design reformers and the Aesthetes but in quite different ways. In the early Victorian period, Staffordshire-made pottery, notably creamware/pearlware, acted as moral agents of the design reformers, imparting visual ideals coded with Christian values about manners and taste for social improvement. The astounding number of pieces of pottery, whether low-end crockery or high-end decorative porcelain prevalent in all levels of Victorian society, made it a target for design reform. The mid-nineteenth-century design reformer and art critic John Ruskin held such a strong disregard for commercial British pottery that he used it as unflattering metaphors to criticize the artists he disliked, as did his contemporary Richard Redgrave. Another influential design reformer Charles Eastlake put it best: ‘there is no branch of art-manufacture exposed to greater dangers, in point of taste, than that of ceramic design.’73 Taste-making and housekeeper guides offered advice on how to navigate the wealth of choice of tableware patterns and ceramic bodies to prevent consumers from making the wrong choice. There was some diversity of opinion but mostly there was consensus: middle-class families should have multiple sets, separating best and every day, while servants were to be given their own plain dishes; ornate decoration and pictorial imagery were deemed wrong because they hid dirt and overpowered form; and gilding was vulgar and to be avoided. Design reformers emphasized that ceramic decoration should be minimal to mark both good hygiene and elevated taste.74 The reformers argued for fitness for purpose to advance conventionalized design over pictorial and naturalistic ornament with the aim of ultimately improving the taste and manners of the working and lower classes. The reformers’ views are evidenced in Redgrave’s Poor Teacher series and other genre paintings where the undecorated and simple English creamware/pearlware crockery at once befit the subjects’ servile economic and social status while still signifying comfort, rectitude and even patriotism. Design reform ideologies concerning pottery’s role in encouraging moral improvements penetrated the writings of both popular and obscure decor guides, along with Victorian morality tales. As the author of Eliza Cook’s Journal (ignoring the pictorial and anti-pictorial debate) stated, the well-shaped form of a figure depicted on the dinner plate was superior to inaccessible Raphaels, Claudes and Poussins in activating and educating the uneducated.75 Publications and visual culture of the period highlighted the important agency assumed by ceramic dishes that served as anti-Semtic tropes or common denominators equalizing the classes, shaping

Introduction

15

the mind of the child and elevating the taste of the elderly. Further complicating ceramic’s agency among the design reformers were collecting practices that prioritized antique or ‘old’ over ‘new’ pottery, contributing to the stratification and hierarchies of their meanings which was practised by the Aesthetes who also called for non-pictorial narratives on ceramics. Authors Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope reiterated or satirized these new ideas. Recent scholarship importantly acknowledges that the Aesthetic Movement’s embrace of ceramics from Japan and China was fuelled by the imperialistic acts of the opening of Japan (1854) and the looting and razing of the Summer Palace in Beijing (1860).76 To this I add the observation that since Aesthetic artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler and Albert Joseph Moore banished the outmoded and parochial techniques and moralizing subjects of English genre painting, they also chose to eliminate English crockery, one of its key ingredients. The cultural referents of the orientalist exotic pots inspired new treatments for their compositions to resemble the ceramics themselves: non-pictorial and non-linear, with colour palettes of blue and white and Imari red. I argue that in comparison with British genre painters who used pottery to express values, class and gender, and to heighten realism, Aesthetic artists deliberately did the opposite. They paired decorative pottery with decorative women to be manipulated as props echoing Kowaleski-Wallace’s observation about the mediations of eighteenth-century women and china: decorative empty vessels waiting to be filled. Thus, in Aestheticism, ceramics no longer served to symbolize home and women’s domestic duty but operated as ornamental models signifying the role of women in the artistic interiors. The significance of blue-and-white china and orientalism is evidenced in the willow pattern, the most successful and widely distributed transferware pattern of the Victorian era that was produced by hundreds of potteries in the UK – more than any other pattern.77 As I discuss in Chapter 2, the explanation behind the success of the willow pattern may lie with the so-called legend surrounding it, a Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed lovers, which was pure British fiction, despite the belief at that time that it, as well as the pattern, had originated in China. While recent scholars have written insightful interpretations of the blue willow pattern, as ways to advance Anglo-imperialism, I argue the perceptions and meanings of the willow pattern were as subtle as they were complicated. The talking willow plate, in Charles Dickens’s and William Henry Willis’s 1852 essay ‘A Plated Article’, exemplified companionship as did the willow patterned cup for Elizabeth Gaskell’s old Alice in Mary Barton. Design reformer

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

Henry Cole enjoyed the pattern as a guilty pleasure but despaired that it blocked design development in the Potteries. Eliot’s Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch scorned it as lower class, and independent-minded Rose, in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, identified it as an agent of domestic servitude. However, for still others it represented good English manufacturing. I posit that knowing the legend behind the blue willow plate, a story of thwarted young love, unlocks material clues and opens new meanings in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painting, as seen in George Elgar Hicks’s Sinews of Old England, Edward Burne-Jones’s Cinderella, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girl at Lattice and William Holman Hunt’s Honest Labour Has a Comely Face. Artists admired the design for its blue-and-white sensibility but adopted the legend to underscore either true love and fidelity or the barriers to love and the victimhood of women. Attention to and knowledge of the willow legend enable the importance of other material symbols within the paintings and literature to emerge, which, when considered together, further strengthen the theme of female entrapment in Pre-Raphaelite painting and the longing for escape and transformation. Therefore, the willow pattern as a metonymic commodity came to mean different things to so many Victorians as it resonated and embodied varying ideas about British consumption, imperialism, class and taste, both bad and good.78 The visual design of and literary legend behind the willow pattern became so widespread among all the classes that any ceramic dish imprinted with this pattern had the potential agency to perform multiple tasks as an object of moral instruction and as a decorative and functional signifier of class taste. If they chose, Victorian audiences could read and listen to these meanings and metaphors from their dishes. But it was not only the ubiquitous willow pattern that was imbued with a mutable agency, but the object types of china cups and teapots were often personified in Victorian text and image to similarly impart multifaceted meanings. The personification of the teacup in Reverend Wedgwood’s 1878 book on the subject claimed that no less than a teacup may contribute to ‘schools of scandal’ at social tea parties and is ‘the pivot of many of plots’.79 As such, he shows its multipurpose mission in bringing the family together for joy and comfort or encouraging gossip both malignant and benign. Erika Rappaport points out the tea-table crossed class structures, serving as a link and binder between the opposing forces of labour and rest, masculine and feminine gender roles, and luxury and necessity. In Chapter 3, I show that the actual tea-things undertook these tasks as well. Teapots (brown glazed, blue and white and silver-plated) and teacups (London- or Bute-shaped, with or without handles) contributed

Introduction

17

to this agency and further shaped the experience at the tea-table. They directly and indirectly stood for the colonialism and imperialism of Britain’s mercantile empire that extended to the West Indies, India and China. Victorian painting and literature representing men and women with teacups and tea accessories in partial or complete china services (often British-made) bridged the rigid class system and demonstrated shared moral values and civilizing manners. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Gaskell’s Mary Barton show us that china cups were desirable among the lower middle classes, but, because china services were affordable to them only in small sets or not at all, it was common at tea parties to rent cups, bring your own, share or hastily wash them for reuse. Analysing how British realist artists Thomas Faed, Frank Holl and Hubert von Herkomer emphasized and replicated their tea dishes to gentrify the poor in their paintings reveals as much about their dependence on stock motifs (a blueand-white or a brown monochrome teapot or a white china cup) as it does for their need to doctor their so-called realist portraits to attain viewer sympathy. In portraits of upwardly mobile families in both English genre and Aesthetic painting, the china is finer, the service larger and the tea urn is silver. They afford more meanings of how china cups and saucers denoted artistic ornamentation. Moreover, they also operated as tools to objectify women, such as William Holman Hunt’s The Children’s Holiday. Chapter 3, therefore, argues that teadrinking objects operated as analogical and metonymical agents that crossed class structures. In Chapter 4, I move away from the typology of objects to investigate the national rhetoric surrounding the production and consumption of British ceramics. I contend there is a direct connection between the English school of painting and English ceramics: both mediums invoked national sentiment to be appreciated by all levels of society, appropriate for ‘the cottage and the palace’.80 Both were thought of as contributing to the improvement of the social manners and values of the working class, a microcosm of Britain’s sense of imperial superiority. As one visitor proclaimed looking at the British display stands of ceramics at the Great Exhibition: ‘Let us boast of our matchless display of useful, convenient, republican crockery, adapted to the wants of a clean, and much washing people.’81 English functional ceramics, therefore, should be analysed in the same light as English genre painting: moralizing and patriotic symbols of empire, as they were so often viewed at the time. Ceramic dishes either individually or in sets served as both tokens and measures of Englishness for travellers like artist Mary Ellen Best and Canadian settlers like Susanna Moodie or the aristocrat Lady Hariot Georgina Dufferin.

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

In England, patriotism for the British ceramics industry manifested in factory tourism, a democratic pastime that appealed to all classes. Fictional characters, journalists, designers and both royal and middle-class patrons visited the Potteries in Staffordshire or the Worcester factory to witness how ceramics were made. However, the ultimate form of patriotism was the purchase and display of British pottery actions that privately and publicly expressed gender, personal identity, nationalism and strong Christian faith – values closely keyed to notions of empire as well as gentrification. Critics and fictional writers such as Ruskin, Gaskell and Eliot praised and critiqued these notions while ‘amateur artists’ like Best and Elizabeth Pearson Dalby and professional artist Henry Hunt, among others, depicted them. These wholesome and patriotic midVictorian representations marked an alternative view of ceramic consumption in comparison to William Hogarth’s and Punch’s eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury illustrations of rapacious chinamania. Clay and the process of manufacturing pottery (especially the transmutation of the material from soft clay into a hard, impervious ceramic) conveyed strong religious metaphors, distinguishing ceramics from other consumer products in the Victorian marketplace. ‘We are all of us children of clay’, ‘we spring from lumps of clay’, ‘man is but God’s vessel’ are common phrases found in both journalistic texts and religious tracts. Clay ‘enduring’ the kiln’s fiery flames to transform into an even stronger material was similarly charged with heavy Christian symbolism likened to men and women’s endurance to resist temptation and strengthen moral character.82 Victorian writers harnessed the strong religious connotations of clay to link commercial British ceramic manufacturing to rectitude, thereby assuring that British pottery became an agent of godliness. For this reason, different clay bodies were commonly used as literary tropes to evaluate strength of character. Trade and religious publications as well as leading authors George Henry Lewes, Henry James and Gaskell applied porcelain as a metaphor for frailty and foreignness while using stoneware and earthenware as signs of strength. Infused with religious undertones, ceramics also intimated life and death. William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil exemplifies this reading and shows how pottery served as an instrument of vanitas. Here, the pottery does not simply stage the human action of the narrative but is integral to it and is emblematic of how pottery commands its own agency. In the final chapter, I return to the typology of the object: I consider the common and practical English jug in all shapes and sizes to assess in the Heideggerian sense how it operated as a carrier and container of meanings and metaphors. Painters Richard Redgrave and Frank Stone employed the broken

Introduction

19

jug as a metaphor for broken female virtue, as did Eliot in Adam Bede. American artist Lilly Martin Spencer depended upon a decorative floral Parian jug as a tool of self-identification in her early genre paintings of women preparing food in the kitchen. Drinking vessels aligned with men could indicate the strong moral character of the British and the embodiment of happy England, as in the case of Gabriel Varden and his companionable Toby Jug in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge; alternatively, they may suggest weak character and fragility, such as the wounded soldier and his broken hunting jug in James Collinson’s Home Again or allude to drunkenness in James Campbell’s Girl with Jug of Ale. In addition to Dickens and Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy, along with lesser-known writers, are brought into the discussion to show how these metaphorical meanings are echoed in their texts. The next section expands upon the argument that I posited in Chapter 1, that ceramics operated as agents of design reform. I maintain the relief-moulded jug became an important subject for Henry Cole’s design reform circle to critique because it was a mass-produced commodity and subjected to so many fashion crimes. The mainstream commercial jug or pitcher, referred to as a ‘pet’ among Stoke-on-Trent pottery manufacturers, contributed to the significant debates of nineteenth-century design reform concerning the nuanced line between good and bad ornament for functional industrially produced objects. This debate has been a subject discussed by recent scholars of wallpaper and textile design but strikingly under-researched in ceramics.83 These erudite discussions concerning a jug’s appropriate design did not preclude the object from becoming an agent of nefarious acts. As contemporaneous newspapers documented in their headlines, jugs assisted in drunken brawling and other criminal activities, functioning far beyond manufacturers’ original intentions. However, just as they aided in degenerate actions, they also operated in more profound capacities, putting out fires and quenching thirst. Eliot, John Everett Millais and Charlotte Brontë show us how the universal jug form could also operate as an elegiac object that at once contains and defines the meaning of life. In these many and important ways, jugs and pitchers helped to shape the modes of behaviour of Britons in the Victorian period.

Conclusion Henry Willett, an important Victorian patron of British pottery, who donated his collection to the Brighton Museum in 1879, collected on the principle that ‘the

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

History of a Country may be traced on its homely Pottery’.84 Willett’s rationale was to map the social history of ceramics rather than rely on the conventions of aesthetics or factory marks. He chose to collect for reasons based upon ‘the greater human interest, which they represent’.85 My book shares Willett’s objective (without his class, gender and imperial biases) to better understand the social history of ceramics, to discover new perspectives on its multiple and mutable meanings. British industrial ceramic production was plentiful, and its consumption was intense among all classes during this period. In order to downplay the importance of uniqueness and the exceptional and open a discursive space for such widely made items, design historian Clive Dilnot advocates for an anti-hierarchical acceptance of all types of objects from high to low within the realm of mass production.86 Building upon this, Judith Attfield cleverly coined the terminology lower case design (anonymous everyday objects) and things with attitude (rarefied objects).87 Here then, Eliot’s previously mentioned brown pitcher and other common dishes are relevant: as lower case objects they should not be ignored in art or scholarship, which the following chapters will show. While each chapter is a case study of a particular group of ceramics, I hope this volume opens further discussion on the lives and agencies of all types of ceramic objects in the Victorian period.

1

Ceramics as an agent of design reform and Aestheticism

[T]he rich little think how much better we feel for having nice things about us, cheap and common though they be, and how far we feel lifted above our common lot by things.1 For the anonymous narrator in ‘The New Crockery Shop’, published in 1849 in Eliza Cook’s Journal, ‘nice things’ mean ceramic tableware. In this serialized short story, it is a melon-shape ‘show-pot’, neither ‘cheap’ nor ‘common’, that drives the plotline. The novel design, distinguished by a jasmine-flowered knob, honeysuckle spout and stalk handle, belongs to young Madeleine, whose father once owned an elegant china shop on Oxford Street. Recently orphaned, she is forced to go to the docks and sell the prized object to the unsavoury Mr and Mrs Moses – presumably Jews given their biblical name and anti-Semitic description – who were as ‘ugly and unwashed as the ceramic goods that they sell’.2 In this way, dirty ceramics served as agents of anti-Semitism, marking a contrast to the cleanliness of monochrome crockery operating as tools of piety and faith, which I discuss later in the chapter and in Chapter 4. A ‘good-hearted’ seamstress comes to the rescue and buys the rare item and also a matching tea-tray and table to complement its high design – all these ‘nice things’ improve the etiquette of her ‘slattern’ and ‘untidy’ household. What is more, the seamstress funds Madeleine to manage a new china shop of her own, resulting in the shuttering of the Moses’s business. Her shop sells a ‘marvellous display’ of well-shaped jugs, cups, saucers and teapots ‘so cheap’ that they are affordable to ‘humble mechanics, shipwrights, and draymen’.3 The neighbourhood becomes gentrified: a temperance society and a lending library open, successfully keeping the locals away from the gin shops. The exemplar teapot personifying the exemplar Madeleine, therefore, demonstrates that ceramics in the Victorian age were far from neutral objects. Here then, an object,

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era

specifically a teapot, operates as a catalyst to refining taste, promoting cleanliness and facilitating moral self-improvement. Alternatively, when the dishes are dirty, ‘ugly and unwashed’, they impose a negative agency of anti-Semitism.4 The design of the melon teapot demonstrates the then current taste for chinoiserie and naturalism and resembles Richard Redgrave’s silver ‘Camellia’ pear-shaped teapot with stalk leaves wrapped around the spout. Redgrave created the pattern in 1847, before he adopted more conventionalized designs of nature for Felix Summerly, a short-lived art manufacturer operated by Henry Cole, the leading design reformer of the period.5 In the conclusion of the story, the narrator makes a direct reference to Felix Summerly: Therefore good Felix Summerly and thy Disciples to beautify what thou canst for the people; and not only adorn the homes of the rich and high but give beauty to poor places; and set it, a holy thing before us, about us, and around us!6

Eliza Cook, the founder of the short-lived magazine, was a Chartist and advocate for women’s rights; her message was that the well-shaped teapot, the form of a drinking cup or the figure depicted on the dinner plate were superior in motivating and teaching the uneducated than inaccessible ‘Raphaels, Claudes, and Poussins’.7 The author beseeches designers to ‘give beauty to poor places’, anticipating by some ten years John Ruskin’s speech wherein he entreated Yorkshire industrialists to employ their ‘lofty’ privilege and bring ‘the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and poor’.8 In this chapter, I posit that ceramics, which are usually displayed or mentioned in the peripheries of Victorian paintings and literature, contributed significantly to the symbolism and allegory of good taste throughout the nineteenth century but in very different ways. Design reformers depended upon pottery as active agents to improve design in their crusade against crass materialism brought on by mass production, which they believed would result in elevating consumer manners. The Aesthetes turned to ceramics as passive agents transmitting new modalities of decorative beauty according to the principles of art for art’s sake, but there was no pretension to better commercial design and therefore to gentrify societal behaviour.9 First, I argue that ceramic dishes in the nineteenth century were active objects used by writers, artists and designers to convey meanings and metaphors. Design reformer Henry Cole, his colleague Richard Redgrave and others in his circle employed ceramics to advocate for fitness for purpose and to advance conventionalized design over pictorial and naturalism with the aim of ultimately improving the taste and manners of the working and lower classes.

Ceramics as an Agent of Design Reform

23

Ceramics represented in Victorian literature and visual culture could signify gentility or ostentation depending upon how they were rendered. Further complicating their agency were collecting practices that prioritized antique or ‘old’ over ‘new’ ceramics, contributing to the stratification and hierarchies of their meanings. Such thinking about ceramics was echoed and often parodied by authors Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope. Later in the century, ceramics’ agency shifted from one associated with moral codes to one that promoted the decorative and conjured the exotic in line with the tenets of emerging Aestheticism. I open the chapter considering why John Ruskin, Cole, Redgrave and others dismissed much of contemporary commercial English pottery. Objecting to its use of printed or hand-painted pictorial decoration and gilding as false and deceitful principles of design, they instead favoured monochrome creamware with or without plain border patterns in the conviction that simplicity was better suited to delineate form and looked to historic pottery models for contemporary design patterns. I also examine how Redgrave, an artist as well as a designer and writer, manifested his design tenets in his genre paintings, particularly his depictions of pottery, arguing that while he selected plain, non-illusionary designs for his pots, his canvases were strongly anecdotal in keeping with the tradition of genre painting. Design reformers Cole, Redgrave and Owen Jones consequently shaped the thinking of other writers on household taste and overlapped with the Aesthetic Movement on their choice for non-pictorial narratives on ceramics, which leads to my discussion on how artists represented pottery and porcelain as expressions of Aestheticism. Examining a selection of work painted by James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Albert Joseph Moore, I hold that they rejected contemporary British pottery in favour of Japanese and Chinese blue-and-white porcelain and other ‘Turkish’ ceramics (as Middle Eastern pottery was known) for what they believed to be higher beauty. They eschewed English creamware and redware used by Redgrave and other English genre artists in part to disassociate their work from didactic English genre painting. Instead, they chose Chinese and Japanese blue-and-white porcelain (and they often conflated the two) as entries into new artistic approaches favouring non-linear perspective and twodimensional decoration and to fantasize and exoticize an orientalist vision of East Asia. While the mania for blue-and-white china as a touchstone for Aestheticism has been well documented by previous scholars who have ably analysed who started collecting blue and white first and who coined which term, I argue that

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there is more to consider here.10 I offer a deeper investigation into how these various artists consistently remediated ceramics into two-dimensional forms in their painting to inspire new treatments for their compositions to resemble ceramics themselves – non-pictorial and non-linear, and colour palettes of blue and white and Imari red. Here I borrow the term ‘remediation’ from Jay David Bolter and Richard Gustin, who argue that new media ‘refashion prior media forms’, and in this case I argue that Aesthetic artists changed the representations of their pottery in their painting to advance artistic discourse in pursuit of a beauty independent of social reform.11 In this way, their ceramic representations, while closely resembling the originals, are still facsimiles and should be considered less as documents of material culture of their time and more as examples of what art historian Julie Codell calls transculturation, appropriating and assimilating exotic cultures. As with the design reformers, Aesthetic artists often paired women and pottery but with very different objectives: they collected them as props, empty, passive vessels in which they artistically both manipulated and dispensed with moral messaging. Thus, in Aestheticism, ceramics no longer served to symbolize home, domestic duty and moral reform but instead operated as ornamental models personifying the women in their artistic interiors.

Design reform and commercial English pottery When looking back on the long nineteenth century, scholars rightly cite John Ruskin’s copious lectures and essays on life, art and industry as important touchstones. Ruskin’s critical writings are relevant to the discussion of meanings and metaphors in ceramics. While he valued the universality and importance of the clay vessel, stating that ‘the pot, cup, and platter represent the first civilized furniture’,12 it is hardly surprising to learn that as a leading critic of industrialization and mass-produced consumer goods, he similarly disliked British commercial ceramics since they were mechanically reproduced. Ruskin observed that the hand, the head and heart of the individual craftsman were suppressed by odious working conditions – resulting in vulgar decoration defying fitness for purpose.13 In The Stones of Venice (1853), Ruskin famously argued that industrialization which demands perfection reduces workers to slavery who are ‘like fuel to feed the factory smoke’, to be ‘divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life’.14 However, in the nineteenth century, Britain was the world exporter of pottery, having usurped China. In contrast to Ruskin, many British consumers took pride in

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their successful industry and positively influenced their perception of English contemporary pottery, a theme I will expand upon in Chapter 4. In 1859 Ruskin pronounced that pottery manufacturers had a choice to make ‘educational instruments’ (as he believed Josiah Wedgwood to have done) or ‘mere drugs of the market’, concluding that the pottery industry wielded a strong influence in public taste.15 A further indication that Ruskin largely disapproved of mass-produced ceramics was that, remarkably, in his art reviews, he sometimes used them as metaphorical darts to hurl insults. Ruskin deemed Claude Lorrain’s landscapes loathsome to be ‘ranked with fine pieces of china manufacture’ because prices depended ‘on the rarity rather than the merit, yet always on a merit of a certain low kind’.16 For a stained glass that Ruskin himself designed, he shamefacedly conceded that ‘[T]he dragon looks as if he had just come off the handle of some dragon china’, in reference to blue-and-white Chinese porcelain made for the export market which was held in low regard by some collectors.17 Ruskin’s problem with contemporary commercial pottery was with surface decoration, believing it was usually poorly drafted and, even worse, out of place. He even brought a breakfast plate to one lecture to make his point: its round shape is ‘the greatest holding surface gathered into the smallest space’, he proclaimed, and its rim is also useful, a ‘simplest form of a continuous handle’. But he objected to the ill-painted roses, exclaiming ‘there was no hand such as William Hunt’s (one of his favourite watercolour artists) to paint them’ and make their ‘graphic power distinguished’. However, even if the china painter had talent, he argued that the flowers served no purpose: the ornament did not ‘obey some mental principle of order, or physical principle of harmony’.18 In this same manner, the brothers Richard and Samuel Redgrave in their seminal monograph, A Century of British Painters, published in 1866, used china painting to censor artists. They dismissed the work of Henry James Richter as ‘sleek’, ‘mannered’ and ultimately ‘china painted’.19 John Martin, who painted enamels on glass and china when he was young, was of little merit, concluding with the final cutting remark, ‘there was somewhat of a sense of the china-painter to the last’.20 Thomas Lawrence, the popular portrait painter, renders flesh colour not as flesh but ‘having the appearance of being painted on hard ground, such as china’.21 Ruskin’s and the Redgrave brothers’ dismissal of commercial ceramics and china painting reflected the existing hierarchies of the arts, namely that fine art was considered superior to the mechanically executed applied arts.22 Henry Cole, the main organizer of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and first director of the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum), recognized the restricting taxonomies between fine and commercial

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arts: ‘When an artist paints a picture, unless he gets anybody to help him, he begins and ends it himself, and then it is called Fine Art; if on the contrary, an artist makes a design, and it is repeated by another process, even so closely that nobody can tell it from the original, that is repudiated as “base and mechanical”.’23 Cole’s commentary reveals his disappointment with consumers who value art higher than design. He attempted to rectify this imbalance throughout most of his career, in his multitude positions as manufacturer, designer, museum and school director. Art historian Jules Lubbock recently observes in his important publication, The Tyranny of Taste, that government-funded design schools established in 1837, and which fell under Cole’s purview in 1852, demonstrated an increasing interest in regulating items like a humble teacup in order to ‘reshape personal morality by implementing the kind of control over individual consumption’.24 The aforementioned story, The Crockery Shop and the pages of the Art Journal reiterated the message that pottery and useful crockery improved the taste, and thus the well-being, of the working classes: ‘Crockery,’ as it is familiarly termed, enters more largely into our domestic and social existence, than any other production; even the broken tea-cups wisely kept for show, are objects which exercise an influence over the dawning mind of the child, and over the development of taste in the mature man.25

As this 1846 passage suggests, quotidian dishes or crockery made in earthenware and creamware take on an important agency among design reformers, who believed that they acted as a social leveller of sorts serving as a common denominator used by both upper and the lower classes from the palace to the cottage, and help shape the mind of a child and improve the taste of a grown man. Apsley Pellatt, a successful London glass manufacturer and a Member of Parliament, whose firm advertised in the Art Journal, likewise observed some ten years later: ‘Among cottage comforts, not the least pleasing to the eye of the philanthropist is a good supply of useful crockery.’26 With this patronizing comment, Pellatt implied that from his high and charitable position, he appreciated the role that all crockery played to improve the social manners of the lower class. Praises sung by Pellatt and others may reflect the results of the newly funded government schools of design, two of which were located in Staffordshire, the heart of Britain’s manufacturing industry known as the Potteries, in Stokeon-Trent and Hanley in 1847 (Tunstall, Burslem, Fenton and Longton made up the other six Potteries towns).27

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However, industry insiders, such as William Evans, cited different problems unrelated to design. Publishing Art and History of the Potting Business in 1846, following the fraught pottery strikes in 1836–7 and the Pottery Riots in 1842, he argued that manufacturers were flooding tableware into the marketplace and, in turn, reducing potters’ wages. Evans observed that while the cotton and woollen business depended upon the introduction of machinery to lower prices, this was not the case with pottery.28 Zeroing in on earthenware (a common low-fired clay body used for crockery), he complained that the prices for everyday dishes were already too low, ‘the most of trifling of sums’. Cutting prices more would be injurious to both worker and employer since it ‘cannot produce an increased demand’, because the market was currently saturated.29 Potters’ rights, however, were rarely discussed in the pages of the leading art and design magazines of the period. The aforementioned Art Journal critic, who remarked that even broken teacups had the potential to better the mind of its consumers, stated that he was ‘more anxious for the improvement of common earthenware, than for the triumph of expensive porcelain’, because this was the pottery for the people.30 His preoccupation with its production, unlike that of Evans, was focused on design to elevate working-class taste and manners rather than the livelihoods of the workers. One major objection to earthenware tableware was that it was decorated with a plethora of impractical transfer-print patterns that did not reflect fitness for purpose, an important principle of the design reformers. Redgrave, echoing Ruskin, adopted the anti-illustrative stance, challenging representations of landscapes and figures on dishes as ‘almost always out of place’. Most problematic, it hid overall form. Decoration should be restricted to the borders, leaving the centres bare, he opined, because ‘utility would be better served by the absence of any decoration in the part which receives the food’. The ‘white unchanged surface of the material’ contributed to ‘a sense of cleanliness’.31 Redgrave’s position on ceramic design reform received support from the Art-Union and credited him for observing that the Potteries needed to advance beyond Wedgwood’s neoclassical styles by John Flaxman. Again, citing Redgrave for this idea, the magazine complained that though Wedgwood ‘had done much to put a salutary curb on extravagance of style, [he] still resurrected a dead art’.32 Additionally, the Art Journal called for conventionalized designs on highend virtuoso pieces and not just mass-produced transferware. One critic, who gave a post-review of the Great Exhibition, was offended by the ‘Portrait Vases’, manufactured by Charles Meigh & Sons, though did not mention the offending pottery by name (Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1  Charles Meigh & Co, vase, 1846–51. Stoneware painted, relief moulding, enamels, gilding, 101.6 by 53.3 cm. V&A, London. Photo: ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The pair of pink-ground stoneware vases, embellished with rococo-styled gilded gesso pelicans and fronds, depicted the exterior and interior of the Crystal Palace on the back, and featured the portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (after Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s 1842 royal portraits) on the front.33 The views defied Rule XI of the design reform circle (Cole, Redrave and Owen Jones) where ‘the basic form should control the distribution of the ornament’ and displayed the impropriety of placing pictures upon the round: Set in a panel such as we have described, and embracing the whole available surface on one side of the vase, was an elaborately finished drawing of the transept of the building, and presenting the appearance, when viewed at a little distance of an inflated balloon; the bulging or ovular form of the body of the vase having compelled the artist, in order to keep his vertical lines perpendicular, to distort the drawing.34

As this example of ostentation demonstrated, design reform was required for high-end ceramics. The condemnation reveals a new direction of the art reformers to respect the three-dimensional quality of pottery, recognizing that

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it was not a flat canvas, and so better suited to schematized, two-dimensional ornamentation that respects the form by avoiding illusionist representation and use of perspective. As the scathing review of the ‘Portrait Vases’ indicates, this thinking began in earnest after the Great Exhibition.35 Charles Dickens was an ardent critic of Henry Cole and his cohorts like Redgrave and famously parodied the former as taste tyrant Tom Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854). In one scene, Gradgrind (Cole) bullies young Sissy Jupe for openly liking naturalistic-looking flowers in carpets and wallpapers, insisting that as she would never walk on a flowerbed it was illogical that she would enjoy walking on a carpet of flowers that were realistically rendered.36 Dickens similarly defended the middle-class preference for tableware patterns with ‘faultless perspective’ in his review of the Stoke-based Copeland factory. In this important essay, which I will return to in the following chapter, he praised ‘cheap tableware patterns of beautiful design, [which] insinuate good wholesome natural art into the humblest households’.37 Sensitive to the taxonomy of the ceramic industry, he described ‘the aristocracy of order’ between earthenware and porcelain: those made of the finer clay, that is porcelain, are the ‘peers and peeresses’, and the porcelain dessert, breakfast and tea services represent ‘the endless nobility and gentry’. Likewise, not all designers supported the call to banish perspective and realism in ceramic ornamentation. Also voicing objection was Léon Arnoux, the eminent French potter who served as Minton’s art director since 1849, prior to working at the prestigious Sèvres factory renowned for its exquisitely painted scenery. He believed that England lacked appropriate schools to learn skilled china painting. Arnoux further explained: ‘to be a good artist, it is not sufficient to have acquired by long practice the knowledge of the technical processes; it is necessary to know how to compose, or in other words, to make the subject selected subordinate to the form of the vase, and the accessories subordinate to the principal subject.’38 Arnoux, then, believed that the artistic conventions of perspective and illusionism were only acceptable on ceramics if compositional sensitivity were taken into consideration.

Richard Redgrave’s representations of pottery In the 1840s Redgrave was a prominent genre painter before turning exclusively to landscape. His depictions of pottery in these works served as symbols of solace and civility and reflected common motifs that English genre artists employed

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throughout the century, as I will expand upon in later chapters. Redgrave’s strong narrative skills paralleled the emergence of the English social novel in the 1830s and 1840s, and, just as they used crockery and china to heighten the storyline or delineate character, so too did Redgrave in own his canvases.39 In keeping with his anti-pictorial stance for ceramics, he generally did not represent illustrative dishes in his paintings but favoured monochrome glazes and simple shapes to identify the social status of his subjects, choosing to focus on ‘the trials and struggles of the poor and the oppressed’.40 Redgrave later recounted that he made them ‘from the heart, to right that suffer wrong’.41 The critics at the time agreed with his assessment. The Athenaeum (a magazine devoted to middle-class audiences) pronounced: ‘All Mr. Redgrave’s pictures tell a story . . . either moral or pathetic or both; and tell it very significantly: a great merit.’42 This juxtaposition of plain ceramics coded as appropriate for the oppressed and seemingly virtuous poor is telling. They are distinct from the pictorial dishes which bring tales of morality linked to visual taste into a working-class home better than a Poussin, as stated earlier in the Eliza Cook short story, and from the ostentatious pictorial high-end Victoria and Albert portrait vases as seen in the Great Exhibition, which were also considered in need of visual and, therefore, moral improvement. In this way, the design reformers recognized that pottery and porcelain served as agents to improve taste for all classes and incomes. I will first focus on a group of paintings known as The Governess and The Poor Teacher, which Redgrave executed between 1843 and 1845 (Plate 1). He created four almost identical works, and all four emphasize the subject with her single cup of tea,43 which in each denotes comfort for the pretty, young female teacher, isolated and alone in the schoolroom, holding a letter – a death announcement revealed by its black border. At the time, the position of governess was considered a respectable but difficult occupation for educated young women with no other means of financial support. An 1848 issue of The Lady’s Newspaper defined a governess as ‘a creature of abject patience, misery and dependence’.44 The anonymous author further demanded social reforms from parliament to improve the prospects of the English governess, whose exploitation reflected a ‘blot on society’. Charlotte Brontë and Christina Rossetti, among others, addressed the challenges of the position in their novels.45 The plight of the governess was a personal issue for Redgrave since his own sister, Jane, was employed in this occupation, living away from home until her untimely death of typhoid at the young age of twenty.46 ‘Rarely do we find a picture’, stated the Art-Union about the Poor Teacher, ‘at all tolerable, so simple and so unaided by accessories’.47 However, some

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accessories are visually prominent, notably the slice of bread on the utilitarian cream-coloured plate and the matching cup filled with tea and resting on the saucer. These objects are present in the original (now lost but visible in the etched reproduction) and in the copies of The Governess (1844) and The Poor Teacher (1845).48 With the additional comments ‘universally attractive’ and a ‘painted sermon’, the Art-Union suggested that viewers interpreted the presence of the plain practical creamware or pearlware, invented by England’s very own Josiah Wedgwood, as not merely symbols of comfort but also moral rectitude and British pride, indicating that the governess’s behaviour was beyond reproach, both pious and decent.49 Redgrave bestowed the teacher with a matching cream colour collar, and the combination visually harmonizes the composition. As such, Redgrave’s depiction of a forlorn working-woman drinking a single cup of tea in solitude carried cultural resonances that situated and articulated a character’s identity. It signalled important psychological information to the viewer, to invite reflection and make a connection to the social ideals that tea represents: comfort, hominess, family and spiritual nourishment. Tea-drinking and functional pottery were perceived as morally appropriate for instilling good Christian values and representing solid British industry, a theme revealed in The Old Crockery Shop and which I will expand upon in Chapters 3 and 4. The choice of white body and clear glaze for the teacup, saucer and plate is significant because it befits the governess’ servile status and, because it was made in Staffordshire, was a source of national pride. Creamware, also known as Staffordshire and ivory ware, emerged in the 1740s and featured a combination of white-firing ball clay and calcined flint.50 Josiah Wedgwood perfected the clay body by adding more flint to the body to make it whiter and thinner, adding to its appeal. Sturdy and inexpensive because it required only one firing, Wedgwood won Queen Charlotte’s patronage by gifting her a service. Accordingly, he branded the line Queensware, to appeal to the ‘middling sorts’.51 The royal nomenclature reinforced the belief held by critics that ‘the cup, the plate, the jug, belong to the cottage as to the palace’ and affirms that British pottery, especially earthenware and creamware, was perceived to equalize all levels of society. Referring to earthenware and creamware, the Art-Union critic similarly asserted, ‘there is no additional expense involved in giving to the peasant elegance of design and correctness of pattern, however coarse may be the material of the utensils’.52 Wedgwood later developed pearlware, an even whiter body by introducing a mix of cobalt into the glaze, and it became the standard earthenware by the 1830s.53 As ceramic historian R. J. C. Hildyard recently points out, the success of

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creamware and pearlware rendered ‘meaningless the old social divide between earthenware and porcelain’.54 Here, then, ceramics through their different materiality (earthenware versus porcelain) and design (plain versus pictorial) were perceived to level the lower and upper echelons of Victorian stratified society because they were utilized by all classes, albeit contexts and use were not always the same and changed depending upon class. As I will discuss later in this chapter, guidebooks of the period urged that servants should be given a separate set of inexpensive dishes for their own use, independent of the rest of the household, and this is the case here.55 Therefore, creamware/pearlware is suitable for Redgrave’s modest schoolteacher, who appears to be more of a plain Jane Eyre than a social climbing Becky Sharpe.56 Additionally, the lack of decorative pattern evinces Redgrave’s belief that plain tableware was more hygienic because the dirt cannot be concealed or camouflaged by decoration, nor, for that matter, cracks and pinholes which attract grime. Therefore, plain creamware/pearlware emphasized the technical excellence of the product and the Wedgwood brand. Redgrave also depicted creamware/pearlware plates on the table in Deserter’s Home completed in 1847, similar to those rendered in his governess paintings because they were appropriate for the subjects’ station (Figure 1.2). In this work, he turned his attention to the troubles of the young male soldier trying to escape the army. He filled the one-room cottage with an array of dishes organized in two groupings: on the table and on the floor, two schematics typically found in genre painting.57 The first composition shows the white dishes interacting with other objects evoking nourishment and refinement: a metal coffee pot, a cruet set and a loaf of bread. The second group of crocks and jugs sitting directly on the red brick floor by the hearth represents another common method of depicting pottery in a cottage interior to signal that furniture is sparse and the room is small. Typically placed in the foreground corner of the canvas, the domestic ceramic composition creates perspective to draw the viewer’s eye, a common trope also practised in seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Redgrave’s realistically rendered crockery – undecorated, affordable and humble – are no less significant for their lack of adornment but rather indicate how pottery, as argued in the pages of the Art-Union, elevated the poor and the unwashed. As well, Redgrave used ceramics to communicate his support for better treatment of soldiers. The problems of desertion and earning bounty for recapture were debated in British parliament and reported in contemporaneous journals, as Redgrave was well aware since his older brother, Samuel, worked for

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Figure 1.2  Richard Redgrave, The Deserter’s Home, 1847, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 102 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1984.20.2.

Fox Maule, Secretary at War (1846–52), and wrote about desertion.58 Arguably, the abundance of pottery represents hominess and a safe refuge, a state in contrast to serving in the military. The Times picked the sentiment interpreting the painting’s message as ‘painfully true’.59 However, in Country Cousins, painted in 1847 the same year as Deserter’s Home, Redgrave depicted a decorative porcelain service to suggest the shallowness of the wealthy family (Plate 2). It tells an equally moralizing story critiquing class differentiation: high and low, city and country – it is a parable of the rich man at his table and a poor man at his gate .60 Rather than an austere or rustic room, Redgrave portrayed, in the Hogarth manner, an elite eighteenth-century interior indicated by the finely rendered Georgian decor. Suitable to their high rank, the younger bejewelled woman holds a silver oval teapot, etched with the family crest, beside a copper kettle, metal pitcher, silver creamer and a blue glass and silver salt cellar, all in the Georgian style. The breakfast set of matching porcelain decorated in a gilt floral pattern includes egg cups, plates, and cups and saucers. Remarkably, Redgrave did not replicate a specific china pattern but created his own motif of tendril and vines in gold and silver and duplicated it on the rich brocade dress of the wealthy matron. Redgrave’s mannered porcelain design

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paired with the dress and other fine tableware underscored the pretensions of his wealthy subjects in comparison to their country cousins who are beholden to them and contrasted with the sensible and practical pottery of his workingclass portraits. He manipulated the ornamentation of the china and the dress to compositionally link the luxurious surfaces, anticipating or perhaps influencing future artists such as William Holman Hunt whom Redgrave taught at the Royal Academy. Redgrave intentionally invoked these ceramics motifs: creamware/ pearlware and crockery for workers and porcelain and silver teapots for upper class; these signifiers reflected the standard devices of genre painting which served as prompts for Victorian viewers to follow the narrative.

Arbiters of taste and commercial English pottery Penny Sparke, Charlotte Gere and Frances Collard observe that the rise of decor journals in the latter half of the nineteenth century originated out of husbandry manuals and reflect an important shift of values, moving away from Ruskinian religious and moral undertones of submission, where the woman’s role in managing the household serves as a microcosm for the superior management of the British Empire, to decoration for its own sake.61 They point out while decor magazines represented examples of idealized interiors, they remain useful for scholarship because they reveal the fashionable views of the day and reflect the stronghold of design reform ideology. The guides reinforced class hierarchies advising that servants should have their own tableware (plain). They remarked that the abundance of china facilitated choice allowing for greater access to tableware patterns and ceramic bodies but at the same time they followed the protocols and matters of taste advocated by the design reformers. The texts of these magazines are particularly illustrative evincing the consumption patterns of ceramics: the fashionable dining à la russe, the Franco-Russian style which replaced English style called for more china services and ceramic centrepieces since the dishes were now brought in by domestic servants, course by course rather than set on the table all at once.62 Charles Eastlake in Hints on Household Taste, an early influential decorating guide, published in 1868 with multiple reprints circulating in Britain and North America, pronounced strong views on china. He cautioned that ‘there is no branch of art-manufacture exposed to greater dangers, in point of taste, than that of ceramic design’, though he upheld the popular opinion that ‘modern’ Minton and English potters have improved the design of English crockery over the last

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fifty years and can be easily bought at the agents Mortlock on Oxford Street.63 In his chapter exclusively on crockery, he objected to twisted stalk handles, gilt acorns, seashell knobs and other ‘silly inventions’ because ‘they are contemptible in a poor design’ and ‘destructive to the effect of a good one’. Eastlake believed the toilet service should be made of white stoneware, decorated in a simple monochrome with either the guilloche (wave) or some variation of the Greek fret (key) pattern. Turning to china sets, he argued that as a rule ‘our dinner and tea services are marred by over-neatness in the execution of their patterns, and by a tendency towards mere prettiness in the tints employed to enrich them. Pinks, mauves, magentas, and other hues of the same kind, however charming they may appear in the eyes of a court-milliner, are offensive’ and the practice of gilding the edges of tableware and touching up lids and handles with streaks of gold is a ‘monstrous piece of vulgarity’.64 Eastlake’s opinions echoed those of Cole, Redgrave and Ruskin, particularly when he asserted that ‘perfection of quality and excessive accuracy of workmanship may add to the luxe, but never to the spirit of true art’. Likewise, he dismissed strictly pictorial representations and mechanical precision ‘as quite unsuitable to the true conditions of ceramic art’.65 American critic Clarence Cook in The House Beautiful, first published in 1875 in Scribner’s Monthly before it was issued as a book in 1878, also asserted very definitive opinions about china and is particularly scornful of ‘matching sets’, calling them ‘a modern invention of manufacturers that may promote uniformity but not harmony’.66 Design reform sentiments inflected many of the decor magazines of the period, continuing with Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses, published in 1880, by R. W. Edis, who stated that the best manufacturers were producing everyday breakfast, dinner, tea and toilet services, combining excellence of form and workmanship with delicacy of colour and moderation of cost but complained that their attempt at ‘irregularity’ shows ‘too much method’.67 Ward and Lock’s Home Book: A Domestic Encyclopeædia (1881), a practical guide for the young housewife, similarly reflected the convictions of design reformers but the tone was less shrill, suggesting as a rule that line borders and simple designs are best, while landscapes and representations of still life, or flowers, should be avoided, allowing that ‘dessert services may be florid’, and further cautioned that gilding adds to the prices, ‘without corresponding advantage’. The text reiterates the general consensus that ‘great improvements in the patterns of dinner, tea, and breakfast services have been made of late

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years’ but insists there is room for improvement, recommending for the ‘artistic home’,68 many of the patterns of modern Wedgwood and Worcester ware that are both ‘neat and tasteful’.69 Contrary to Clarence Cook and other arbiters of taste, the hand-book advised the young housewife to be practical and should choose her first sets of china so ‘that they can be easily matched’, because ‘in your first inexperienced housekeeping months with “the girl who breaks” disaster will most certainly occur to these, the most brittle of your household wares’.70 Ward and Lock reiterated that house servants should have their own dishes, even ‘if you have but one servant, let her have a cup, saucer, plate, etc., bought expressly for her use. Such as these can be bought as parts of sets almost anywhere, very inexpensively’, adding The family itself in a small house requires two sets of tea things, one for family ordinary use and one for the entertainment of visitors, which can be purchased in the range between 9s to 2£. Nobody need feel reluctant to own that the ‘best set’ only comes out on high days and holidays.71

Jane Ellen Panton, in her household handbook From Kitchen to Garret also targeted at young women, published in 1887, repeated the familiar refrain that gilding on tableware is ‘vulgar and suggestive of nouveau riches’.72 She too recommended a ‘best set’ of dinnerware to be kept in a locked cupboard away from clumsy servants, although typically she was ‘not an advocate of holding back’ items for special occasions. Contradicting the Art Journal some forty years prior, she declared that ‘nothing looks worse than chipped china’, and for those who cannot afford translucent, ‘real china like Crown Derby or Worcester’ assured that they could console themselves with the next best thing, such as an ‘imitation Wedgwood basket’, supplied at Mortlock’s, or white plates with simple border patterns of ivy or daisies for two shillings a piece, the latter being easy to replace and keep clean. In Panton’s view, ‘there is no excuse for having ugly things’, since there is much china available at affordable prices.73 Both Ward and Lock’s Home Book and Panton’s direction to own multiple sets of dishes and prioritizing ‘best’ reiterates the term, used as a qualifier by potters’ accounts to distinguish between seconds/flawed and best ware.74 Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy: From a 100£ to 1000£ a Year, published in 1856 and reissued in 1874 for a higher income range between £150 and £1,500, evidenced the practice of owning multiple sets, recommending, for example, that iron or stone china be used for functional dinner and chamber services because it is ‘tough’, ‘hard’ and ‘thick’, but, unlike bone china, not ‘transparent’. However, the set priced at £15 is listed as affordable for an annual income of £500

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and higher.75 Prices for Staffordshire earthenware sets are priced considerably lower between 6s and £1.10 but can reach as high as £3.8; the higher the price, the greater the decoration. The price list differentiation of the two editions spread over fifteen years revealed that prices dropped by almost 50 per cent for high-end china but remained more or less the same for every day, useful Staffordshire earthenware, therefore indicating an increase of consumer choice for only the higher annual incomes.76 Nonetheless, multiple matching tableware sets, whether transfer print, stone china, bone china, best, dessert or breakfast, were available to all classes at varying prices. The abundance and accessibility of china that encouraged the consumption of multiple china sets is borne out by a description of visiting Mortlock’s, the multi-room china shop on Oxford Street (recommended by Eastlake and Panton). Upon entering the first room there is ‘nothing but dinner-sets of all patterns’, the narrator exclaimed in an 1881 issue of Sylvia’s Home Journal, and one could easily buy a dinner set, though she herself had ‘no need of one’, indicating that choosing a dinner service reflected the social hierarchies between necessity and stylistic trend or best and every day, rather than price-points for middle-class clientele.77

Discriminating between old and new china and the rise of chinamania Ceramics as tools of design reform in the nineteenth century was heightened by the rapidly increasing agency of ‘old china’. The desire for antique pottery and porcelain became so popular in Britain and across the Atlantic that it was simultaneously praised and ridiculed as chinamania.78 Antique ceramics entered the marketplace when estates from great houses in Europe and Britain divided important services and sold them at auction, while exhibitions of historic pottery and porcelain contributed to their connoisseurship. 79 The Art Treasures of Great Britain, presented at the Manchester Art Gallery in 1857, displayed, among the 16,000 works of fine art, a small grouping of antique Chelsea, Meissen, Sèvres and Wedgwood, as well as Renaissance maiolica. The latter came from the prestigious private Jules Soulages collection, originally from Toulouse, which Henry Cole borrowed and then acquired for the South Kensington Museum that had started collecting historic and modern ceramics five years prior.80 The museum played a significant role contributing to ceramic design education by lending some of its historical collections as well as photos and drawings to the government design schools in Staffordshire.81

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The renewed interest in Renaissance maiolica along with eighteenth-century Sèvres, Meissen and Chelsea drove up prices and spurred a market for revivals, such as majolica by Minton, that I will discuss further in Chapter 4.82 The 1862 Loan Exhibition at South Kensington Museum, produced in conjunction with the International Exhibition, also proved to be important for raising the stature of Persian ceramics, influencing artists such as William Morris, William De Morgan and Frederic Leighton. Similarly, the private Burlington Fine Arts Club in London mounted pottery exhibitions furthering instruction in connoisseurship.83 Member of Parliament Joseph Marryat and the eminent dealer William Chaffers wrote popular collector books fuelling chinamania. Marryat’s Collections Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain, published in 1850, documented factory monograms and recorded the list of names of the collectors and their collecting choices, mostly – high-end Sèvres and Chelsea – and in subsequent published editions less expensive Worcester and Lowestoft, affirming the prevailing taste for porcelain among the elite.84 Chaffers’s 1863 Handbook of Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain went into seven editions during his lifetime, the number of marks documented tripling to 3,000 in the final 1891 volume. Like Marryat, Chaffers gave preferential treatment to European and English ‘old china’, the term used for coveted antique porcelain.85 The Times obituary declared that Chaffers’s name, as the leading authority of English ceramics, was a household word, and he was a welcome guest at most of the great houses of England.86 For design reformer Eastlake, traditional stoneware and delft were ‘sufficiently cheap, elegant and picturesque specimens of industrial art’,87 and should be acquired instead of florid, matching china to avoid the contemptuous trend of domestic interiors coordinated as united decorative assemblies and the all-consuming desire for new fashions. Eastlake protested: ‘All that the British public seems to care for is to get the “last thing out”.’88 It was little different in the eighteenth century confirmed by Josiah Wedgwood who wrote to his business partner, Thomas Bentley: ‘Novelty is a great matter in slight matters of taste.’89 Mary Haweis reiterated Eastlake’s and Cook’s opinion that new ceramics were vulgar in The Art of Decoration, published in 1881. She opined that harmony cannot be attained by new pottery and therefore proposed the ‘cloudy and soft’ colours of antique objects, which she claimed were ‘more easy to keep in harmony’.90 Echoing Ruskin’s views, she noted that older ceramics were made under the influence of comparative leisure and freedom, and she was not impressed by Minton’s and Doulton’s ‘modern productions made after the old

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manner’, because the ‘dimmed tints and crookedness are too laborious, calculated and careful and represent artful acting with no spontaneity’.91 Discriminating between old and new china, therefore, was considered to be an essential component of design reform to attain good taste and to becoming a serious collector. Montague Guest remembered that his mother, Lady Charlotte Schreiber, one of the great porcelain and pottery collectors of the nineteenth century, admitted to initially preferring ‘modern Minton’ sold at Mortlock’s over antique blue-scale Worcester from the Dr Wall period.92 However, this mistake was made before she started collecting, and the anecdote delineated the division between antique and modern ceramics as well as the belief among collectors that the skills of connoisseurship may be learned. Schreiber’s enlightenment reveals how ceramics’ agency had shifted while operating as an agent of the class system, as well as a leveller of it – contemporary British pottery was once coveted by the wealthy and then eschewed by connoisseurs. Not surprisingly, the preference of old over new china became a source for Victorian writers to build themes in their plotlines and flesh out their characters. Wilkie Collins, in his first contemporary novel Basil: A Story of Modern Life, published in 1852,93 critiques taste that elevates shiny new things, employing it as a metaphor for the deception of appearances. Upper-class Basil falls in love at first sight on an omnibus with the inappropriate Margaret Sherwin, the daughter of a linen draper. Visiting the new suburb of North Villa, the family home of his betrothed, his ‘eye ached’ looking round the drawing room where everything was ‘oppressively new’, ‘brilliantly varnished’, the wallpaper pattern of birds in trelliswork and flowers was ‘gaudy’, and the showy carpet of red and yellow ‘seemed to have come out of the shop yesterday’. Also disturbing to his eyes were the china plates hanging on the door. Later in the book, Collins contrasts this interior – a satirical ode to Henry Cole – with that of Mr Sherwin’s clerk, Mannion: [T]he carpet was brown, and if it bore any pattern, that pattern was too quiet and unpretending to be visible by candlelight. . . . [E]ven the white china tea-pot and tea-cup on the table, had neither pattern nor colouring of any kind. What a contrast was this room to the drawing-room at North Villa!94

Significantly, Basil rejects pattern and ornament, preferring plain white china without illustrative decoration and the patina of the old over the ‘oppressively new’. However, Mannion becomes Basil’s romantic rival and enemy, ending in tragedy. Basil concedes: ‘My powers of observation, hitherto active enough, had now wholly deserted me.’95 Basil’s ability to distinguish between the vulgarity of new decoration and the aura of the antique is a materialist skill, proving not to

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be useful but actually harmful, that prevented him from seeing the truth about everyday life. In a more whimsical tone, Anthony Trollope makes his pretentious and often silly character, Archdeacon Grantly, in The Warden, the first novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series published in 1855, a fool for old china. Grantly prizes his ‘old dim china dragon cups’, which are part of a plain but equally costly breakfast service; the cups were worth about a pound a piece (the equivalent of 145 pounds in today’s currency) ‘but very despicable in the eyes of the uninitiated’.96 Thus, the ‘old dragon cups’ are only recognizable as rare to connoisseurs because their owner wanted to ‘spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendor’. He could own expensive things but should not be vulgar about it, in keeping with his status as a man of the cloth. Likewise, George Eliot in Scenes of Clerical Life, her first published fiction, made a similar biting observation about the pretence of old china in the short story, ‘Janet’s Repentance’. The narrator gives a detailed description of Mrs Jerome’s best tea service resembling old Worcester: [I]t was of delicate white fluted china, with gold sprigs upon it – as pretty a teaservice as you need wish to see, and quite good enough for chimney ornaments; indeed, as the cups were without handles, most visitors who had the distinction of taking tea out of them, wished that such charming china had already been promoted to that honorary position.97

While Mrs Jerome is a peripheral character in the story about eponymous Janet, a battered wife and alcoholic who finds moral redemption, she serves an important role representing the judgemental townspeople of Milby.98 Here the narrator satirizes Mrs Jerome’s pride of porcelain teacups, remarking on the absence of handles on the cups and thinks them nothing but impractical. But we learn that it is Mrs Jerome’s ‘best china’ which she purchased herself before she married, insisting that she ‘knowed how to choose chany’; she only brings it out for special occasions and guests, and, heeding to the advice of women’s journals, refuses to allow her maid wash them for fear of breakage. The narrator adds that Mrs Jerome is ‘like her china, handsome and old-fashioned’. Using china as an agent of personification and measure of character was a common literary device which I will expand upon in Chapter 4. Additionally, in her final novel, Wives and Daughters, published posthumously in 1865, Elizabeth Gaskell ridicules Clare Kirkpatrick, a governess and widow, for her desiring porcelain above her station. She is far less sympathetic than Eliot’s Mrs Jerome and closer to Archdeacon Grantly in nature, though of lower

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social rank. The narrator describes Clare (a foil to her future stepdaughter Molly Gibson, the heroine of the novel) as a ‘superficial and flimsy character’, and her love of porcelain reflects her weak nature. She marries Molly’s father ‘principally because she [is] tired of the struggle of earning her own livelihood’. She longs to dine on ‘old Chelsea china’ and be rid of her ‘indelicate meals’ she was obliged to eat as a school teacher.99 Chelsea Porcelain Factory, founded by French Huguenot silversmith Nicholas Sprimont in London circa 1745, was considered one of the finest of the British porcelain manufacturers furnishing the dining halls of Burleigh Palace, Petworth and other great houses. It remained the most collectable of antique English porcelain in the nineteenth century.100 Clare’s decision to give up her teaching position and marry the middle-class widower surgeon is tied to her desire for upward mobility and the acquisition of china sets. He could afford to buy her a new dinner service which ‘she had set heart on so long’, and although it was not antique Chelsea was found to be an acceptable substitute.101 Punch satirized women like Clare and their desire for new china and reiterated the complaints of Haweis and Eastlake in the cartoon entitled, ‘The Height of Commercial Morality’ (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3  ‘The Height of Commercial Morality’, Punch, vol. 14 (1848): 238. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

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In response to a lady outside a china shop exclaiming, ‘O, I want to buy another of those pretty teapots, like the one I bought last week, you know’, the shopkeeper retorts, ‘Sure an we’ve given up keepin’ them intirely, my Lady! For as soon as iver we got them in, we sold them out!.’102 The caption and title ridicule the notion that the consumption of commercial goods, such as new teapot, can be moral. As well, it sets up a class divide between the merchant who is selling and the female consumer who represents the ignorant commercial class.

Porcelain as an agent of Aestheticism In the hands of artists of the Aesthetic Movement the passion for ‘old china’ only increased, but their tastes favoured blue-and-white porcelain from China (Nankin or Kangxi) and Japan, often conflated as ‘oriental China’.103 Chinese ceramic historian Stacey Pierson explains that because Chinese export ceramics were plentiful and available in the first half of the nineteenth century, they had lost their mystique for collectors who preferred Sèvres, Meissen and Chelsea. However, tastes changed in 1860, when British and French soldiers plundered the Summer Palace outside Beijing, raiding the rare porcelain made for the imperial court and thereby re-elevating collecting Chinese ceramics to its prior high status in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries.104 This event also marked the rise of more discerning collectors such as Captain J. H. LawrenceArcher, who published in the Art Journal his account of his visit to China, where he saw many of the plundered porcelain specimens, making him suspicious of older collections in Britain, since ‘these could never have issued from the best manufacturers of porcelain china’.105 As such, the types of pottery represented in these late Victorian pictures reflected the new collecting habits of connoisseurs, who were often painters themselves – notably James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. What better way to free themselves from the shackles of domestic genre painting, a prevailing component of the English national school of art, than to eliminate English crockery and ceramics, one of its key features, be it pearlware, brown jugs or gilt English porcelain in favour of antique ‘oriental china’.106 William Holman Hunt, founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, proudly lectured on why he preferred Chinese blue-and-white styled porcelain over pictorial British and European ceramics to none other than William Ewart Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and future prime minister. Upon seeing the politician’s German and French porcelain on display while visiting his

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London residence Carlton House Terrace, Hunt confessed that he ‘committed his extravagances only to Oriental China’. Sèvres and Dresden (Meissen) porcelain ‘defy fundamental principles of sound design and disregard the fitness of things’, pronounced Hunt, admitting that his views came not from any personal theory but reflected what he called ‘Ruskin’s principle’.107 Much like Ruskin in his lectures, he held a cup before Gladstone and declared his dislike for the pictorial imagery of the landscape and buildings depicted on convex and concave surfaces that he found difficult to reconcile, concluding that ‘the cup and the pictures are perfectly incongruous, and elegant manipulation is misplaced’.108 This sermon on design reform may have been difficult for Gladstone to digest, since he himself was a known collector of Wedgwood, Chelsea and Sèvres, lent pieces for display to the Liverpool and South Kensington museums, and gave public lectures on the subject.109 Indeed, as reported by Hunt, he countered that ‘Oriental porcelain sometimes has representations of objects, and landscape painted on its surface’, but Hunt retorted that ‘these are not portrayed with the aid of elaborate perspective light and shade. The objects are represented as decorative objects, controlled by design fit for the nature of the thing in use’.110 Hunt’s views paralleled Redgrave (his former teacher) and Ruskin’s idea that two-dimensional pattern was more appropriate in the decorative arts and that rules of perspective should be eschewed. In 1885 eminent banker Alfred de Rothschild sold his important art collection, including pre-revolutionary Sèvres vases and garnitures. The review of the sale in the Art Journal underscored the divisions and hierarchies between collecting European and Asian porcelain, affirming that these boundaries were very much instituted.111 According to the author, ‘the world of art lovers will always be divided into people between those who care for Sèvres and people who do not’, and named William Morris of the second school, which the author himself followed. Echoing the views of Hunt and others, he explained that Chelsea, Dresden and Sèvres should be dismissed for their ‘fragility’, ‘high finish’ and ‘historical associations’ that they ‘lack sincerity, the love of pure beauty, and a sense of due relation between the ornament and the thing ornamented’, nor do they reflect ‘the laws of form, or of the secrets of colour, or of the kind of ornament which was best adapted to perfectly smooth and generally convex surfaces’.112 Simpler original forms, ‘exquisite vagueness’ and the ‘seeming uncertainty’ of the Chinese and the Japanese artists were preferred. Just as Charles Meigh’s portrait vases were criticized by the Art Journal thirty years prior, the journal made the same objection about Sèvres, complaining that Boucher or his imitators take the round surface of the vase and treat it as if it were a square of canvas, in no

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relation whatever either to the surface or to the shape or to the surrounding, concluding that ‘a picture is one thing and the decoration of a plate or cup is quite another’.113 Writer and art critic William Cosmo Monkhouse offered some hints in 1881 on collecting china to the non-specialist, who should start with ‘specimens of the house’ such as cups and saucers made by Coalport, Worcester and ‘some bits of a Nankin dinner service’.114 Most importantly, he commented that collecting china must be empirical, hands-on and cannot be learned in books alone, and new collectors should visit the Greek pottery at the British Museum and the Middle Eastern ceramics at the South Kensington Museum.115 While Monkhouse recommended a catholic approach to collecting not simply blue and white, he reinforced visual hierarchies and compared them to the three pillars of architecture, grouping them as Classic (Greek/Roman/Etruscan), Mongolian (Chinese/Japanese) and Arabian (Persian/Spanish/Italian/Moorish).116 This mania for collecting and classifying antique ceramic was facilitated by Britain’s incursions into China and the Middle East in the nineteenth century, which allowed for this form of activity to take place. In this way, these antique or ‘foreign’ ceramics became agents of British imperialism, not merely as objects to be consumed and collected but as examples of Britain’s subjection of China and Japan in pursuit of orientalism.117 Monkhouse’s use of critical language and appreciation of style to create taxonomies are revealing and applicable to contemporaneous Aesthetic painting. He argued that classical Greek pottery has the most beautiful shape, while the Chinese have superior colour and transparency, praising celadon, turquoise, yellow, apple-green, sang-de-boeuf and peacock. For Monkhouse ‘transparency’ is an important term to describe purity and restfulness.118 He admired the ‘accidental’ and ‘uneven strokes’ of Islamic ware, far superior to the ‘flat mechanical colours’ of Worcester, Chelsea or Sèvres. His underlying message, paralleling the art and design thinkers of the day, is to treat the decorative arts, especially ceramics, for what they are, not as a canvas to be filled with pictorial imagery. Hunt’s discourse with Gladstone, Monkhouse’s art criticism, as well as other discussions printed in ceramic trade and art journals evidence that by the late 1870s European porcelain, especially Dresden and Sèvres along with their British imitators, fell out of -fashion. Their mechanical realism cancelled the more desirable qualities of purity, transparency and harmony, which are believed to be achieved by an irregular intuitive approach rather than by deliberate calculation. As such, Aesthetic artists, in contrast with the English genre painters, very often changed

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surface patterns and scale, preferring to represent pottery two-dimensionally to emphasize decoration and to deny perspective, further disassociating themselves from the English school’s convention of close replication and positioning their crockery on an angle to lead the viewer’s eye into the composition, as we saw with Redgrave. They employed ceramics to delineate the boundaries between the pictorial and the decorative in their canvases; the ornamentation of the painting became the subject itself, regardless of instruction and morality.119 And all the elements of the painting are reduced to the ornamental – including the women who have as much compositional and symbolic value as the ceramic vases similarly operating as pretty vessels who are objectified and collected. In this section I contend by looking at a selection of pictures by James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Albert Joseph Moore that their similar sensibility of representing women in orientalist costumes with Japanese, Chinese and Near Eastern pottery reflects a common goal for decorative flatness, echoing the earlier design reformers’ message to emphasize the rounded ceramic surface through decorative patterning but with major differences. The representation of ceramics, along with women, was a key element in paintings by Whistler, Rossetti and Moore. At first glance, their compositions seem similar and indeed there is much overlap in their work. However, with further probing it becomes clear that each artist manipulated pottery in a particular fashion to express his individualized interpretations of burgeoning Aestheticism. Whistler preferred a loose and expressive, but still fairly accurate, method of replicating blue-andwhite porcelain. He reinterpreted the luminous qualities and two-dimensional designs of the porcelain to suit his own painting techniques. Rossetti carefully studied the pottery motifs but then altered them to increase their visual weight. Moore depended upon stock poses for both his pots and models which he often repeated. However, for all the artists pottery and women were one and the same: props to be manipulated to enhance their decorative compositions. Whistler understood the metaphorical power of the pot when he famously lectured that a vase may be considered the first artistic act: ‘and so they fashioned, from the moistened earth, forms resembling the gourd. And with the power of creation, the heirloom of the artist they went beyond the slovenly suggestion of Nature, and the first vase was born, in beautiful proportion.’120 As has been well documented, Whistler began collecting blue-and-white Chinese porcelain in 1863, purchasing a collection of pots in Holland and then turning to the London dealer Murray Marks.121 ‘The artistic abode of my son’, wrote his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, in 1864, ‘is ornamented by a very rare collection of Japanese and Chinese, he considers the paintings upon them the finest specimens of Art &

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his companions (artists), who resort here for evening relaxation occasionally, get enthusiastic as they handle & examine the curious figurines pourtrayed [sic]’.122 Fuelled by his passion for porcelain, Whistler painted between 1864 and 1865 several key works centred on the theme of European women dressed in Japanese costume paired with ceramics as agents of style to pursue orientalism: Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen; La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine; and Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks. Although the ceramics are invariably blue and white, mostly Kangxi and the occasional delft, he rarely repeated the same object.123 In Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, the blueand-white cylinder jar is placed at the foremost left corner, a common trope of genre painters such as Redgrave, but here serves a different compositional purpose (Figure 1.4). The vase is functional, holding flowers, their verticality echoing the torso of the courtesan (his model and mistress, Joanna Hifferman) who looks at Hiroshige woodblocks. In this way, rather than directing the viewer’s eye into the narrative, Whistler employed the vase and flowers to block entry into the canvas and flatten it emulating the Japanese woodblocks he so admired. Similarly, in La

Figure 1.4  James McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864, oil on wood panel, 50.1 × 68.5 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Art Gallery, F1904.75.a. Public domain.

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Figure 1.5  James McNeill Whistler, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 1864–5, oil on canvas, 201.5 × 116.1 cm. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Art Gallery, F1903.91a-b. Public domain.

Princesse du pays de la porcelaine a large baluster pot sits on the floor in the far corner of the room near the screen; its blue colour, sensual curves and vertical format complement the Princess’s robes (model Christina Spartali) and outline the contours of her stance (Figure 1.5). In both works, the women do not hold, touch or look at the ceramic objects, but they are critical to the visual composition, influencing colour, pattern and structural layout. Moreover, the women are as flattened on the canvas as are the designs on the pots. In most cases Whistler’s women, such as Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, in the collection of Tate Britain, (1864) featuring a blue-and-white vase on the mantel, rarely interact with the pottery. Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, another example from this orientalist series, references selling and collecting blue-and-white porcelain (Figure 1.6). Whistler described the scene: ‘un Chinois en train de peindre un pot [sic]’.124 Here the kimono-dressed woman (again Joanna Hifferman) holds the pot and is in the act of china painting. Beneath her are encaustic medieval-style floor tiles, inspired by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin who worked for Minton to help revive this design; it became a feature of Gothic revival interiors and thus

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Figure 1.6  James McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 1864, oil on canvas, 93.3 × 61.3 cm. John G. Johnson Collection, 1917, cat. 112. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

incongruous with the orientalist composition.125 The model china painting is not an accurate representation since the pot is clearly fired, glazed, decorated and thus complete. In fact, blue-and-white porcelain was rarely china painted since the blue cobalt design was under-glazed; meaning applied onto the porcelain then covered in a clear glaze for one firing. Any other enamel colours (china painting) were applied afterward and fired at a much lower temperature. Presumably, ceramic connoisseurs would have known the difference further confusing Whistler’s intended meaning. However, the Observer stated: ‘The name given to it has puzzled a good many people but is explained as having a technical reference to the painting of blue china.’ Despite the incorrect explanation, the author concedes that ‘the picture itself is less capable of explanation’.126 Lange Leizen was the Dutch nickname for blue-and-white porcelain, meaning ‘long ladies’ or ‘long Elizas’ and six marks signified the reign marks used to date Chinese porcelain. The picture presents eight ceramic pieces of different sizes, six jars and two plates, which frame the subject. The lidded ginger jar distinguished by a blue stylized lotus pattern and cobalt blue dots encircling the rim of the cap may be compared with the original jar, now in the V&A, and reveals Whistler’s

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typical practice of remaining faithful to the pattern but abstracting the design by his loose and impressionistic brushwork. ‘She had just stepped out from a china bowl’, described the Art Journal, ‘so stiff is she in bearing, and so redolent of colour in her attire’.127 Indeed, her clothing is the colour of Imari ware from Japan or general overglaze enamel porcelain from China further orientalizing the composition. Whistler, therefore, re-envisioned a three-dimensional Chinese pot as a two-dimensional painting. The teacup and saucer by her side appear to be British rather than a Chinese or Japanese tea bowl because of the size and inclusion of a handle and thus reveals the conflation by Aesthetic Movement artists of British blue and white with Chinese and Japanese pottery.128 The Pottery and Glass Trades Review’s 1878 report of Sir Henry Thompson’s renowned porcelain collection is couched in Whistler-like language and could just as easily describe one of Whistler’s paintings, further reiterating the parallels between Aesthetic painting and ceramics. For example, as the critic noted about the willow pattern, ‘there is something attractive in the artistic mingling of blue and white in proper proportions. . . . In modern language the design is a study, or a symphony, or a harmony in blue and white, and to this combination of colour is apparently due to the favour that the willow pattern has so long enjoyed’.129 Or, as art historian Lionel Lambourne recently observed, Whistler’s loose, painterly brush strokes echoed those of the potter’s brush.130 Dante Gabriel Rossetti began collecting Chinese and Japanese porcelain in earnest in 1864, making a large acquisition of 200 pieces from the Sardinian ambassador Marquis Vittorio Emanuele Taparelli d’Azeglio, but even with this acquisition, he wrote that he ‘pants and gasps for more’ and must not give a ‘hint or word to Whistler’.131 Whistler and Rossetti were well-known rivals in collecting blue-and-white porcelain, sharing, for example, Murray Marks as their dealer. However, their representation of their pottery in painting significantly differed.132 Whistler’s gestural brushstrokes facilitated a looser and more impressionistic rendition of the pottery, and he employed less artistic licence than Rossetti, who often altered patterns for art’s sake. Rossetti’s handling of the pottery’s agency falls within the principles of Aestheticism and Monna Rosa, completed in 1867, is an exemplar of this approach. The prunus ginger jar, so called for its floral decoration and because it was believed to contain ginger when the ware was first exported from Jingdezhen, plays a prominent role in the composition (Plate 3).133 At the time critics attributed Rossetti to coining the name hawthorn jar, and, as with the name Long Elizas they denote the imperialist agenda of appropriation and assimilation in the wake of the Opium Wars and Britain’s imposition of unequal

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treaties with China.134 Art historian Jessica Feldman sees the prunus jar as ‘an emblem of Aestheticism’ and rightly argues that it shows Rossetti’s skill in translating the exotic into the English painting idiom.135 Similarly, Rossetti made the hawthorn jar more beautiful in Monna Rosa by making subtle changes to the decoration and changing its size and function. The lip with a border of white prunus flowers was not typically a stylistic feature of the pot; since it was covered by a cap lid, it was usually left plain and unglazed for economy. In fact, the lid was usually fired on the jar and needed to be unglazed so the two pieces would not adhere together in the firing. Even more significant, Rossetti has exaggerated the size of the pot, tripling its dimensions – the average size is only 23 centimetres. The much-desired collectable of the period would have been deemed too valuable to hold flowers – Rossetti sold his for 600 pounds – let alone large enough to hold a plant of longstem roses for the model Frances Leyland (wife of shipping magnate Frederick Leyland) in a voluminous golden floral costume to trim. As The Pottery Gazette trumpeted in language like that applied to Aesthetic painting:136 [I]t is the hawthorn jar that the highest expression of Nankin blue and white is reached. In the hardness of the diaphanous paste, brilliancy of the glaze, the intensity of white, and the depth and purity of blue, this famous kind of porcelain has never been approached. Its rich blue may be produced by ultramarine or some other lapis lazuli, or by cobalt.137

Like Whistler, Rossetti has employed his blue-and-white ceramic vessel to flatten the canvas. By exaggerating its size, contrasting its blue colour with the yellow and red tones of Leyland’s dress, the background and the roses clearly delineated its surface design – further highlighting the agency of the vessel as an Aesthetic Movement trope. But its prominence also means its role as an agent of orientalism and British imperialism is also clearly evident. Therefore, while Rossetti’s depiction of the pot at first glance seems accurate, and far less impressionistic than Whistler’s replications of his blue-and-white porcelain, he has in fact heightened its agency by exaggerating its size and adding decoration; his simulacra is not merely an imitation but reveals his self-referential attempt to improve on the original. Rossetti, therefore, exerts a subtle artistic autonomy from the ceramic model to inform his own Aesthetic meaning. During this period Albert Joseph Moore also featured ceramics from his personal collection (location unknown) in his canvases, adjusting their size and shape and even their colours, to deliberately harmonize and unify the palette and design of his pictures.138 As has been documented by Moore’s peers

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and recent scholars, the artist relished in making anachronisms, sacrificing historical accuracy and often mixing classical, Chinese and Japanese pottery in his usually overtly neoclassical subjects.139 Evidenced in some of his preliminary drawings for Azaleas and A Venus completed in 1868 and 1869 respectively, the artist often selected and changed patterns and shapes of pottery late in the process to complement the visual schematic. Moore depicted the fashionable blue and white, and the less popular monochromes of blue, red, yellow, grey and apple-green porcelains. Monkhouse was a greater admirer of Moore’s paintings, praising their transparent qualities achieved by the application of a final coat of luminescent grey, recalling the same traits that he admired in ceramics.140 Therefore, Moore’s pictures, like Whistler’s, invoke many of the attributes of a Chinese pot, as described by Monkhouse, such as the ‘diaphanous paste’, ‘purity of blue’ and ‘intensity of white’. Monkhouse, in his defence of Moore’s pursuit of beauty and art for art’s sake, reflected that Moore chose beautiful women, china and other material objects to achieve his vision of the ‘pleasure of the senses’.141 Just as Moore often repeated poses of his female models in his compositions, so he duplicated his pottery. For example, Apples, Beads and A Sofa, all painted in 1875, represent variations of the same image (Plates 4–6). The pots on the floor by the couch are identical, featuring Moorish scaling pattern around the sloped shoulders, but their colours are blue, grey and green, respectively, depending upon the dominant hue of each canvas. In addition to the matching colour schemes, the pottery is often placed low to the floor to introduce a vertical plane to contrast with the horizontal format of the composition. Moore favoured a porcelain white bowl with a prominent rust-colour fish (carp) to enhance Pomegranates, Azaleas and Oranges. While contemporary art historians identify it as Japanese in appearance, it also resembles a stem cup, decorated with three copper-red fish, from the Chinese Ming period, after a fifteenth-century design and reproduced well into the Qing period, circa 1725– 35.142 The rounded sides of the bowl rise to a gently everted rim and is supported on a low foot ring. The exterior surface features three evenly spaced fish in underglaze red, covered with a transparent glaze of a slight bluish tinge. This pottery is small, approximately 9 centimetres in diameter. Moore, like Rossetti with the hawthorn jar, emulated the design but enlarged it to heighten the visual experience, and his pot appears to be painted overglaze rather than underglaze. Art historian Allen Staley states that Pomegranates (1866) is ‘as much a portrayal of things as it is of people, and it is not really about people or things but about itself ’ (Figure 1.7).143

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Figure 1.7  Albert Joseph Moore, Pomegranates, 1866, oil on canvas, 26 × 36 cm. Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

To be sure if we concentrate on the ceramics, it becomes clear that Moore manipulated the fish bowl and Etruscan black urn as a potent ‘thing’ to schematize his canvas. Both are placed in the centre of the canvas and perform a very active role in defining the structure of the picture. While the pottery serves no moralizing purpose like in genre painting, their agency is no less important, because they become tools to achieve harmonious flat decoration. In Azaleas, painted two years later, the model holds the pot, which emphasizes the delicacy of her fingers and makes a stronger statement about porcelain and feminine beauty (Figure 1.8). For Algernon Swinburne, the poet of Aestheticism, the carp bowl filled with blossoms of blue complete ‘the melody of colour and symphony of form’. He adds that the floor pot inlaid with designs of Eastern colour is ‘[a] strange and splendid vessel’, which is also an apt description for the model herself.144 In this passage, Swinburne famously pronounced the raison d’être of Aestheticism: the pottery are agents to define the meaning of beauty and ‘its reason for being is to be’. The identical bowl form also appears in The Quartet, a Painters Tribute to Music but monochrome without fish motif (1868). In Oranges, painted in 1885 some twenty years later, the carp bowl returns, and this time in partial view, filled with oranges, conforming to the orange chromatic scheme of the picture, also delineated by the model’s yellow beads and the backdrop of orange trees (Figure 1.9).145 Moore’s representations of

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Figure 1.8 Albert Joseph Moore, Azaleas, 1868, oil on canvas, 1981. 100.3 cm. Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.

Figure 1.9  Albert Joseph Moore, Oranges, 1885, watercolour and gouache on paper, 35.9 × 16.2 cm. The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford, UK. Photo: ©The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum/Bridgeman Images.

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ceramics appear to have no message and take a step back to be part of the decor rather than actively contributing to the narrative. However, this is precisely the agency of the ceramics, pots being pots, to achieve the art for art’s sake objectives.

Conclusion This chapter addresses the material culture of ceramics represented in Victorian paintings and literature arguing that it played a central and important role shaping how authors, critics and artists expressed their different approaches to art and design reform, be it proposing moral or orientalist messaging. The method in which they represented ceramics dictated a particular grammar and language that they used, critiqued, discarded or personalized. In the early Victorian period, Staffordshire-made pottery, notably creamware/pearlware, acted as moral agents of the design reformers imparting visual ideals coded with Christian values about manners and taste for social improvement. A simple dish or a teapot served as an agent of good taste cultivation or Christian instruction. The vast quantities of mass-produced dishes available at Mortlock’s and other retailers made it topical for decor magazines to arbitrate which styles of patterns were appropriate and for whom, indicating that ceramic tableware at once created a common material culture for consumption and divided it. These tensions spawned a reaction against novelty and new dishes in favour of collecting ‘old china’. In the later nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese and Near Eastern ceramics usurped the influence of British pottery and operated as cultural referents of the orientalist exotic, inspiring new treatments for their compositions to resemble ceramics themselves – non-pictorial and non-linear, and colour palettes of blue and white and Imari red, a theme I will continue to examine in the next chapter on the blue willow pattern.

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Figure 1.10  Richard Redgrave, ‘Well Spring’ vase, 1847–65, Minton, Felix Summerly, porcelain, 21.8 × 17.8 × 10.7 cm, porcelain, Minton & Co., V&A Museum, 135–1865. Photo: © Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Object analysis Richard Redgrave’s ‘Well Spring’ vase illustrates the contradictions of the early Victorian design reformers Richard Redgrave, Henry Cole and Owen Jones (Figure 1.10). Redgrave created the design when he was an established painter known for The Governess and The Semptress, among other morally charged realist paintings. The decorative imagery on the vase lacks a pictorial narrative, but like his genre paintings, still carries a moral message and the mantra of the design reformers: fitness for purpose. The design represents Redgrave’s first foray into product design and was originally conceived as a glass carafe, manufactured by A. J. F. Christy, Stangate Glass Works in Lambeth for Felix Summerly’s Art Manufactures, Henry Cole’s short-lived company.146 As glassware, the design successfully meets the objective of fitness for purpose since the painted water plants rising from the bottom and the garland of water lilies around the neck symbolize its function as a water

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carafe. While the representation is naturalistic rather than schematized – which the reformers would soon adopt – the ornamentation does not overpower form, another important rule for new art manufacturing. Even the punning name, ‘Well Spring’, messages that drinking from the vessel will bring youth and good health. When transfigured into porcelain by Minton & Co, however, contradictions arise. The liquid inside the container is hidden, and the addition of two handles formed into entwined leaves changes the object’s function into a vase. While it no longer pours water, it does hold water and the flora become a fetid pond. As such the painted embellishment and especially the title less suit the object’s fitness for purpose. The ‘Well Spring’ vase demonstrates that putting theory into practice was no easy task, and the reformers were often satirized in Punch by Charles Dickens and others for dictating public taste by commissioning fine artists to design functional objects. One vocal critic F. J. Prouting, a Manchester-based economist who wrote under the pseudonym Argus, called Redgrave, Cole and Jones the insufferable ‘Triumvirate, Triunity or Triad of National Taste’.147 Nonetheless, the design remained in production for several decades by Minton, operated by Herbert Minton and then his nephew Colin Minton Campbell, both friends of Cole. According to the V&A’s website, its example dated 1865 ‘seems to have been especially made’ for its collection.148 This vase was acquired when Cole served as the museum’s director (then known as the South Kensington Museum), demonstrating that he had few issues about the contradictory messaging of the porcelain ‘Well Spring’ vase.

2

Willow pattern A mutable agent of British design and art

And didn’t you see (says the plate) planted upon my own brother that astounding blue willow, with knobbed and gnarled trunk, and foliage of blue ostrich feathers, which gives our family the title of ‘willow pattern?’1 In this passage from the short story ‘A Plated Article’, published in 1852 for the weekly magazine Household Words where Charles Dickens served as editor, co-authors Dickens and William Henry Wills elevated the common willow pattern into a congenial companion. Dickens may well have encountered the legend behind the pattern several decades prior when he edited Bentley’s Miscellany, which had published Mark Lemon’s ‘A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood [sic] Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern’ in 1838, considered to be one of the first documented renditions of the story. Lemon’s imperial racist narrative was as follows: an ignorant Chinese mandarin named Chou-chu forbids his daughter Si-So to marry her lowly young lover Tinga-ting, a poor musician, and betroths her instead to a rich, elderly Duke; the lovers flee, die and are transformed into doves, thus becoming an allegory for everlasting love.2 In ‘A Plated Article’, Dickens contributed to the personification of the plate, observing that ‘the ugly old willow’ is withering out of public favour, being replaced by new designs that are similarly cheap and serve as ‘good wholesome natural art into the humblest household’.3 This insult echoed opinions also espoused in the Art-Union and Penny Magazine, but despite this regrettable reputation, it is the willow plate that serves as the commentator for most of the story and which provides companionship to the narrator, who is bored with no book or newspaper to fill the time. What is salient here is that Dickens animated and anthropomorphized the plate. During a lonely night at the inn

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it comforts the narrator who confesses that ‘I got through the evening after all, and went to bed. I made but one sleep of it – for which I have no doubt I am also indebted to the plate’. Dickens’s readers inferred that the tableware pattern conveyed meanings beyond the fable.4 The Dickens–Wills story of the willow plate followed the literary tradition of personifying an object, but the authors also understood that the pattern was as popular as it was frowned upon by the design reformers. This fulsome description was then also meant to be a jibe at the design reformers so loathed by Dickens. Indeed, willow was the most successful and widely distributed transferware pattern of the Victorian era, produced by hundreds of potteries in the UK – more than any other pattern and yet, as many have acknowledged since the common dishware first entered the marketplace, it remains a mystery why the pattern was so attractive to consumers.5 After all, there is nothing remarkable about the design: its blue-on-white chinoiserie transferware design emulated the coveted blue-and-white hand-painted Chinese and Japanese porcelain at a fraction of the cost, but so did countless other transferware designs. In an 1862 issue of the Art Journal, ceramic historian Llewellyn Jewitt provided early documentation of the willow, confirming its popularity as ‘the most extensive sale, of any pattern ever introduced’, but confessed that he was at a loss to explain its success and wondered why it outperformed in appeal Worcester’s dragon (featuring an elongated Chinese dragon extending across the vessel).6 Nonetheless, reflecting the strong influence of ceramics collectors, a subject discussed in previous chapters, Jewitt imparted a hierarchy to the willow pattern, privileging ‘early’ and ‘fine’ examples ribbed and without handles with the Caughley pottery marks (wrongly believing that this manufacturer was the originator), which he stated he himself owned.7 Jewitt declared that the willow pattern ‘has, of course, been made by most houses, but the credit of its first introduction belongs to Caughley’.8 Ceramic collector and scholar William Chaffers similarly stated that the pattern first appeared in the early 1780s and attributed the British engraver Thomas Turner of Caughley near Broseley, Shropshire, as the first adapter of the Chinese design.9 Willow’s allure spread to many countries including the United States and Canada. The American collector and author Alice Morse Earle disliked it, but to avoid offending collectors used her stock reply when asked about it: ‘That pattern is priceless.’10 N. Hudson Moore, another American, was more generous: ‘[It is] as plentiful as blades of grass’ and ‘worth next to nothing, but owners of it hold it at the very highest market price’. She described an American who has some 3,000 pieces of willow pattern china in his country house aptly named ‘The

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Willows’, where he decorated his carpets, wallpapers, bedspreads, upholstery and draperies in the chinoiserie pattern. Like Jewitt, she wondered ‘why the really handsome “blue dragon” pattern did not succeed in winning popularity’.11 The explanation behind the success of the willow pattern may lie with the so-called legend surrounding it, a Romeo and Juliet story of star-crossed lovers, which was pure nineteenth-century British fiction. The racist/imperialist narrative recounted by Lemon emerged some thirty years after the pattern was produced. It was retold and expanded upon in ‘The Story of the Common Willow-Pattern Plate’ (1850), and parodied in F. C. Burnand’s A Tale of Old China (1874) with the plot centred on a willow teapot being passed off as a rare Chinese antique.12 In The Egoist (1879), George Meredith employed the legend of the willow pattern for the structure of his satire. Sir Willoughby Patterne (note the punning of the name) plays the titular role and chooses not to marry the twicejilted Lady Busshe with her ‘owl’s hoot of Willow Pattern’; the story ends happily without death and reincarnation but with Willoughby getting his comeuppance and his former fiancé finding true love.13 The circulation of the willow legend and how it entered high and low Victorian literature have been recently ably examined by scholars Patricia O’Hara and John Haddad, who have applied Edward Said’s concept of ‘the Orient’ to the pictorial imagery of the blue willow pattern.14 Their skill at situating the willow pattern in a larger cultural and material history, showing how the design and the legend behind it permeated the thinking of the period to fantasize and exoticize East Asia, is particularly insightful. The willow legend and its multitude of retellings have motivated these contemporary scholars to study it as an exemplifier of Said’s ‘other’, a Western cross-cultural encounter with the East during the First and Second Opium Wars. Haddad and O’Hara focus on metamorphosis and transmutation as an example of British and American biases and myths that constructed the Chinese ‘other’, while art historian Alison Syme looks at the design itself through the lens of botany.15 O’Hara also examines the social life of the legend and how it manifested in numerous literary forms.16 English historian Elizabeth Hope Chang similarly investigates the social life of the commodity stating, ‘we have to understand what it meant to look at a willow pattern plate, or indeed any patterned blue and white china in Britain in the nineteenth century, and to expect that look to return both value and meaning to a broader reading context’.17 She correctly recognizes that it carried weight as a ‘symbol of both domesticity and foreignness’, what she calls the ‘familiar exotic’, and helped to shape how Victorian artists and writers viewed foreign difference.18 Blueand-white china, which included the willow, was seen as a referent to Chinese

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porcelain and the otherness of the Chinese; the willow pattern’s chinoiserie figures and landscape reinforce these associations. Building on these arguments, I posit that the willow pattern should be viewed as more than a British racist orientalizing device that appropriates Chinese otherness. While this holds true for some Victorians, I maintain that the perception and meaning of the willow pattern were as subtle as it was complicated. Building on Chang’s observation that the willow served as a national touchstone for Britain, I argue there is more to say. In some respect the pattern exposed the hierarchies and divisions of British society, but in others the tableware pattern equalized consumption habits by appealing to all classes. Willow exemplified lower-class bad taste for some, but for others evoked ingenuity, nostalgia, friendly companionship (as in the case with the Dickens– Wills story) and domesticity. In many respects, the willow pattern expresses what art historian Julie Codell refers to as a transculturation, the appropriation and absorption of Britain’s subjection of China.19 Willow was adopted in the mania for blue-and-white china as a poor man’s alternative to Kangxi of Qing period. Functioning as a hybrid signifier, it therefore served as an agent of British culture and connector to Aestheticism, where it was admired for its symphony or harmony of blue and white. No longer rejected as ordinary or embraced as a symbol of comfort and national pride, the willow pattern became respected on a visual level for its blue-and-white palette, considered more suitable than the bright mechanical polychromes of modern potteries, and thus anticipated the artistic desire for vagueness and lack of precision in Aesthetic composition. What is more, artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt replicated the pattern not simply for visual composition but also to insert the romantic legend as prompts to read the painting and enrich the narrative. In this chapter, I first explore the origins of the willow pattern and then discuss how it became a symbol of the working class and bad taste, only to later become an agent of nationalist pride and an expression of the comforts of home. I then argue that the multiple meanings of the willow pattern are very much tied to the literary tradition of ‘talking objects’ or it-objects, which began in the eighteenth century as a form of satire for adults and continued in the Victorian period as a tool of moral instruction and vanitas often directed at juveniles. English literary scholar Mark Blackwell explains that talking objects known as ‘object tales’ or ‘it-narratives’ are a sub-genre of the novel, a type of writing style in which a sentient thing serves as the protagonist. He acknowledges this genre

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has ‘languished in critical purgatory’ but recently there is growing attention to it in academia.20 Victorian literary specialist John Plotz adds that speaking objects or it-fictions offer insight and serve as ‘curious records’ of British society’s relationship with its material environment.21 And willow plates, as expressed by Dickens and others, certainly fall into this category. Finally, expanding upon some of the themes discussed in Chapter 1, I examine how both the tragic story associated with the pattern and its blue-and-white colouring appealed especially to Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic artists. Significantly, the willow pattern as a ‘metonymic commodity’ came to mean different things to so many Britons as it resonated and embodied varying ideas about British consumption, imperialism, class and taste, both bad and good.22 The visual design of and literary legend behind the willow pattern was so widespread among all the classes that any ceramic dish imprinted with this pattern had the potential agency to perform multiple tasks as an object of moral instruction and a decorative and functional signifier of class taste. If they chose, Victorian audiences could read and listen to these meanings and metaphors from their dishes.

Blue willow pattern: Origins The story of the willow pattern begins in the 1760s with John Sandler’s perfecting of transfer printing, which contributed greatly to the advances of the pottery industry by enhancing utilitarian tableware with inexpensive, mechanically applied decoration. The process at once democratized consumption among the classes, but also contradictorily exemplified and reinforced many of the divides related to gender, nationalism and income level. Replacing the more laborious technique of ‘pouncing’, or sifting cobalt powder through a pierced sheet directly on the ware, transfer printing was economical, requiring little skill except for the making of the original etching on the copper plate. The manipulations of taking impressions involved several steps. Tissue paper (made specifically for the process and sourced from the local paper mill) was moistened in soapy water, which creates a greasy patina facilitating the transfer of the image, and then was passed under a small roller press onto the heated engraved metal sheet, which is inked usually with blue cobalt oxide (brown, green and pink stains arrived in the 1830s). The sheet is given to the cutter for trimming and then to the ‘transferer’ who places and presses the paper with a piece of flannel and a brush onto the once-fired ware that has the consistency of a dry

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biscuit but is still porous enough to capture the image. The sheet is then removed by submerging the ware in water. The ceramic object is subsequently fired at low temperature to solidify the image and lastly re-fired at high heat with a protective glaze, leaving a clear glossy sheen. Two idealized stock images published in trade journals in 1843 and 1878, almost identical apart from dress, illustrate that women and their young female apprentices were responsible for transferring and cutting respectively, while men did the heavier work at the press. 23 The decorative imagery for transferware was diverse, copied from widely circulated engravings and printed books of political events, travel scenes, landscapes, flora and fauna, and chinoiserie. The early printed tableware made available subject matter and decorative motifs from a wide variety of sources to many more people than had been previously possible.24 Susan S. Frackelton, a late nineteenth-century American china painter artist and writer, praised the benefits of mass-market distribution of patterns as a ‘universal blessing’ that enabled the public ‘to purchase really choice designs when printed which would be immeasurably beyond the limit of the ordinarily comfortable purse if produced by hand’.25 Of all the patterns, willow became the best known. After 1814, because it was produced by several hundred British potteries, the term itself often acted as a generic qualifier for everyday blue-and-white transferware patterns, despite its Chinese elicitations. British potteries adapted the design from an amalgam of several hand-painted Chinese export patterns that arrived in the West in the mid- and late eighteenth century. Like many other blue-and-white and polychrome patterns it followed the chinoiserie convention, a wholly Western style based upon the appropriation of Chinese referents: the representation of figures in orientalized dress in a Chinese landscape rather than realistic pictorial imagery. Simply put, willow is a rehash of hand-painted motifs adapted from other Chinese export porcelain. Motifs specific to the willow pattern are a pagoda, a willow tree, figures crossing a bridge, a boat, a main tea house, a fence in the foreground and two doves. The shape and placement of the birds, the number of figures on the bridge or the renderings of the temple and the trees, and so on, may vary, and so too the border, which could be zigzag/key, dagger or lozenge.26 The clay body ranges from inexpensive earthenware to gilded porcelain (Plate 7). Mechanically reproduced through transfer printing rather than hand-painted, the print quality is not necessarily uniform: renditions can be crisp or blurry depending on the wear of the engraving, for it was common practice to resell the metal plates in bankruptcy sales or to simply lend them out.27

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The exact beginnings of the design are less clear. Significantly the trade journal The Pottery Gazette in 1885 was still discussing whether the willow pattern was an authentic Chinese pattern, stating, ‘The question has often arisen among manufacturers and collectors of pottery as to whether the famous “willow” pattern is of Chinese or English origin. It continued that Hanley one of the Potteries’ towns ‘had obtained a Chinese plate from the captain of a trading vessel. That plate was the design from which the first English patterns were made’.28 Remarkably, The Pottery Gazette not only perpetuated the claim that the willow was of Chinese origins but also went on to assert that the ‘orthodox’ adaptation of the Chinese pattern was produced only in England rather than Switzerland or Italy where it was also manufactured. It identified a version called Nankin as the first ‘blue printed table-service made in England’. While the accuracy of this statement is questionable, it demonstrated the pattern’s agency as a universal British brand.29 In 1906 the brothers George Woolliscroft Rhead and Frederick Alfred Rhead, both ceramists, continued the rhetoric that the willow design derived from China in their publication on Staffordshire pottery.30 The Caughley attribution remained the convention until the second half of the twentieth century. However, in 1969, based on shards found at the Spode/ Copeland factory site, Robert Copeland reaccredited the design to Thomas Minton, an apprentice engraver for Thomas Turner at Caughley, arguing that Minton took it with him when he briefly joined Josiah Spode in Stoke-on-Trent in 1782 before establishing his own pottery in 1796.31 Spode and Minton were the first to mark their blue willow pattern with their logos starting in 1818.

Willow as an agent of bad taste and working class Despite, or because of its popularity, willow tableware became a familiar signifier of commonness and bad taste. In 1843 Penny Magazine dismissed the willow calling it a ‘coarse and unmeaning pattern’ that would continue to dominate the market until ‘better taste prevailed’.32 The following year, the Art-Union informed that the middle classes were one of the largest consumers of earthenware and that their pattern of choice remained the ‘detestable’ willow, adding that they acquired it not by ordering new sets, but rather they built and completed their services slowly by inheriting and selecting pieces from open stock available from different manufacturers. ‘[T]his permanence of pattern’ led to multitudes of orders and spawned many producers, thus preventing new patterns entering the marketplace. According to the Art-Union:

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era [M]en cling to familiar ugliness, that one of these outrageous characters of nature, ‘the willow-pattern’, still holds its place in the market, and perpetuates bad taste in a large proportion of the community. . . . But this perpetuation of ugliness points to a practical moral: it shows how desirable it is that good patterns and forms should be introduced, for they, in time, will acquire permanence, and enjoy the popularity now possessed [of the willow] almost exclusively by sheer absurdity.33

The Art-Union’s complaint that the ubiquitous willow blocked new design in tableware and perpetuated bad taste was mocked by Punch in its 1845 satirical cartoon (Figure 2.1).​ The illustration employed the willow pattern as a device to criticize director Charles Heath Wilson’s curriculum at the Government School at Marlborough House that promoted mindless copying. One of the teachers, architect Charles James Richardson, protested that the director treated everyday patterns for carpets, mugs, and tea-trays as if they were ‘cartoons for historical pictures, or designs for regal palaces’, which he believed were more fitting subjects for a ‘School of Copyism’.34 In the accompanying illustration, Punch presented a

Figure 2.1 ‘The School of Bad Designs’, Punch, vol. 9 (1845): 2. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

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young man sitting, appearing to dutifully replicate what is in front of him, but his paper is blank and he seems unable to draw the monumental willow platter which is further ridiculed because it rests on a washstand indicated by the roller towel above. The tell-tale three figures on the bridge and the two doves and willow tree are visible, but the platter itself is broken, creating the aura of an antique. Behind it is a blanc-de-chine figurine with its price tag of five shillings, indicating a disdain for commercial Chinese products and heightening the willow’s perceived Chinese origins. The main caption reads ‘The School of Bad Designs’ and below the image: ‘The study of “High Art” at Somerset House’.35 The depiction of the washstand and the low-class roller towel is another dig at the willow pattern and the educational curriculum, hinting they were all washed up. Here then, willow became fodder in the early art and design debates at the newly created government design school located at Somerset House, symbolizing the pretension of elevating an everyday household object – one that is particularly reviled by the art reformers – into fine art.36 Disdain for the willow pattern also surfaces in Victorian fiction as an expression of a character’s consumption habits and a reflection of inner or moral status. As I discussed in the last chapter, George Eliot was particularly adept at employing material goods, especially china, to demarcate the mutable moral compass of her characters. In her important 1877 social novel Middlemarch, the blue willow pattern similarly smacks of vulgarity and poverty for her character, the ambitious and snobbish Doctor Tertius Lydgate, who recalls dining in the Wrench family home, his medical colleague of little means: He foresaw that science and his profession were the objects he should alone pursue enthusiastically; but he could not imagine himself pursuing them in such a home as Wrench had – the doors all open, the oil-cloth worn, the children in soiled pinafores, and lunch lingering in the form of bones, black-handled knives, and willow-pattern.37

No willow, then, for Lydgate. Significantly he cites it at the end of his list of disparagements, making it the noteworthy and final reason why he could not possibly live in such meagre circumstances, dictated by his profession. He then makes an unwise decision in choosing the indulged and selfish Rosamond Vincy to be his wife and immediately decides to mark the occasion by buying an extravagant china service which costs beyond his means.38 Eliot used Lydgate’s desire for a luxurious dinner service as a foil to the humbler and esteemed Caleb Garth and his family who live ‘in such a small way’ due to ‘the absence of suitable furniture and a complete dinner-service’.39 Later in the novel when facing

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bankruptcy, Lydgate begs spendthrift Rosamond to be more fiscally prudent, like the Wrench family.40 It would seem, after all, that the blue willow was a better choice for Lydgate, but ‘he hated ugly crockery’, reflecting the sentiment of decor journals, and he, not Rosamond, selected their expensive dinner service.41 While Lydgate recognizes his mistake and the consequences of his choices, it is too late to change his way of life or his wife. Eliot employed the willow pattern and dinner services (complete or incomplete) to signify the morality of life, luxury and taste, a major concern for many Victorian novelists.42 It was the willow pattern above all other patterns that resonated and embodied so many of these ideas about British consumption, imperialism and taste. Charlotte Brontë grew up with willow dishes in her family home at the Parsonage of St. Michael’s and All Angels church in Haworth.43 She made reference to the pattern in Shirley, published in 1849, similarly casting the design in a negative light but this time as a symbol of female servitude rather than lower-class taste. In what is considered to be her feminist novel, she questioned the social inequity where professional men may work outside the home while women are confined to work within.44 Twelveyear-old Rose Yorke is described as most like her father and resents that her mother ‘wants to make of her such a woman as she is herself – a woman of dark and dreary duties’.45 She complains about the lack of choices and education available to her, and protests against all ‘womanly and domestic employment’ naming the household objects around her to make her case: ‘The tea-pot, the old stocking-foot, the linen rag, the willow-pattern tureen will yield up their barren deposit in many a house.’46 While Rose is only a minor character in the book she disrupts the norms of womanhood in her desire for a professional occupation, a major objective of the two female protagonists, Caroline and the eponymous Shirley. Remarkably, only the willow pattern is specifically named among all the consumer goods cited, affirming its universality as a generic brand and its potency as recognizable symbol. Familiarity with the ubiquitous willow pattern bred in many cases contempt, with the brand serving as a metaphor to criticize character, art and design. In yet another example of how the pattern was maligned, during a House of Commons debate in 1862 the politician Acton Ayrton used it to insult the faulty engineering for a new bridge, likening it ‘to those on the well-known willow-pattern china’. His opponent took offence to such ‘an absurd description of bridge’, insisting that there would be flat iron girders to span the arches.47 Dickens similarly employed willow to criticize the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which I explain later in the chapter.

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Willow as an agent of national pride Just as the willow pattern was negatively perceived as embodying the oldfashioned, bad taste, the lower class, and servitude, at the same time many saw it in a more positive light. Its mass production was advantageous, allowing for standardization. According to an 1845 issue of Fraser Magazine this was a good thing since broken plates from Worcester and other hand-painted sets from other manufacturers were difficult to replace unless ‘it happened to be the blue willow pattern’.48 That it was produced in Staffordshire and exported around the world was also considered a badge of honour and source of national pride. For example, in Cardinal Newman’s popular novel Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, published in 1848, an Oxford student makes polite conversation with his tutor at breakfast discussing the Potteries in Staffordshire. Remarking on their growing importance, the tutor points out that they are dining on Derbyshire cups and saucers, ‘but you find English crockery everywhere on the Continent. I myself found half a willow-pattern saucer in the crater of Vesuvius’.49 This passage is significant on a number of levels: it demonstrates the growing brand of Staffordshire crockery in general and the ubiquity of the willow pattern in particular, indicating that the pattern was accepted as congenial English along with exotic Oriental. Admittedly, Newman was being a touch ironic situating a modern industrial shard near the famous archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum known for their coveted Roman antiquities, but his comparison also implies that the British Empire is comparable to the Roman Empire. Thus, the named willow pattern saucer acted as a moniker of national pride of the British pottery industry, an important theme which I explore in Chapter 4. This is not to claim that the Chinese referent disappeared, but rather that the willow pattern exhibits British imperial pride at appropriating and absorbing Chinese culture or transculturation marking the professed superiority of the British Empire. John Everett Millais’s Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), painted in 1889, evidences Britain’s perceived dominion over Chinese culture (Plate 8). In what seems to be an innocent portrayal of three finely dressed little girls participating in a pretend tea party (and gossiping), the willow teapot is positioned directly in front of the pet pug dog, a breed imported from China and made fashionable by Queen Victoria.50 This painting, therefore, is not simply an example of Millais’s depiction of child subjects as sentimental prettiness but illustrates his appeal to clients who believed in British imperialism, as shown in his deliberate pairing of these two Chinese motifs consumed as upper-middleclass English leisure products.51

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Willow, therefore, was the ultimate marker of successful industrial imperialism. It demonstrated how the British both appropriated the chinoiserie style and substituted the medium of porcelain with less expensive hybrids and simulacra, such as the lower-fired bone-ash porcelain and much lower-fired earthenware, enabling the nation to export ceramic tableware around the world. Their nineteenth-century export markets included China, the inventor of white porcelain and its leading producer for centuries. Since the seventeenth century, China had dominated the export market for porcelain sparking a chinamania in Europe, Britain and their colonies. However, by the early 1790s the English India Company, the main purveyor of Chinese porcelain, ceased bulk importing because it was surpassed by European manufacturers and its monopoly ended in 1833 – a further boon to British potteries. Moreover, the Company subsequently supplied Canton with 13,000 pieces of willow for 400 pounds in the 1820s, a sign of Britain’s growing success and a reversal of fortunes.52 It is important to recognize that although the willow pattern was often seen through a British imperialist lens, it was widely copied and manufactured in other countries such as Japan, China and the United States, further complicating it as a hybrid signifier.53 The exporting of the willow pattern from Japan and China back to the West affirms Helena Liu’s postcolonial theory of self-orientalism, here representing themselves in their china products for the imperial white gaze as exotic commodities expressing ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Asianess’.54

Objects lessons with the friendly willow While the commercial success and wide appeal of the willow pattern made it an easy target for elitists and discerning critics alike, interestingly the design reformer Henry Cole took a gentler stand, calling it the ‘poor’ and ‘unpretending’ willow. In 1849, in his short-lived mouthpiece, Journal of Design and Manufactures, he wrongly predicted its demise because of the onslaught of new patterns but admitted that it was his guilty pleasure, conceding that ‘the design had some artistic merit in its humility’ admiring ‘the adaptation of ornament to form’.55 More importantly, like Dickens, he identified that the pattern conveyed ‘consonance and tranquility’ for the user after ‘a hard day’s work’.56 The emphasis of the willow pattern’s amiable attributes was by no means specific to Cole and Dickens. Elizabeth Gaskell in her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), presented the willow as a common item affordable to the lower classes and a sign of security and pride, even for the impoverished

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‘old Alice’. Alice invites the heroine Mary for tea, a rare invitation, setting a very little round table with ‘her unlacquered ancient, third-hand tea-tray arranged with a black tea-pot, two cups with a red and white pattern, and one with the old friendly willow pattern’.57 Notably, only willow is identified and given the descriptive ‘friendly’, signifying its welcoming presence and suggesting that everything is complete: no more preparation needs to be done. The following year, The Family Friend published the Old Willow-pattern! similarly repeating the sentiment that it was an ‘old friend’. Invoking nostalgia and childhood, it declared that the willow ‘has mingled with our earliest recollections; it is like the picture of an old friend and companion, whose portrait we see everywhere, but of whose likeness we never grow weary’.58 American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem ‘Kéramos’, published in 1877 and reprinted several times in The Pottery Gazette and other British print media, also identified the willow pattern as one of solace and nostalgia rather than Oriental strangeness: ‘The willow pattern, that we knew / In childhood, with its bridge of blue.’59 As art historian Alison Syme points out, the pattern was strongly associated with childhood innocence and hope.60 This nostalgic reading of the willow pattern traces back to the Romantic poet and essayist Charles Lamb’s often quoted 1823 essay ‘Old China’. Though Lamb was clearly speaking of rare porcelain and never mentions the name ‘willow’, many Victorians and current scholars believe that he conflated the two. Cole stated that he had a ‘vivid recollection of Charles Lamb’s inimitable description of it [willow]’.61 In the short story, Lamb’s fictional alter-ego, Elia, claims that china stirred his imagination as a child, ‘I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.’62 This passage is often quoted in current scholarship as an exceptional example of fetishizing orientalism and revealing the feminizing of men who privilege china due to the line, ‘I have an almost feminine partiality for old china.’63 It is also pertinent to this discussion because it underscores the fanciful appreciation of china, less as a consumer good and more as one that has its own agency that stimulates the imagination of its users. Lamb enjoyed the exotic orientalism of his ‘extraordinary set of old blue china (a recent purchase)’, admiring the young and courtly mandarin and the pagodas.64 The foreign culture ‘in china teacup’, the ‘speck of tiny blue’, the world before perspective that collapses, in his words, ‘far and near’ and thus provides pure escapism.65 The Chinese referents held strong for Lamb and, while I have argued that the pattern became a source of British imperial pride, the two views were not necessarily binary but reflect the appropriation and absorption of China through British imperialism.

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The tradition of personifying and reading china originated earlier in the eighteenth century and was not restricted to chinoiserie. Porcelain and miniature-painter Jeffrey Hamet O’Neal notably adapted Francis Barlow’s scenes of Aesop’s Fables on expensive Chelsea wares in the 1750s and on Worcester dishes in the 1760s and 1770s. After finishing their soup or dessert on porcelain china, elite diners studied the image and retold the fable and the object lesson to other guests at the table to entertain and to flout their education.66 Therefore, the willow pattern’s performative role to stimulate the imagination, to educate or provide companionship through its stories, was by no means unique to its design but enjoyed a much longer tradition. Dishes, like books, can be held, studied and read, and the more knowledgeable the reader, the greater the enjoyment. English scholar Deborah Lutz recently argues in The Brontë Cabinet that books offered consolations to Victorians: they could be held and read, which ‘unloosed rich pleasures’ and offered romance and escape.67 She adds that Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s titular novel, published in 1847, often tried to withdraw from her persecuting Reed relatives by reading such titles as Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds.68 I further observe that Jane similarly turned to a porcelain plate with a bird decoration for refuge. After being released from the trauma of the red room, young Jane recounts how the good housekeeper Bessie brought her a sumptuous tart on ‘a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestl[ed] in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds’. The description seems to refer to a handpainted plate in the style of eighteenth-century Chelsea Porcelain from its gold anchor period that represented its most florid style inspired by the popular French Rococo (Figure 2.2).69​

Figure 2.2  Plate, Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, gold anchor period, 1759–69, softpaste porcelain, 22.9 cm. Museum Accession X.3.27. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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In the past, Jane had often petitioned to be allowed to take the plate in her hand ‘in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege’.70 Jane’s ‘precious vessel’, hand-painted and rare, featuring a fancy bird and morning glories, is more refined and of higher status than the commercial willow transferware, but both exhibit transformative powers to delight the beholder and help them escape from loneliness, although on this particular occasion it did not succeed in comforting young Jane. Brontë’s depiction of a china plate’s evocative effect on people is remarkable. Indeed, it is not surprising that Fannie Wright, an American who descended from a potting family, cites this passage, in her 1888 home decorating book for amateur artists, to express her own passion for china.71 As books provided companionship for Jane so did china. Elizabeth Hope Chang points out that the 1845 issue of Fraser Magazine recognized that ‘transferring a print to the clay became of the same relative importance as printing to manuscript’.72 Similarly, she notes that Dickens and Wills made the analogy as well in their punning title of the ‘Plated Article’, an acknowledgement that both the willow pattern and the essay have been executed, thanks to the printmaking technique of copper engraving.73 In the late nineteenth century, Frackelton offered a similar observation as Dickens and Wills but with a difference equating transferware patterns to popular fiction. ‘Our libraries would be poor indeed if we could obtain only the manuscripts of Dickens, Thackeray, or George Eliot; and what would be ordinary dinner-table be if only the signmanual of Sèvres, Meissen, Coalport or Minton were permissible? A tedious white monotony would stare us in the face.’74 Frackelton’s opinion is remarkable on a number of counts: at the height of the Aesthetic period it promoted the pictorial application of decoration on china rather than schematic patterns, and it linked transferware patterns on dishes to fiction, which, I argue, applies to the willow pattern. Mary Gow’s watercolour The Story of the Willow Pattern affirms the intimate experience of how the willow plate was read and handled in a similar way to a book (Figure 2.3).​ An elegant mother embraces her little girl reclining on a day bed and holds the plate like a book pointing to a particular image. The story is generally read beginning with the pagoda, moves to the right showing figures on the bridge running away and culminates with the pair of doves crowning the top of the plate. Painted in 1886, it demonstrates that the design crossed class divides and that the legend was in the public domain in late Victorian England. Commenting about the painting in The Magazine of Art found the subject agreeable:

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Figure 2.3  Mary Gow, The Willow Pattern Plate, ‘Art in June’, The Magazine of Art, vol. 9, 1886: 356. Photo: Internet Art Archive. Original from the Getty Research Institute. The charming old legend is aptly displayed in the pretty face [of the girl] – half in thought half in wonder – as it gazes at the old plate. Many years will pass before ever she murmurs regretfully that she also, was once in Arcadia. The world of all of us in her Arcadia, and the willow-pattern fable is a mere extension from a boundless realm of fancies, a journey into the blue distance between tea-time and bed.75

In this telling passage, the plate becomes a storybook – reading the design triggers childhood nostalgia and an orientalized Arcadia. The willow plate was a popular it-narrative, but its meaning and purpose were also negotiable: it might invoke sentimental nostalgia, support British industry or critique social conditions. In ‘The Plated Article’, the narrating plate’s role was to educate and sermonize on the production techniques of the Spode factory, specifically transferware and porcelain. It demonstrated pride in British manufacturing and, as such, referenced the category of factory tourism, a popular pass time, which I address in Chapter 4. Following this tradition of instructing, the poet James Giles anthropomorphized the willow plate in his 1881 ‘The Willow Pattern (A Plate Soliloquy)’, giving it a voice to demarcate social iniquities:

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Every day I meet at the table Rich and poor and old and young, Serve them, well as I am able, See and hear and hold my tongue.

Giles’s plate says that it has ‘fed thankless sinners’ and ‘poor mothers’, and for the latter it wishes that it were ‘burdened with substantial fruity’ to feed the needy. As typical with it-narratives, the personified object eavesdrops on the characters, listening to their desires, their needs, their aspirations and their flaws.76 Here then, the talking willow plate used by all echelons of British society passes judgement on the wealthy and desires to give nourishment to those in need. Thomas Hood’s earlier widely circulated poem ‘The Broken Dish’, published in 1839, was not directly about the willow, like Lamb’s aforementioned essay, but described the typical chinoiserie motifs and, most important, reflected the pervasiveness of ceramic dish as a metaphor of life. He employed it as a morality poem about frivolity and the fragility of life. Though it did not speak like Dickens or Giles’s willow dishes, the poem cautioned: But life’s as frail as dishes! Walking about their groves of trees, Blue bridges and blue rivers, How little thought them two Chinese They’d both be smash’d to shivers!77

The belief that the willow was a common metaphor for mortality was not exclusive to the pattern but was also a familiar allegory applied to both unfired and fired clay that surfaced in texts and images of the Victorian era. I will return to the meaning and metaphor of ceramics as a signifier of mortality in Chapters 4 and 5.

Willow pattern as an agent of the Pre-Raphaelites So far, I have discussed the willow pattern largely as a domestic symbol signifying class, nationalism, mortality and companionship. However, I will now focus on the willow legend, the story behind the plate’s pattern, a popular and multifaceted signifier evoking star-crossed and everlasting love. This allegory, together with its blue-and-white palette and non-linear perspective, made it a favourite in Victorian painting particularly among the members of the PRB. Building on arguments made in Chapter 1, I address how to better comprehend

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the PRB artist’s passion for willow as a precursor to or simulacra of blue-andwhite china and how this affected both the narrative and visual appearance of their painting. George Elgar Hicks conveyed the messages of industrial pride, domesticity and love in the willow plates that he depicted in The Sinews of Old England (1857) (Plate 9). Hicks, a successful genre painter and society portraitist, is here referencing the Pre-Raphaelite artists Millais and Arthur Hughes in the subject matter, vertical composition and arched frame. His use of blue willow predated Pre-Raphaelite artists by several years. He presented a glimpse of the labourer’s home through the doorway and the only visible items are the blue-and-white crockery, and most conspicuously, a matching set of willow − two oval platters and six plates. The table is set with a white cloth and a blue-and-white teacup and saucer (but not the privileged willow), clearly in use because it holds a spoon. Art historians Mary Cowling, Tim Barringer, Andrea Korda and Lynda Nead deftly argue that the painting glorifies labour and its just rewards,78 epitomizing Thomas Carlyle’s maxim: ‘For there is perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work.’79 They fittingly acknowledge that the picture romanticizes the gendered division of spheres between the domestic and paid labour since the couple with their small child are standing in the threshold between the interior and exterior. The wife is situated closer to the door and the dishes, as her husband, wearing his distinctive navvy costume of buckled strapped boots, vest and coloured handkerchief, gazes out to the public world.80 While Barringer argues that railway navvies were not considered ideal husbands and that the wife would most likely have to work outside the home and not been able to afford such a pattern, wages of the period and the prices of transferware indicate otherwise.81 In 1857 wages of common labourers ranged between 15s and 17s per week. Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy (1856) listed Staffordshire sets between 6s and 15s, suggesting that willow plates were not out of reach for a navvy.82 To be sure, The Sinews of Old England is an idealized portrait, but the replication of the dishes reflects more than the wife’s domestic duties, and though the difference may be subtle, it should not be seen as only representative of the woman’s sphere. What is important to recognize is that Hicks featured willow pattern reiterated and promoted British labour. It was understood and seen as a signifier of homegrown British industry benefiting the British working class, which was also exported to the rest of the world and, therefore, a symbol of British imperialism gentrifying the globe with well-made china. The affordability of the willow pattern suggested in this painting is borne out by the Art Journal’s observation about the purchasing strategy open to the

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lower working classes, who could procure it piece by piece over a period of time because it was sold in open stock and not complete sets. Similarly, in Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Alice the washerwoman owned a friendly willow cup and Mary’s millworker father in good times could afford small tea set of six, albeit the pattern is not named.83 And William Farrow, the hardworking millworker and his wife in Brontë’s Shirley, owned a ‘set o cheeney’ which his wife ‘brought for a portion when wed’, further indicating that willow and other British tableware patterns were prized possessions of the working class and, therefore, within their means.84 Hicks’s replication of willow plates fits into this larger understanding evident in Victorian pictures and literature that dishes gentrify their subjects, exemplified in ‘The New Crockery Shop’ as we previously read in Eliza Cook’s Journal.85 I argue that Hicks’s tidily arranged dishes prompt another coded meaning embodying the family unit: a top shelf of two overlapping oval platters representing the unification of the two extended families, followed by a second shelf of two touching circular plates emblematic of the couple and then a final row of three overlapping plates (symbolizing the family’s size and its unity). Here then Hicks referenced the willow’s popular romantic legend about love and fidelity as well as industrial pride, comfort and the well-mannered working class. This convention of representing willow plates to signify true love was by no means specific to Hicks. The illustrator Harry Parkes displayed a shelf full of willow dishes in the kitchen behind the devoted couple, a parlour maid and a policeman for the book jacket cover of Mary Jane’s Memoirs Compiled from Her Original Manuscript (1887) (Figure 2.4).86​ The willow’s signature pair of doves is distinctly visible in the oval plates resting upright on the shelves above the young lovebirds holding hands. Interestingly, the depiction of the doves is different on each plate, reading from left to right the doves come together and part again. Moreover, two white jugs with blue vine relief pattern flank the lovers (his large with a broad base, hers small with a swelled belly) and here the crockery personifies the couple, a matching set only distinguished by size and shape to denote their different gender, a theme I will explore in Chapter 5. Jane Beckett (née Buffham) was a former parlour maid who commissioned George R. Sims, a popular journalist and playwright, to adapt her memoirs into a book manuscript. Like the fictional Jane Eyre, she confirmed the pleasure of eating toast off a ‘plate that had pictures painted on it’.87 However, she wrote that she ‘cried with rage’ when she saw the book cover. While she had no objection to the symbolism of the willow plates portraying them as lovebirds, the man depicted was not her husband since he was a sea

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Figure 2.4  Harry Parkes, book jacket cover, Mary Jane’s Memoirs Compiled from Her Original Collection, 1887. John Johnson Collection: Colour Printing 8 (35a). Bodleian Libraries.

captain; fearing for her reputation, she insisted the publisher change the design in the next edition.88 The willow pattern became a popular one among the PRB and was used as a descriptor of their work. In ‘The Plated Article’ Dickens and Wills significantly described the willow pattern colour as ‘Pre-Raphaelite blue’: ‘Then (says the plate), was not the paper washed away with a sponge, and didn’t there appear, set off upon the plate, this identical piece of Pre-Raphaelite blue distemper which you now behold.’89 This was a relatively early passage documenting the PRB’s association with the willow pattern and their fondness for the colour blue in their painting, possibly a reference to the striking blue velvet dress in Millais’s painting Mariana that was executed in 1851, a year earlier than the article. Ruskin identified Mariana, distinguished by her velvet blue dress as the ‘lady in blue’ in The Times.90 However, Dickens’s use of Pre-Raphaelite blue is more complicated: in the same vein that Ruskin and the Redgraves hurled insults based on china analogies in their critical assessments of artists who they dismissed, I argue that Dickens’s likening the PRB’s art to a tableware pattern was also certainly intended as a jibe. Moreover, two years earlier, Dickens had used this strategy, calling the PRB the ‘dread Tribunal’ in

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his well-known scathing review in Household Words of Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents.91 He took offence to the new realism and the ugliness of Millais’s Holy Family, firmly declaring that he was of the ‘Raphaelite’ camp.92 Further mocking them, he mentions a new society in the horizon called the ‘Pre-Perspective Brotherhood’ with the mandate to subvert ‘all known rules on perspective’. As such, ‘it is intended to swear every P. P. B. to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on a soupplate of the willow pattern’. Here then, Dickens used the willow pattern to skewer three targets: the PRB by comparing them to china painters; the design reformers who at this time rejected perspective and pictorial ornament on two-dimensional tableware; and finally, the fashion for societies, clubs and other intellectual groups, a rich British tradition which emerged in the eighteenth century. Over twenty years later, the Scottish poet Andrew Lang paired the willow pattern with William Morris but cast a more positive light, calling the willow ‘A veil of Morrisian Hue’ in his poem ‘Ballade of Blue China’, published in 1880.93 ‘Morrisian hue’ may have been an acknowledgement for Morris’s choice of blue in his tile works that reference Delftware and his experiments in indigo blue that are integral to his textile prints. He also made reference to the metamorphosis of the eloping lovers who ‘lived, died and were turned into two bright birds that eventually flew’, continuing the assumption that the blue and white employed by Morris and other members of PRB elicited the willow pattern. More evidence of this is found in The Pottery and Glass Trades Review’s 1878 report of Sir Henry Thompson’s renowned porcelain collection.94 The article, also published under the title The Blue-White China Mania in the American Crockery and Glass Journal, praised the willow pattern because it compares well with the more expensive hawthorn jar collected by Whistler and Rossetti.95 As I discussed in the previous chapter, the appreciation of willow’s decorative flatness, abstraction and its subtle blue-and-white palette was preferred over the garish commercial polychromes and pictorial imagery of modern potteries, and anticipated the Aesthetic Movement’s desire for blue and white. Members of the PRB collected willow because it was affordable and it invoked the blue-and-white sensibility they so desired. In her memoirs, Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of artist Edward Burne-Jones) kept the only letter she received from Elizabeth Siddal (wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti), showing another example of how the willow pattern was understood as a touchstone for joy and companionship: My dear little Georgie, I hope you intend coming over with Ned tomorrow evening like a sweetmeat, it seems so long since I saw you dear. Janey will be

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Ceramics in the Victorian Era here I hope to meet you. With a willow-pattern dish full of love to you and Ned, Lizzie.96

In addition to Siddal’s affectionate letter, Burne-Jones mentioned the happy occasion of dining at the Madox Browns, where every guest was ‘a welcome friend who had come to talk and to laugh and to listen’, and at their table was the standard, common English willow pattern plate. She explained that ‘it was before the days of real Chinese ware for any of us, Rossetti’s fine collection in later days may be traced back to his first quest after these despised “kitchen plates”’.97 William Morris also furnished his residence, Kelmscott Manor, with willow pattern plates and jugs as well as other blue-and-white dishes by Wedgwood, Minton and Spode, kept in a corner cupboard in the dining room and in the china pantry adjoining the green room.98 Burne-Jones declared willow as an affordable substitute for real Chinese porcelain. She also referenced chinamania and the particular desire for Oriental blue and white, a phenomenon that was well known and satirized in its day by George du Maurier and Edward Linley Sambourne in Punch between 1874 and 1880 and in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881), and which currently attracts the attention of many scholars.99 The English parodist Max Beerbohm derided the 1880s taste for the artistic interior and dandy aesthetes led by Oscar Wilde, proclaiming: ‘Men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio shops . . . Dados arose on every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curled in every corner, tea grew quite cold while guests were praising the willow pattern of its cup.’100 Both the willow’s love story and the blue palette appealed to the PRB’s artistic sensibilities. Nowhere is this more evident than in Edward Burne-Jones’s Cinderella, painted in 1863 (Plate 10). In this watercolour, he deftly replicated a set of willow plates to connote love, nostalgia and more notably the power of transformation and metamorphosis.101 The year prior he had designed a tile panel illustrating the Cinderella story for the Morris Firm, commissioned by Myles Birket Foster in 1862. The tiles were part of a fairy-tale series including Sleeping Beauty (1863) and Beauty and the Beast (1864) for overmantel fireplace surrounds to be installed in the bedrooms at his Gothic revival house, The Hill in Witley, Surrey.102 In the kitchen scene of Cinderella’s centre panel, BurneJones depicted dishes, which, based on previous models for the panel, John Ruskin identified as willow. He wrote to Louisa, marchioness of Waterford: ‘How I wish you could see more designs for tiles which the P.R.B. people have been making from Cinderella (the very things for a fire place of course) such a sweet Cinderella in her kitchen full of willow pattern plates.’103 While in the final

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version of the Cinderella tiles, the plates are blue border, Burne-Jones returned to the willow motif for his subsequent watercolour. Illustrating Cinderella with a cupboard full of dishes had been a strong visual tradition in children’s literature since the early 1800s, but in these storybooks the dishes are mostly plain, without decoration or only given a border colour.104 Burne-Jones heightened the agency of the dishes in his 1863 painting by increasing their number and employing the popular willow as a visually striking backdrop to his contrapposto Cinderella dreaming of the ball with the single slipper still on her foot.105 Behind her are four shelves of standing blue willow dishes and cups hanging on hooks leaning in the same direction that her head is pointed.106 He divided the image into five planes: the floor with vertical wood floorboards, the bottom cupboard slightly ajar filled with chargers and bottles, the counter with a blue-and-white cloth, glass decanter, and three stemmed glass and lastly the wall of plates. The dishes create an expansive decorative pattern and continue upward, while the circular rims above Cinderella’s head evoke a halo effect. Burne-Jones employed the blue china as a trope to reference the PreRaphaelite blue palette, echoing Rossetti’s wall of blue-and-white tiles in the Blue Closet (1857), in the collection of Tate Britain, and anticipated Rossetti’s backdrop of octagonal prunus tiles in the Blue Bower (1865), now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Here I make the point that the PRB painters used blue-and-white tiles and plates as flat wall patterns to emphasize their planar approach to composition as a way of deconstructing perspective. The agency of the willow pattern remediated through painting contributed to Jones’s aesthetic innovations. In Cinderella transformation is the key theme, one shared by the willow pattern’s story. Burne-Jones has delineated the emblematic doves (formerly the lovers) on several plates. Similarly, the peacock feather on the largest charger and the butterfly spreading its wings on the jug in the lower cupboard – both age-old symbols of transmutation – allude to metamorphosis.107 Georgiana Burne-Jones famously stated that her husband wanted ‘all his viewers to pass through the golden gate of his dreams’.108 The artist acknowledged this view when he cited the influence of Tractarianism (Anglo-Catholicism): ‘in an age of sofas and cushions . . . he [Newman] taught me to be indifferent to comfort; and in an age of materialism he taught me to venture all on the unseen’.109 I maintain that in this way Burne-Jones saw the transformation of Cinderella and the willow as an analogy of religious and spiritual transformation and transubstantiation which he conveyed through stirring the imagination.

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Critics at the time recognized the artist’s skill at representing fantasy: ‘[I]t is perfectly true that [Burne-Jones] does not paint dresses from Worth, or furniture from the stores’, wrote Robert de La Sizeranne, and [He] should be congratulated thereupon. But it is an immense error, made by realists in search of modern superficiality, to think that his works suggest fewer contemporary pictures, fewer existing interests, because they are further apart from our daily life than the illustrations of The Graphic and the Illustrated London News.110

Recent scholars still agree with this assessment that Burne-Jones painted dream worlds, far removed from the harsh realities of his day.111 However, BurneJones’s imaginary world was strongly grounded with quotidian objects, and it is important to acknowledge that his carefully considered and accurately rendered representation of the willow plates share the same plane of realism as the objects his contemporaries included in their domestic genre paintings. Decorative arts historian Alan Crawford points out that Burne-Jones’s paintings should be viewed through the lens that reveals he was also a designer ably working in stained glass and tiles.112 As such, he was familiar with both the functional and evocative power of objects and for him the tableware easily acted as a connector between reality (mundane drudgery of washing dishes) and fantasy (transformative escape). The endless wall of china behind his Cinderella sensualized the composition into a blue fairyland and positioned the work in the Aesthetic camp. BurneJones ensures that the tableware serves at once as a domestic and exotic trope: integrating the Chinese faux-tale of the willow into Cinderella’s story, he made another cultural transformation that effectively Europeanizes (or Anglicizes) the willow story through hybridization. In 1874 artist and book illustrator Walter Crane, a generation younger than Burne-Jones, designed blue-and-white willow plates for two scenes of the Cinderella story. Like Burne-Jones, he accented the fairy tale with real objects, employing a similarly strong repetitive motif pattern and depicting a wall of dishes to flatten the space (Plate 11). The schematic decorative perspective suits his graphic treatment of the illustration that he designed for Toy Books and that was published by Routledge in eight-page 9.5″ × 7.5″ booklets using the latest chromolithographic wood-block technology. It was one of thirty-seven Toy Books Crane illustrated between 1865 and 1876 and the only one to incorporate the willow pattern (other dishes such as in Goldilocks and the Three-Bears were blue-edged). As Andrea Korda points out, the illustrated children’s books were intended by Crane to cultivate an ‘an appreciation for beauty in young readers to help them resist the effects of industrial capitalism’ and thus exemplify the unity

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between art, design and production promoted by Arts and Crafts advocates.113 In this way, the willow dishes perform the role of instructing about taste as well as love and fidelity. However, Crane’s fairy tale, while decorative rather than pictorial, eludes the dream world of Burne--Jones: Crane’s figures are more active and engaged and the inclusion of the VR (Victoria Regina) monogram worn by the prince marks it contemporary and British. Crane references a wide variety of ornamental styles: classicism and Japanese prints, for example, and while the flying birds of the willow pattern are visible, the theme of transformation and metamorphosis is less emphasized. Crane employed the willow, along with matching blue-andwhite tiles in the accompanying scene, more in the Aesthetic tradition to suggest the fashionable artistic interior, a trope he favoured in his paintings as well as illustrations.114 Art historian Morna O’Neill argues that Crane’s socialist views made him depart somewhat from Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater’s ‘art for art’s sake’ mantra of Aestheticism to the less elitist Arts and Crafts Movement which advocated ‘art for all’.115 The use of the willow pattern enabled him to cross both worlds of popular taste and rarefied Aestheticism, which favoured the decorative over imitative pictorial. Designing affordable illustrated books for children and decor magazines allowed him to reach wider audiences than Burne-Jones.116 Moreover, his illustrations for fairy tales, as with Burne-Jones, were produced on ceramic tiles, but Crane’s strong graphic style translated well in the applied arts and was more successful in achieving wider audiences. While some tiles, like Burne-Jones’s, were hand-painted, the majority of Crane’s designs were printed on mass-produced industrial tiles and manufactured by Maw & Company, Minton, Pilkington, Wedgwood and other Stoke factories as well as American potteries.117 Arguably, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was attuned to the legend of the willow pattern and all that it entailed when he painted Girl at Lattice in 1862, revealed by the presence of the blue-and-white jug and basin (Plate 12). Art historians Richard O’Neill and Paul Spencer-Longhurst maintain that they marked the beginning of Rossetti’s interest in blue-and-white pottery and Aestheticism.118 Indeed the basin closely resembles a pickle dish (indicated by its triangular/leaf shape), suggesting that these pieces were collected individually rather than in a set. They may well have come from his own collection or that of Ford Madox Brown, another collector of willow, who Rossetti was visiting when he painted this picture. George Price Boyce, their friend who purchased the painting, was another collector who reportedly once squabbled with Rossetti over a Wedgwood jug.119 To be sure, the pottery contributes to the overall Aesthetic sensibility, for

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example, through its colour scheme that complements the blue band of the white curtains falling gently over the girl’s head. However, few scholars look at the meaning of the pottery itself, instead arguing that it reflects Rossetti’s attention to ornamental detail and thus is essentially decorative in conception, with no clear moral message. Julian Treuherz, for instance, interprets the work as possibly a scene in La Vita Nuova, when a lady looks down in pity at Dante, after Beatrice’s death, or perhaps after all is ‘only a girl at a lattice window’.120 By examining the painting in the context of when it was made together with the willow legend, the pottery and other signifiers take on a greater agency. This approach contributes to a fuller narrative that touches upon themes of tragic love rather than only conveying formalistic Aestheticism with no message except art for art’s sake. Scholars have consistently agreed that Lattice is a significant work for Rossetti because it is one of the first paintings he completed after the tragic death of his wife, artist Elizabeth Siddal, who, suffering depression following a stillborn pregnancy, overdosed on laudanum.121 ‘He was attracted one day’, wrote William Sharp in 1882, ‘by the healthy face of a sunburnt country girl looking out of a window with a framework of green leaves, so that he took up the brush and wrought this healthy and pleasant little picture’. Henry Currie Marillier, in his 1889 biography, believed that the face of the ‘dark gipsy-looking girl impelled him to begin painting again’.122 And more recently, Virginia Surtees and Paul Spencer-Longhurst argue that her expression resembles Siddal, although the model was, in fact, Madox Brown’s young maid.123 Recent scholars do not agree on the jug’s attribution, naming it willow, delft or Worcester.124 I argue that Rossetti has taken some of the details in the willow pattern and enlarged them on the jug – the bridge, the boat and two birds appear in the sky, indicating that while the jug’s decoration is not directly the willow, it tells the willow story of transformation. Examination of the painting’s composition and material culture suggests a theme of entrapment and longing for escape. The jug is not in the room but placed outside on the windowsill on which the girl leans out to look and smell the red wallflowers (a Victorian symbol of fidelity in adversity).125 She wears tightly coiled choker beads,126 her hand clutches the windowpane resembling a prison barrier and her dreamy gaze is focused on tableware patterns used as a device for fantasy hinting at flight from domestic drudgery to join her lover. Or perhaps the picture itself is a metaphor of escape for Rossetti himself to flee from the imprisonment of guilt of infidelity that he felt because of the tragic death of Elizabeth Siddal.127 Burne-Jones in Cinderella and Rossetti in Girl at Lattice twinned beautiful young women with willow-type blue-and-white tableware to evoke themes of

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love and escape from reality which reference both domesticity and exotic blueand-white Aestheticism. William Holman Hunt portrayed a similar subject in Honest Labour Has a Comely Face in 1861 (Plate 13). This theme has been missed by contemporary scholars, but I argue that there are many visual clues pointing to it. Judith Bronkhurst, author of Hunt’s Catalogue Raisonné, identifies the woman in the painting as his youngest sister, Emily, who was living with him at Tor Villa in Campden Hill.128 Hunt adopted Rossetti’s device of the Renaissance window portrait and presents a rich array of material attributes: his model wears a fashionable snood, a brown brocade dress, dainty dangling earrings and a carved stag cameo identified by Charlotte Gere as a popular souvenir from Erbach, Germany, which was displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851.129 Most striking is that she firmly holds a blue-and-white gilt teapot in her hands: her left hand touches the acorn-shaped finial, which extends beyond the canvas into the visitor’s plane, as her right hand clasps the loop handle. The teapot appears to be a prized decorative possession rather than utilitarian, indicated by the absence of other tea things such as a tray and cup and saucer. Indeed, the blue underglaze transfer pattern references the collectable Caughley’s pagoda (c. 1780–90) identified by the two figures on the bridge, the twin pavilions, and the teapot’s globular body, curved spout and acorn knob. Made of soft-paste porcelain, the pattern was common but the teapot shape rare since many did not withstand the heat and often broke with usage. Collected at the time as an example of ‘old blue’, teapots such as these, as well as pearlware, were gilded, but as Charles Eastlake and others have pointed out gilding was considered vulgar.130 Here Hunt used the gilding to stylistically complement the sitter’s brooch and earrings.131 The imagery evokes the willow, although the doves are absent. As discussed earlier in the chapter, at the time collectors and scholars such as Jewitt attributed Caughley with originating the willow pattern and that these early examples were rare. Hunt would have been familiar with the reference as a collector and enthusiast of blue-and-white himself.132 Clearly, this teapot is special since it has been gilded and is held by the sitter as a prized possession. The title, Honest Labour Has a Comely Face, imprinted on the frame’s tablet is a reference to the 1603 Restoration play The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissil reprinted in 1841.133 ‘Honest labour bears a lovely face’ is the correct passage describing Grissil, daughter of a poor basket maker who, despite her low birth, is so beautiful and pure that she attracts the attention of the Marquess who marries her against the advice of his courtier. Doubting her fidelity, he subjects her to cruel tests, until finally convinced of her loyalty he has a change of heart and all ends well. In the young woman’s cameo the vivid image of the stag, a popularly

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hunted animal, offers another material clue that there is more to this picture than a pretty apple-cheeked girl holding a teapot. Behind her is the cabinet of diamond-paned glass, rendering the composition claustrophobic, while the carved gilt frame designed by Hunt has a protruding locking device, reinforcing the symbolism of keeping a woman under lock and key.134 By paying attention to the backdrop of the Restoration play coupled with the legend of the willow pattern, along with details of the material culture represented, I maintain that the painting can then be understood to signify how women were constructed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain as victims in the trials of love. Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Holman Hunt, all employed more available blueand-white English examples, rather than the more desirable Kangxi of the Qing period, in these works to reference the willow story, in order to enhance the narratives of the English women they portrayed, to fuse orientalist and British referents and to convey the emerging Aesthetic taste. Importantly, in these PRB paintings the blue-and-white ceramics, and particularly the willow pattern, function as powerful agents that suggest these paintings be understood as a group, which prompts a deeper and more nuanced meaning of them than is typically interpreted by contemporary scholars. Attention to and knowledge of the willow legend enable the importance of other material symbols to emerge, which, when considered together, further strengthen the theme of entrapment and the longing for escape and transformation.

Conclusion Understanding the literary and visual metaphorical meanings of the willow pattern sheds light upon how ceramics were perceived during this period and therefore helps to read their potent agency as signifiers of manners, ideals and artistic language. This chapter argues that the perception and meaning of the willow in Victorian Britain were more nuanced and complex than has been typically documented. Always congenial, comforting and a symbol of true love, willow was also, on the one hand, lower class, out of date and tasteless and, on the other hand, patriotic, nostalgic and a trope for the Pre-Raphaelites and Aestheticism. These contradictory and conflicting meanings defined the blue willow from the 1820s through to the 1880s. Just as important, the willow pattern assumed a theatrical function elevating the ceramic object to speak to its users, offering moral messaging or simply providing companionship. Paying attention to how the willow was and can be read offers new strategies for studying Victorian ceramics and new ways of understanding Victorian literature and painting.

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Figure 2.5  Cinderella Panel, designed by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, illustrated by Lucy Faulkner 1862–5, overglaze polychrome decoration on tin-glazed earthenware Dutch blanks, ebonized oak frame, 71.8 × 141.6 cm. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 2000.5.1872.

Object analysis Author and ​teacher Henrietta-Barclay Paist complained in her guide on porcelain decorating, ‘Why has China painting been so long the “Cinderella of art?”’ (Figure 2.5)135 Pictured here are six illustrations of the fairy tale for a fireplace tile overmantel designed by PRB artist Edward Burne-Jones and produced by Marshall, Morris, Faulkner, & Co.136 The ‘Cinderella’ who hand-painted the tiles was Lucy Faulkner. She signed her discreet monogram ‘LF’ on the right lower left panel, but her signature often went unnoticed until the last quarter of the twentieth century, and while it was documented that she was paid for her work, the sum is unknown.137 By contrast, Burne-Jones’s account book reveals that he was paid £7.10s for ten designs for Cinderella tiles.138 Starting as amateurs, Lucy and her better-recognized sister Kate soon replaced their brother Charles Faulkner (a partner in the firm) and William Morris as china painters; May Morris recorded that this branch of work was completed at Morris’s workshop at 26 Queen Square and ‘partly by the Faulkners in their own home lower down the square’.139 Morris’s early biographer stated that after Lucy married the firm ‘produced but few figure-subject tiles’ attesting to her importance.140 As the married Mrs. Lucy Orrinsmith, her professional path changed and she wrote a decor book supporting the Cinderella of art, observing that ‘some might tend to the production of home painted tiles’ and if that were the case then ‘a little inquiry is all that is now needed to find out proper colours and assisting kilns’.141

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Tile production in Britain shifted from hand pressing wedged wet clay to industrial methods after the 1840 invention of Richard Prosser’s dry clay powder press that allowed the tiles to become more affordable. However, Morris disliked the industrial product and imported hand-pressed tiles from Holland. Equipped with a low-firing stain glass kiln, the Cinderella tiles were re-fired three times and placed on the top and lower shelves to be closer to the heat.142 The polychrome overglaze enamel decoration, even with a glost protective glaze, was prone to abrasion and flaking and consequently, only five Cinderella fairy-tale panels are known to still exist.143 The Huntington example, displayed here, is attributed as the second version. The metal rivets and grouting are visible further evidencing that hand-crafted did not necessarily mean well-made since they may have been working out technical challenges. Morris like most Victorian design reformers strongly advised against ‘falling into sham naturalistic platitude’ in pottery painting.144 While contradictorily the Cinderella tiles are pictorial, Burne-Jones schematized the design using a grid of horizontals and verticals and in this way denied realism and made them illustrative rather than strictly painterly allowing for a clearer narrative reading. In contrast to other extant examples, the Huntington panel features more narrative captions, a painted daisy border that is echoed on the ebony frame but no edge tiles (diaper ornament) of the swan pattern. Ruskin saw a version with willow dishes in the kitchen scene, but most examples show plates with blue or brown rim.145 These discrepancies may indicate client preference, discolouration or the hand of Cinderella aka LF.

3

Teacups tell such wondrous tales

Yet, if the Tea-Cup could speak it would tell some wondrous tales!1

In his 1875 book on the history of the teacup and the potter’s art, Reverend G. R. Wedgwood longs for his teacup to speak. His statement reflects his awareness of the Victorian literary tradition of giving agency to objects so that they may bear witness to the events of the day or offer lessons to those who used them. In this way, the teacup served as a metonym, just as we saw with the willow plate. Reverend Wedgwood (no apparent relation to the famous Wedgwood pottery dynasty) joked that a teacup contributes to ‘schools of scandal’ as it played a prominent role at social tea parties and operated as ‘the pivot of many of plots’.2 His notion that cups and saucers and tea-drinking promoted gossip was a commonly held belief, dating back to when tea was first drunk in England and bringing to mind William Congreve’s character, Mellefont, in The Double Dealer, published in 1694, who states that the women will retire to ‘tea and scandal’.3 However, as contemporary scholars point out, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tea and scandal often meant more than gossip; together they also implied female licentiousness and infidelity, and porcelain cups served as agents of such lewd behaviour.4 Lady Fidget, in William Wycherley’s 1675 play The Country Wife, famously pronounced ‘we women of quality never think we have enough china’, which scholars recognize alludes to her indefatigable sexual appetite.5 The trope of insatiable porcelain consumption symbolizing female lasciviousness resurfaces in Alexander Pope’s epic poem of 1712, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, and in William Hogarth’s popular print A Harlot’s Progress II (1732) and painting The Tête à Tête (1743), now housed in the National Gallery, London, which was also engraved in the six-part series, Marriage A-la-Mode.6 At the same time, however, a woman pouring tea from porcelain showed just the opposite: high rank and respectability, an opportunity to reveal her polite refinement and

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carefully choreographed gestures.7 The paradoxical significations of china cups and tea-drinking continued into the nineteenth century. By the Victorian era, the expression ‘tea and scandal’ was in common usage and while the sexual connotation is absent in Wedgwood’s text, it is very much present in Lady Audley’s Secret, a popular sensation (melodramatic) novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, published in 1862. Here ‘ruinous gossip which even strong men delight in’ sets the stage for the bigamist Lady Audley, which I discuss later in this chapter.8 Yet Wedgwood also referred to the teacup as ‘a cup that cheers but not inebriates’, demonstrating its positive role to assemble and unite families without offering the temptation of alcohol.9 George Eliot appropriately cited the same phrase in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ in A Clerical Life, a story that centred on the detrimental effects of alcohol.10 The teacup operated as an agent of the temperance movement affirming sobriety. ‘A cup that cheers but not inebriates’ is found in William Cowper’s fourth book of his long poem, The Task, published in 1785. Cowper upheld a standard image of the tea-table and accessorizing teacups serving as agents of comfort: ‘Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast / Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, / And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn / Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, / That cheer but not inebriate.’11 The comfort of tea was not only for those who could afford shutters, curtains and a sofa. Academic painter William Redmore Bigg’s A Cottage Interior, An Old Woman Preparing Tea, completed in 1793 and held in the V&A, alludes to the Cowper image of the solace of tea through his depiction of a white creamware teapot and a brown monochrome glazed mug as suitable pottery for the virtuous poor.12 Thus, the personification of the teacup in Wedgwood’s book shows its dual role: one that operated as a vessel to promote divisive gossip and one that brings the family together for friendly chatter and comfort. In this chapter, I argue that cups, saucers and teapots stood for these activities and much more: well-being across class and gender, taste, male civility, feminine refinement or eroticism and the colonialism and imperialism of Britain’s mercantile empire that extended to the West Indies, India and China. Representing tea-drinking was common practice in English genre, social realist, Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic painting. I draw upon a wide variety of literary and visual sources to show how china objects for tea, whether on the table or on the mantel, became a leitmotif to symbolize these mutable meanings and metaphors of Victorian stratified society. I open the chapter with an overview of Victorian tea-drinking to explain how and why it became the ‘totem drink’ of the British, to borrow from Roland Barthes, through the processes of transculturation found in the often violent contact zones implicated in the appropriation and assimilation of Chinese

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culture.13 I then examine how china cups and teapots with or without the Chinese connotation dramatize and humanize the portrayals of the poor in the work of major authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope and realist artists like Thomas Faed, Frank Holl and Hubert von Herkomer. I turn to consider more joyful images of tea-drinking by English genre painters Thomas Webster and Joseph Clark to probe more deeply into the agency of quotidian china. While Victorian painters built upon the moralizing narrative of William Hogarth, David Wilkie and William Mulready, they also quoted seventeenthcentury Dutch and Flemish genre painting (both of which had been collected and reproduced in Britain since the early nineteenth century).14 As art historian Christiana Payne points out, English genre painters deliberately tried to improve the Dutch/Flemish narrative by offering moralizing didactic messages for all classes, where a sentimental, paternalistic benevolence characteristic of the affluent was directed towards the inspirational edification of the poor.15 American literary critic Ruth Bernard Yeazell adds that Victorian realist novelists similarly drew upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch as well as early Netherlandish genre painting as touchstones for what they believed to be authentic expressions of realism that referenced attention to detail, subject matter and imagery.16 Building upon Yeazell’s observations that realist novelists and British genre painters shared common motifs and scenes, I argue this strategy is particularly evident in their representations of ceramics. Moreover, they consciously selected British pottery to convey their messages. Finally, I conclude the chapter with analyses of Edward John Pointer’s portrait of his sister-in-law Georgiana Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt’s monumental painting of Allison Callaway Fairbairn and her children to argue that although the china is finer than that depicted in the genre paintings, the tableware inculcates similar values of taste, civility and domesticity. The portraits of affluent women offer yet more interpretations of how china cups and saucers denoted artistic ornamentation and Aestheticism, and most importantly how they also operated as tools to objectify women. Hunt’s painting viewed through the lens of Lady Audley’s Secret, published two years prior, suggests a more ominous reading of tea sets and tea-making. Throughout the chapter I posit that the method by which artists represented china cups, saucers and teapots dictated a particular grammar and language. In this way, I borrow from literary scholar Thad Logan’s innovative idea of finding a syntax or a grammar of objects (how objects interact with each other) within the interior, and I apply this method of study to assess how ceramic objects

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negotiate a space within visual and material culture to demonstrate microcosms of society.17 I argue that tea accessories mediated in text and image signified neglect (if empty), happiness and industriousness (if filled), good manners and social status (especially when paired with expensive china and dependent on its high or low placement in the room). These motifs comprise the visual and literary rhetoric of ceramic representations that both artists and writers employed, personalized and critiqued. Moreover, specific objects such as the humble teacup, distinguished by colour, size, shape and placement both in relation to the body and within the realistically or idealistically rendered room, often expressed attributes related to gender, taste and morality. Examination of the visual representational rhetoric of ceramics in paintings, in the context of the popular press and in literature, reveals that they were infused and coded with deep metaphorical meanings. The veiled symbolism encoded particular narratives of stratified Victorian society that could be accessed and decoded by the targeted viewer.

Victorian tea-drinking: Origins Tea was a national beverage in the Victorian period, but it had only entered the English market in the last half of the seventeenth century. Imported from China by the British East India Company (the Company) it was initially a luxury commodity and its consumption was restricted to three distinct groups: men of science who drank for medicinal benefits; men of commerce who exploited its commercial advantages; and elite women who drank it as a fashionable and gentile activity, a pastime enjoyed by Queen Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of the restored King Charles II.18 Tea accessories were also reserved for the upper echelons of society and considered just as much a symbol of wealth and high status as tea itself. It became fashionable to represent china sets in showy still life paintings known as pronkstilleven (popularized in the late seventeenth century by Dutch artists like Pieter van Roestraten) and family portraits, called conversation pieces, depicting family groups socializing and drinking tea in contemporary interiors.19 Small in size, conversation portraits denoted affluence and polite behaviour and the type of china that was portrayed further identified status: Chinese blue-and-white export porcelain for the middle class, German Meissen and French Sèvres for the upper classes.20 Remarkably, in the pronkstilleven, the tea implements fill the canvas and form the complete subject of the painting; they are sparkling and

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large and full of intricate detail. However, in the conversation pieces the china pieces are small and while often at or near the centre of the composition, they are secondary to the people and to the architectural space portrayed, requiring viewers to look closely at them to see their details. Francis Hayman’s portrait of The Gascoigne Family painted c. 1740 and held in the Huntington is just one of many conversation portraits illustrating a middleclass family at the tea-table with Chinese blue-and-white rimless cups and a red stoneware Yixing teapot (then thought to be perfect for oolong or bohea tea as recommended by the Chinese).21 The artist is believed to have supplied the china cups and redware teapot, a routine studio practice at the time which continued into the next century.22 Tea-drinking reached wider audiences in the eighteenth century when it entered the public coffee houses and was consumed by middle-class men.23 Thomas Twining opened his eponymous shop in London in 1706 to sell tea and tea accessories which furthered tea’s consumption among middle- and upperclass women in their private homes, thereby affirming the practice and notion that tea-drinking fell under the feminine domestic domain.24 The Commutation Act passed in 1784 drastically reduced tax on tea from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent, resulting in the doubling of tea consumption in a single year and making it affordable to the poor.25 French writer François de La Rochefoucauld observed in his 1784 memoir about his English travels: ‘The drinking of tea is general throughout England. . . . It gives the rich opportunity to show cups, tea-pots, etc., all made to the most elegant designs all copies of Etruscan and the antique.’26 Here de La Rochefoucauld identified tea sets in what we now call the neoclassical style, efficiently manufactured and distributed by Josiah Wedgwood and other British potteries, indicating the decline in taste for chinoiserie. In the early seventeenth century, porcelain dishes were shipped to Europe in large quantities and employed as ballasts for cargo ships carrying tea, silk and other luxuries before they were sought as profitable commodities in their own right. The Company, which held a monopoly on the British import of tea and porcelain as well as silks and spices and other luxuries, expanded its ceramic trade and eventually flooded the market with Chinese porcelain dishes; by the 1820s a Chinese export teapot was reduced to a penny a piece, making British and European porcelain the more desirable.27 After 1820 tea was increasingly recognized in Britain as a necessary luxury. As historian Julie Fromer explains, ‘Tea thus occupied the binary-straddling position of being physically and morally necessary as an article of daily ingestion and of retaining the characteristics of a pleasurable indulgence to be savored

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and enjoyed. Tea’s oscillation between the ontological categories of luxury and necessity was critical to the ideological development of an imperial nation.’28 It was seen to encourage sobriety, overruling the ‘anti-teaists’, a movement protesting that tea-drinking was inappropriate for the lower classes in the belief that it encouraged idleness, among other things.29 Several events consolidated that tea was a necessary luxury confirming Britain’s identity as a nation of teadrinkers. Although a tea tax returned in 1840, William Gladstone as Chancellor of Exchequer reduced it in 1863 and 1865 to a mere sixpence, making the beverage even more affordable.30 The Duchess of Bedford, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, introduced afternoon tea as a popular pastime, raising its importance to a desirable daily ritual.31 Another factor contributing to the institutionalization of afternoon tea was that more men started to work outside the home, and while the time of tea served varied, the change in labour habits required the dinner hour to switch from midday to around seven or eight in the evening. Teatime filled the gap between meals.32 With these changes in eating patterns, combined with improved shipping and rail transportation of cargo, came an increase in the production and choice of teawares, which I discussed in Chapter 1.33 As has been well documented by recent scholars, the drive to make teadrinking quintessentially British meant the active and systematic disassociating of tea and porcelain from China, their originating country. This severance required a substantial effort. Since the seventeenth century, the wealth and sophisticated ancient art and culture of China had inspired some respect among the British.34 However, Chinese trade barriers that increased in the nineteenth century incited British racism that was already endemic within chinoiserie, as discussed in Chapter 2. Notably, only Canton was open to the West as a trade port and to gain market control the British, as well as the French and Dutch, resorted to trading opium (replacing silver and Indian cotton) in exchange for tea and other luxuries. Chinese resistance to the highly addictive and dangerous drug culminated in the Anglo-Chinese wars: the First Opium War (1839–42) and the Second Opium War (1856–60). Devastating war reparations for the Chinese followed and facilitated the increased British appropriation and assimilation of tea and porcelain. Art historian Catherine Paganini points out that Victorians saw China in contradictory terms, ‘as both the land of the uncivilized and as a country which produced wonderful and exotic goods’.35 The 1843 Chinese exhibition held in London celebrated the signing of the Treaty of Nanking and the British defeat of the Chinese in the First Opium War. It was intended to educate

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the British public but continued to reinforce negative stereotypes of the Chinese. Featuring the private collection of the American merchant Nathan Dunn, it included art, objects and even pavilions and 100,000 copies of the exhibition catalogue were sold.36 As previously discussed, the destruction and plundering of the Summer Palace and four other palaces in Beijing in 1860 at the end of the Second Opium War triggered a second wave of chinamania for those connoisseurs among the Aesthetic circle such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler in search of rare imperial pieces, rather than the ceramics made for export, which were now deemed commercial. With the augmented racism brought on by the Anglo-Chinese wars, china dishes became the very tools to mock the Chinese as revealed in the lithographic caricature, Principal Teapots to the Celestial Court (1843) (Figure 3.1).​ The illustration follows the English tradition of anthropomorphizing pottery and puzzle pictures. For example, in 1831 illustrator George Spratt and engraver George E. Madeley produced images of people made of ceramic dishes in their series of representing trades as personifications working in the style of the Italian Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for his humourous portraits made up of objects which symbolize the subjects (Figures 3.2 and 3.3).​​ Crockery presents a woman comprised of quotidian dishes in front of pottery bottle-kiln chimney stacks that are clearly English, while China depicts a man made of finer decorative dishes referencing chinoiserie. The personifications marked

Figure 3.1  ‘Principal Teapots to the Celestial Court’, c. 1843, hand-coloured lithograph, printed by W. Kohler, 12.8 × 22.5 cm. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Figure 3.2 Crockery, John Johnson Collection: Puzzle Pictures, Folder 3 (66b). Bodleian Library.

Figure 3.3  China, John Johnson Collection: Puzzle Pictures, Folder 3 (66a). Bodleian Library.

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the division of gender but upturned the conventions of the period: domestic and everyday pottery made of red earthenware and stoneware as feminine, and ornamental white porcelain tableware as masculine; the couple perpetuated the belief that Britons excelled at utilitarian ware, while the Chinese were better at producing high-quality china – though not all of the pieces in the latter image appear to have originated in China, and the Chinese monopoly of export porcelain was in decline as previously mentioned.37 The Celestial Court offers a far more critical view presenting a gathering of angry officials of the imperial court brandishing clubs. They look like humpty-dumpty characters wearing bulbous teapots for armour and lids for helmets; they are rendered at once clumsy and fragile and thereby useless. Overwhelmed by their own oversized tea-bowl helmets the boys beside them are equally ineffective.38 The irony of using china to insult the Chinese would not have been lost on Victorian viewers – it was common knowledge that China was the country of origin for porcelain, hence the designation china for porcelain. Adding to the cruel joke was that the only impressions of Chinese culture and geography for the majority of British people were formed from chinoiserie tableware patterns.39 The Illustrated London News alluded to this in 1843: ‘Tea cups have not inappropriately acquainted us with Chinese appearances’, informatively observing that according to British soldier and politician, Viscount Jocelyn ‘it is wonderful how correct they are in the main features’.40 Writers like the previously mentioned Reverend Wedgwood recognized that the harvesting of tea was a global endeavour and one that was increasingly controlled under the British Empire.41 Since the 1820s, the Company had expanded tea cultivation in Assam, India, and Sri Lanka, colonies of the British Empire. Control of these areas passed to the British Raj in 1833 because of the civil unrest and by the late 1880s tea production in India had surpassed that of China, helping to diminish the beverage’s cultural referents.42 Fromer writes that the tea industry not only became British, but it also bridged the gap between colony and empire.43 This transculturation masked the foreignness of tea-drinking.44 By the 1860s, tea-drinking was so firmly ingrained as a British domestic tradition that the term ‘cup-and-saucer drama’ became a popular descriptor of a type of British play that centred around drawing-room comedies, employing realistic dialogue and residential interiors for stage sets and where, significantly, tea was always served. As I will now discuss, for these at once simple and complex reasons, English realist writers and painters often represented tea-drinking in

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their narratives as a source of nourishment and pleasure, or lack thereof, a frugal luxury, which often had little to do with Chinese culture, except on occasion to provide a false view of the foreign country.

Cups, saucers and teapots as agents of the virtuous poor and the working class Design historian Clive Edwards maintains that the definition of home is essentially middle class, and in the nineteenth century the poor and working classes aspired to have a home through the acquisition of material goods.45 I argue that cups and saucers, teapots and tea services were important products to acquire and own because these objects became an extension of their subjects to express domesticity.46 In both literature and painting there was much focus on the lone teacup or the singular teapot and often the reason for this was to draw attention to economic duress; few families of little means could afford large sets. Nowhere is this more evident than in Jane Austen’s third published novel, Mansfield Park (1814).47 The protagonist Fanny returns to her poor childhood home from the great country house of her relatives where she grew up, and she is ‘almost stunned by the smallness of the house and the thinness of the walls’. She cannot help but notice that this is where the cup and saucer must be ‘hastily washed’ during tea because there is not enough for everyone.48 Austen has used the common activity of tea-drinking and an insufficient supply of cups and saucers to emphasize genteel poverty. (In Austen’s earlier Sense and Sensibility (1812), status and china are also very much entwined. The economic position of Mrs Dashwood and her daughters diminishes after the death of her husband, and they must leave the family estate to make way for her materialistic son and his wife. She resents that the family furnishings will remain with her mother-inlaw including the breakfast china that is ‘a great deal too handsome . . . for any place THEY can ever afford to live in’.49) Similarly, the realist novelist Elizabeth Gaskell continued the tradition of utilizing cups and saucers to underscore poverty, as well as affection, in her contemporaneous Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, published in 1848. Gaskell’s use of objects in her novels was particularly descriptive and tied to the story. The character Old Alice, a washerwoman, invites women above her station to tea. As Fromer notes, an invitation to join a private intimate tea-table allowed the guest to cross boundaries and share their domestic lives.50 Alice, who would have earned between twelve and twenty pounds a year,51 owns mismatched

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saucers, an un-lacquered third-hand tea-tray and a black teapot, but only two cups. When she hosts her frugal tea party for three she borrows another cup so there are enough: two with matching red-and-white pattern and one with ‘the old friendly willow pattern’ as discussed in Chapter 2. By contrast, the millworking Barton family have their own tea party of six and own six cups and saucers to share with their guests. Mrs Barton tells her daughter Mary that she is reluctant to invite a seventh guest, Alice, unless she brings her own teacup or if Mary agrees to share a cup with Jem, her would-be lover. Mary finds this abhorrent and is ‘secretly determined to take care that Alice brings it’.52 In both Austen’s and Gaskell’s literary examples, tea-drinking and teacups instil good values of comfort and domesticity. More than that, we learn that china cups were so much in demand that it was common practice to borrow, bring your own or share, evidencing that china services were affordable only in small sizes such as transferware willow dishes or not at all to washwomen and low trades. More importantly, cups and saucers operated as metaphors and attributes of their fictional characters, measuring wealth, status and even love (whether or not you felt intimate enough to share the same teacup with someone). For the Scottish genre artist Thomas Faed it was the sole teapot that he charged with meaning and signification in a series of pictures that focused on the poor. His repetition of a blue-and-white teapot reveals how a ‘realist’ painter – as he was perceived at the time – relied on this conventional artistic trope in at least four paintings, including When the Day Is Done (1870), A Wee Bit Fractious (1874), Time of War (1876) and My Good Little Girl (1882).53 In all these paintings Faed positioned the teapot with the handle facing the viewer’s right and sometimes even made the angle more pronounced to increase the three-dimensional perspective, a manoeuvre typical of English genre painting. By supplying china such as the teapot as traits of gentility for his subjects, Faed followed the tradition of genre and conversation painting of the eighteenth century. The featured blue-and-white teapot has a decorative pattern and gilding on the spout and handle that outlines its moulded-relief patterns, demarking its higher status than the coarser brown-glazed teapots usually associated with the lower class. The shape of the teapot, defined by the rounded belly, sturdy strap handle with stirrup and flat knob resemble Chinese Nanking export porcelain, but its floral pattern with a large rose imprinted on the centre between the blue-ring borders is more English and typically found on printed earthenware. Faed’s teapot reflects a fusion of commercial Chinese and English ceramic manufacturing, and I maintain that it is no longer an agent of chinoiserie styling but one of gentrification and British technical superiority.

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Figure 3.4  Thomas Faed, When the Day Is Done, 1870, oil on canvas, 102.87 × 151.63 cm. Photo: Sotheby’s.

When the Day Is Done is unusual in Faed’s series because the teapot gentrifies a male labourer in his domestic space rather than a housewife at work, his more familiar composition which I will address shortly (Figure 3.4).​Here the gleaming teapot and cup and saucer sit on the table beside the patriarch of the family who reads the paper, and the delicate china marks a contrast to his rough hands and muddy boots.54 It is the only ceramic object prominently visible. It also, from the angle of the handle and spout, leads us into the physical and narrative space. It is placed near him because it signifies that he is at rest while the two women portrayed are still at work tending the children. As was typical of English genre painting, Faed utilized the teapot to convey a token of comfort as a necessity of daily life and to portray the humanity of the worker. Teapots and china services played similar roles in Victorian literature as evidenced in Charles Dickens’s early novel of 1841, Barnaby Rudge. His first foray into historical fiction, the story takes place in the 1770s during the Gordon Riots, but, as scholars point out, it is only superficially about the past and indirectly references the then current unrest of the Chartist Movement and the Hungry Forties.55 As such, Dickens relied on anachronisms to make his work more contemporaneous.

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The character Gabriel Varden, a London locksmith, earns more than Faed’s labourer, resides in ‘the cleanest of streets’ and his good character reflected in his home: ‘there was not a neater, more scrupulously tidy, or more punctiliously ordered house, in Clerkenwell, in London, in all England.’56 From his trade he would have earned an annual income between fifty to seventy-five pounds in the Victorian period.57 Gabriel Varden lives up to his Christian name: he is an angel among his people, a ‘worthy English yeoman’,58 whose moral and industrious actions contrast with the angry mob.59 Toward the end of the novel, Varden enjoys his tea with his family, on ‘the best service of real undoubted china’.60 The narrator adds that ‘the commonness of this inexpensive porcelain by no means diminished his frank enjoyment of the tea set in the bright household world’.61 The pattern of Varden’s china, featuring ‘divers, round-faced mandarins holding up broad umbrellas’, suggests mass-produced bone china in the Chinese style with polychrome decoration that has been applied with simple transferprinted outlines by possibly Hilditch & Son.62 Like Faed’s teapot, its Chinese connotations are superficial, and its chinoiserie design one of countless patterns that Stoke potteries appropriated from China and absorbed as their own. In both Faed’s and Dickens’s portrayals china teapots reward honest labour and cleanliness and share a similar message with Eliza Cook’s short story discussed in Chapter 1 but with an important distinction: here the protagonists are male. Faed and Dickens presented their respectable working-class men, albeit from different income levels, actively engaged with ceramic dishes as a necessary luxury. Their gender in relation to ceramics is not insignificant. Contemporary scholars Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Ann Eatwell and Stacey Sloboda have argued that china dishes and accessories in literature and painting, as in life, were more often paired with women. Women purchased for decoration and/or to participate in appropriate and polite ceremonial tea-drinking, while men admired it for edification.63 As they point out, men’s appreciation for china was mocked as feminine and, therefore, foolish, and this sometimes was the case. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Lydgate in Middlemarch chooses to buy china above his station foreshadowing his financial ruin, and in The Warden Archdeacon Grantly is smug about his antique ‘dragon cups’ that only a few connoisseurs would recognize as rare. However, both Faed and Dickens elicit their male characters’ domestic wholesomeness through their attachment to china, and these domesticated traits are presented in a positive light to show their humanity to contrast the terrible exploitation of the working class by industrialists at this time. The tea china, therefore, operated as a bridge between

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the classes which facilitates the development of a common humanity, a theme I will return to in Chapter 5 when I examine the agency of the jug form. In Faed’s Time of War (1876), A Wee Bit Fractious (1871) and Where’s My Good Little Girl (1882), the narratives centre on single mothers looking after their children (Plate 14) (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). In each, the teapot’s agency changes depending on its placement in the cottage interior and its relationship to other objects and as a foil to the British country jugs. Faed also portrayed British country brown jugs in the same pictorial space. Sometimes the teapot is out of reach such as in Time of War, indicating it cannot provide immediate comfort to the woman who waits for the return of her soldier husband .64​ In A Wee Bit Fractious and Where’s My Good Little Girl?, the mother figures appear better-off with more material comforts and so the teapots are nearer, set lower on the table and on the cabinet respectively indicating their more frequent use. In the latter a pitcher on the floor reveals a Rockingham glaze, a higher quality than the clear lead glaze over an iron slip pot in Time of War. In his day Faed was generally viewed as ‘an uncompromising realist’. He had only one ‘watchword, motto . . .–‘Observe’, surmised the critic Marion Hepworth

Figure 3.5  Thomas Faed, A Wee Bit Fractious, 1874, engraved by William Henry Simmons, mixed mezzotint on India paper, 63.2 × 45.7 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Bequest of John Ross Robertson Esq. (Toronto) 47.34.

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Figure 3.6 Thomas Faed, Where’s My Good Little Girl?, 1882, oil on canvas, 101.1 × 81.3 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. Photo: Glasgow Life Museums.

Dixon, who believed that Faed brought ‘an air of reality into the sphere of British genre painting’.65 Another critic Marion Harry Spielmann added that Faed’s scenes of Scottish domestic life represented ‘a fidelity to realities’.66 That Faed used the same teapot often in the same position in his compositions reveals that the object had a higher status than other pottery; it also offers insight into his practice of employing studio props to achieve this realism in his rustic genre paintings. There were some reviewers who recognized his subjects as ‘fair actors in his humble domestic scenes’ who are ‘unfailingly pretty – after a conventional artistic pattern’, a comment that can easily be applied to his representation of the teapot.67 Remarkably, the Art Journal observed that the universal appeal of Faed’s painting was ‘his skill at uniting prince and peasant, palace and cottage’. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the same magazine acknowledged that pottery made in Stoke, notably ‘the cup, the plate, the jug, belong to the cottage as to the palace’.68 Similarly, tea-drinking was considered ‘the only real luxury which is common to rich and poor alike’, as stated Samuel Phillips Day in his 1875 publication on the history of tea.69 Taking this observation further, Faed’s genre paintings are arguably the equivalent of Josiah Wedgwood’s creamware or ‘Queensware’ and pearlware which were enjoyed by all classes.70

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Another realist painter Frank Holl, who was two decades younger than Faed, created a series of paintings depicting infant mortality and widowhood in a bleak fisherman’s stone cottage in North Wales.71 They are pertinent to my analysis of how and why Victorian artists represented pottery in painting because they show that painters like Holl and Faed repeatedly used the same pottery, despite their classification as realist painters.72 Instead of an appealing blue-and-white decorative teapot, Holl usually relied on a handful of dishes painted in monochrome earthtoned hues of red-browns, blacks, creams or blue-on-white. These earth-toned glazes were deemed appropriate for his subjects since John Ruskin, described ‘black’ and ‘tan’ pottery suitable for the peasant class in many of his lectures.73 In Hushed, the first of the cottage group painted in 1877, Holl established the basic structure of his composition (Plate 15).74 Leaning on the peeling stone wall by the window he rendered two sturdy white plates (undecorated and utilitarian) and furnishing the wood side table he depicted a large dish and a crock with a spoon, a brown teapot and a white cup turned on its side in the saucer. The trio image of the cup, saucer and teapot interacts, forming the apex of the triangle which frames the mother (who weeps for her dead infant) and child to create the structure of the narrative. Here the dishes are empty and, therefore, do not serve as emblems of comfort but rather signifiers of neglect. The upright plate and teapot return in Widowed, painted two years later, as does the furniture (the crib with octagonal headboard and the block side table), but the cup and saucer are absent, there are fewer dishes and the child is barefoot (Figure 3.7).75 Alternatively, pots and dishes are more plentiful, the cup and saucer are present and there is more food in the wholesome Peeling Potatoes painted in 1880 (Figure 3.8).76​ Lastly, in the companion paintings Hope and Despair completed in 1883, Holl also included less or more dishes in correlation to the storyline prompting the viewer to think that the absence of the stack blue-rimed dishes needed to be sold to support the family because of their new desperate times (Plate 16) (Figure 3.9).77​ Holl, therefore, manipulated the crockery in a similar fashion as Faed employed the blue-and-white teapot: they indicated a modicum of civility to contrast with the desperate narrative and were employed as compositional devices to structure and schematize their interiors. Faed relied on the blueand-white hues to add colour to brighten the drab rooms and angled the spout and the handle to guide the viewer’s eye into the picture. Holl employed the whiteness of the plain dishes to draw attention to his subjects’ cleanliness and brighten the dark interiors; he placed them at different heights to organize spatial depth; their blue rim pattern added to their agency to show the family’s more secure status. Lastly, the artists used their ceramic props carefully in relation to

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Figure 3.7  Frank Holl, Widowed, 1879, oil on canvas, 84.3 x 115 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1931. This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited.

Figure 3.8  Frank Holl, Peeling Potatoes, c. 1880, oil on canvas, 35.6 × 45.4 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1983.32.

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Figure 3.9  Frank Holl, Despair, 1883, oil on canvas, 1883, 84 × 112 cm. Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK. Photo: Southampton City Art Gallery/Bridgman Images.

other objects in the room to emphasize their importance. Faed and Holl are not usually paired by current art historians as Holl is considered more of the social realist school; however, by assessing how these two artists rendered their pottery in their paintings a specific syntax becomes evident. Each used their pottery and placements as a device to construct a social narrative to communicate a specific realistic style. Contemporary scholars more often link Holl’s painting with social realist artist Hubert von Herkomer since they both illustrated for The Graphic, the political magazine founded in 1869, which disseminated weekly illustrations of the poor and disfranchised.78 The theme of the elderly taking tea is the prominent image in Herkomer’s Eventide: A Scene at the Westminster Union, painted in 1878 (Plate 17). In contrast with Faed’s and Holl’s staged compositions, it is based upon the artist’s eyewitness account of a workhouse in Soho. Herkomer’s sympathetic portrayal of the plight of elderly women, financially unable to live on their own, exposed the punitive conditions of the workhouse. This was an issue under tremendous scrutiny at the time and the image was first published as a wood engraving for The Graphic. (Figure 3.10)79​

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Figure 3.10  Hubert von Herkomer, ‘Old Age: A Study in Westminster Union’, The Graphic (7 April 1877): 324–5. Photo courtesy: Private Collection Look and Learn/ Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images.

Yet Herkomer too similarly doctored the real-life composition to heighten a sympathetic response and he used a cup and saucer as his agents. Both the illustration and the monumental painting show Herkomer’s famous technique of distorting perspective to underscore the tension of the scene.80 However, in the painting completed after the engraving, the position of the tea and crockery have changed to take centre stage: the plain ceramic white cup and metal teapot are moved to the foreground and sit on a separate side table, rather than the far end of the main sewing table. The new location draws the viewer’s eye into his long, expansive perspective. More significantly, he inserted an elderly woman gazing at the viewer, holding a cup and drinking the drops from her saucer (a sign of her lower class).81 Her addition functions in two important ways: she draws the viewer into the pictorial space, but she also invites the viewer to take tea with her and the other women – and therefore, her presence operates as societal levelling. Despite her vulgar manners, the teacup and vase of flowers, which he also added, soften the forlorn and depressing scene. The addition of the woman drinking tea and vase of flowers, all absent in the earlier illustration, makes the picture more palatable for middle-class audiences, subtly reframing the narrative to facilitate its public reception. Importantly, it links these women to the other genre paintings where tea and crockery are symbols of rest from honest labour and is intended to resonate with all generations and classes who are the viewers themselves.

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The artists I have discussed – Faed, Holl and Herkomer – all focused on representing narratives that touched upon serious issues with respect to poverty and the struggle to endure deprivation, each employing varying degrees of sentimentality and realism. What unites their work is their inclusion of ceramics, often studio props, to focus the story and the composition. Cups, saucers and teapots in relation to the objects in the room (carpet, tablecloth, food or lack thereof) and placement (high, low or near their subjects) all operated as a visual grammar that artists used consciously, or possibly unconsciously, because these tropes were so institutionalized in the practice of British genre painting.

Cups, saucers and teapots as agents of cheer and seduction Not surprisingly, there are numerous examples of middle-class tea gatherings depicted in British genre painting, and ceramic dishes similarly played a significant role to shape the tableau and influence the readings of the subjects portrayed. Thomas Webster led the Cranbrook painters based in rural Kent.82 His A Tea Party, completed in 1862, presents a noteworthy example in which the illustrated ceramics help to interpret the characters and the message of the scene (Plate 18). An elderly woman drinks from her decorative china cup and holds her saucer, signalling that she is gentile, in comparison to Herkormer’s subject. As well, she inhabits a comfortable private domestic interior with chimney ornaments, curtains, carpet and tablecloth, rather than a subsidized workhouse. Beside her are a group of little girls who she is minding; they are having a tea party using a toy set of blue transferware and appear to be eating real food. Children mimicking their elders with miniature toy china tea sets was a common way of teaching civility to young women and a fashionable and cheerful subject for Victorian artists to portray.83 However, tea sets were also understood as metonyms for ‘gossip’, which further complicates the reading of the work and in this way the children are being chastised for a seemingly benign activity. John Everett Millais acknowledged the double meaning in the title, Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), which I discussed in the previous chapter (Plate 8). Here then the dual agency of the tea set is common to both works: serving to instruct these cherubs in lady-like behaviours on the one hand or promote gossip and idleness on the other hand. Like the children’s tea set, the woman’s porcelain cup is coded with a double meaning: it is part of an eclectic assortment of tea things, a pewter teapot, a blueand-white slop bowl and two blue ware plates; its singularity marks a contrast with the children’s matching set and, therefore, at once connects and isolates

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her from the little girls. The cup resembles the common ‘London’ shape, which ceramic historian George Miller recently documented as an original trade term introduced around 1802 and evident in Josiah Wedgwood’s shape book.84 Its name connotes the urban middle class and was considered more upscale than the utilitarian creamware usually represented in rustic genre painting. But while its design may denote the woman’s higher status, it is even possible that she filched her cup, as other ‘widows filch china cups, and a silver teaspoon or two’, to quote Anthony Trollope in Eustace Diamonds (1872).85 Here I argue that the tea dishes, in fact, separate her from the children who she notably does not engage with and afford a more sombre interpretation of the scene that juxtaposes the young and the old, isolation and inclusion. Still, all the pottery represented is British, a source of national pride, and a usual feature of English genre painting. One reviewer in the Art Journal in praise of English genre painting put it this way: ‘the Englishness of the England, happy in her homes, and joyous in her hearty cheer, and peaceful in her snug firesides, is equally fortunate in a school of Art sacred to the hallowed relations of domestic life’. It is only right, therefore, that English pottery is represented in English genre painting. The concept of a national English school distinct from continental painting emerged in the seventeenth century, and by the 1840s buying English art was a popular topic of discussion by art critics such as Samuel Carter Hall, editor of the Art Journal, a theme I expand upon in Chapter 4.86 Joseph Clark’s The Labourer’s Welcome (n.d.) is an example of a pleasurable teatime featuring English pottery (Plate 19). In this labourer’s welcome, the wife heeds Sarah Stickney Ellis’s advice book The Wives of England (1843) to not sacrifice either ‘comfort or respectability for the sake of economy’, because comfort and respectability go hand in hand and domestic material comfort falls in the wife’s domain.87 We see the scene from the perspective of the husband’s eyes, whose distant image is reflected in the mirror. Arriving home from a hard day’s work, he sees his wife at rest, sitting at the tea-table with her feet elevated on a footstool but she is busy sewing.88 The message is clear: the labourer has every reason to return home to his wife and tea and avoid the distractions of the public house. Clark, following common visual and literary tropes, utilized both the mirror and tea dishes as agents to objectify and feminize his pretty wife for the male gaze. The composition illustrates how the tea-table unites the binaries between men and women, because, as Fromer points out, ‘the mutually beneficial moral influence of the home is rendered meaningless if the man of the family fails to return to his wife to accept the nourishment

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she offers’.89 Fromer states the tea-table crossed class structures, serving as a link and binder between the opposing forces of labour and rest, masculine and feminine, and luxury and necessity. I would add that the ceramics on the table and displayed throughout the room added to this agency and further shaped modes of behaviour.90 The table is set for two: ‘Bute’-shaped white cups decorated with a dainty leaf band pattern sit on saucers next to a common brown-glazed teapot. Like ‘London’, ‘Bute’ is an authentic trade name (rather than a later collector’s term), possibly introduced by Josiah Wedgwood (c. 1761) at the request of Lord Bute, prime minister of England, which added to its aristocratic status. Here then, the viewer sees china fit for the palace and the cottage, but this time we see porcelain, not pearlware. The simplicity of the pattern would have met the approval of future taste arbiters like Jane Ellen Panton who preferred white plates with simple border patterns of ivy, but the gilding would have been deemed extravagant especially for the labouring class.91 The china not only enhances the wife’s femininity but also affirms her material aspirations as she was likely buying her English china wares in open stock piece by piece. The prized teacups are complemented by the tablecloth and the decorative lustre and turquoise cup holding a posy of flowers, including a rose (symbol of love). However, the fine china contrasts with the common brown teapot, known as a Brown Betty or a cottage teapot, which acts as compositional device to invite the viewer into the canvas. It is made of local red clays and a transparent manganese Rockingham brown glaze. Manufactured by numerous factories in Staffordshire, including Alcock, Lindeley and Bloor, it was more affordable than a porcelain or silver-plate teapot.92 What is more, the viewer also sees additional English pottery examples hanging on the wall, which serve to distinguish the husband’s and wife’s gender roles: a brown-dipped stoneware hunting drinking jug with the signature hounds hangs above the husband’s reflection in the mirror, demarcating his masculine status, while the decorative relief-moulded lustreware jug is placed near her hat above her sewing kit to signify her ornamental as well as functional purpose. Significantly, the large basket of blue-and-white dishes on the bureau that abuts her head are, like the woman herself, at rest. Interestingly, the china is not on display on the mantel or in the cupboard, a more common form of depiction that I will discuss in the next chapter, indicating they are frequently used. They are agents of her domestic work, as is the teapot whose spout points to her, signalling that she will soon pour it as part of her wifely duty.

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Affluence and teacups In this concluding section, I examine portraits of affluent women who wear fashionable jewellery and are surrounded by fine china filled with tea, notably Edward Poynter’s 1870 portrait of his sister-in-law, Georgiana Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt’s painting of Allison Callaway Fairbairn completed in 1861. I argue that the women and their ceramics do not necessarily communicate domesticity and comfort but rather their pairing echoes Kowaleski-Wallace’s observation about the mediations of eighteenth-century women and china: decorative vessels pleasingly full or waiting to be filled.93 Portraits are complex works and reveal insights into the artist, the subject and the audience. The portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones is certainly a nod to the popular Aesthetic doctrine at the time: she wears a blue hairband, the wallpaper is blue and white, as is the upholstery, there is a blue glass vase on the side table, and she holds a blue-and-white cup and saucer without a handle (Plate 20). Burne-Jones’s aristocratic friend Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, commissioned the portrait and she wears the locket that Howard gave her. Burne-Jones wrote to Howard, ‘I have stipulated that your little locket shall be distinctly visible in it and though no one will know what it means when we are dead and gone you and I shall while we live.’94 The gold watch at her waist is recorded as a gift from her husband, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, early in their marriage. While I have found no documentation on the porcelain cup, it is a key feature of the portrait. Significantly, it has no handles, an indicator that it is old and precious like Grantly’s dragon cups and Mrs Jerome’s china cups discussed in Chapter 1. It is clearly not an example of British pottery: the tea bowl and saucer are hand-painted Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, possibly eighteenthcentury first Kangxi with a pencil-drawn lotus blossom and herringbone design in separate panels, and they therefore orientalize the canvas in the fashion of the Aesthetic Movement.95 Cups without handles signified a greater degree of Chinese authenticity at the time since the addition of handles was a Western fashion introduced in the early eighteenth century.96 The way in which BurneJones holds the saucer with her left palm, while her other hand daintily stirs the tea with a silver spoon mark a strong contrast to Webster’s and Herkomer’s elderly women who clutch their cup and saucers, hiding their fingers and showing only their gnarled knuckles. What is more, the proximity of the porcelain cup and saucer to her delicate hands shows that they are as smooth and fine as the white porcelain itself. The interface of the hand and the porcelain cup at the centre

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of the composition evidences Burne-Jones’s knowledge of etiquette and hence the manner in which her body and the cup and saucer interact determines her agency as a woman of taste. William Holman Hunt’s The Children’s Holiday (also known as Lady Fairbairn with her Children) of 1864–5, an Ingres-like composition set en plein-air, also referenced the rhetoric of conversation portraits from the previous centuries (Plate 21). As Codell observes, Hunt’s portraits criticized ‘the middle class taste through mimicry and simulation while creating “artistic” variations on bourgeois excess’.97 Judith Bronkhurst and Carol Jacobi have commented that Hunt’s ‘hyperrealism’ was one of his main weapons in his artistic arsenal, which allowed him to alter accessories.98 This is true of his portrait of Lady Allison Callaway Fairbairn and demonstrates Hunt’s delicate balancing act between realism and the imaginary as well as affording a look at a high society tea in juxtaposition to the previous pictures that I have examined.99 The painting was commissioned by Sir Thomas Fairbairn, the Manchester steel magnate, engineer and patron of the arts. He and his wife, Lady Fairbairn, may well have specified some of the artefacts to Hunt as well as the setting of the portrait of her and their children taking tea on the grounds of their recently acquired country house Burton Park in Sussex, built by Henry Bassett around in 1828.100 Indeed, an examination of the material culture in the extremely large 213 x 146 cm painting reveals their wealth and social position. Lady Fairbairn wears an Etruscan-style gold and coral brooch and earrings, a parure (made to order by Robert Phillips of Phillips, a coral importer) which had previously won a prize at the International Exhibition of 1862.101 The rococo-styled silver teapot which she holds, and emphasizes as the most important object in the portrait, has been identified as English made by Peirce and Burrows circa 1848, revealing how the ceramic teapot was frequently dispensed with by wealthier households in favour of silver.102 Just as significantly, her hands are active and she participates in the rituals of the tea-table, one of the few opportunities for wealthy women to reveal the sequenced gestures of labour. Protocols for women preparing and pouring tea as ways of controlling the upper-class female body for the pleasure of the male gaze were established in the eighteenth century and continued throughout the Victorian period.103 Fromer and Kowaleski-Wallace observe that both the writers Gaskell and Eliot employed tea accessories as agents of seduction to heighten the enticing gestures of their protagonists when they prepare tea for male consumption in their respective novels North and South and Middlemarch. Gaskell’s character, John Thornton, admires Margaret Hale’s ‘porcelain arms’ and ‘dainty ivory hand’,

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which are ‘busy with the tea-cup’, and he is sorry when the tea is poured because he no longer has a reason to look at her.104 From Thornton’s perspective, the cups and saucers increase Margaret’s sensuality. While Margaret is unaware of her seductive powers, Eliot’s Rosemond is not, and the tea-table and tea things operate as a place of scandal in the tradition of Congreve. The narrator describes the scene from the viewpoint of Lydgate who watches his wife as she ‘delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers’, recognizing that, despite the feminine act of providing nourishment, she is not herself nurturing. At the tea-table, a place where families are supposed to unite, the narrator comments, ‘Perhaps Lydgate and she had never felt so far off each other before.’105 What is more, at another tea that Rosamond hosts ‘she placed a tiny bit of folded paper in his [Ladislaw’s] saucer’ in the presence of her husband, transforming a ceramic object normally associated with domesticity to an agent that facilitates her secretive behaviour. Importantly, Eliot creates two different tea-party scenes as foils to demonstrate appropriate feminine behaviour. She contrasts the shallow Rosamond, who ignores her husband and does not create a sense of home, with the dutiful and less affluent Mary Garth, who attentively pours tea to her disappointed suitor, Mr Farebrother, thereby echoing appropriate feminine comportment illustrated, for example, in Campbell’s The Labourer’s Welcome.106 Returning to Hunt’s portrait of Lady Fairbairn, she embodies the genteel woman’s role as tea-maker and moral nourisher of the family, to paraphrase Fromer, who, through the tea-table, instilled good manners and good taste.107 Fairbairn shows the convention that tea should be prepared and presented by the matriarch of the family according to custom, rather than by the domestic servant, a task considered appropriate for the wealthy woman of the house. In this painting she serves a lavish tea, especially for a picnic, which is furnished with carved wood and satin upholstered chairs. Three ceramic cups are filled with tea and sit in deep saucers decorated in a gilt neoclassical key pattern which was engine-turned on a lathe (a sign of industry) and set on a band of cobalt blue. Possibly a family heirloom, the china service resembles soft-paste porcelain made by Derby (Bloor Period) in the 1820s. The Bute cups are distinguished by the cylindrical, egg-shape sides curving inward towards the foot ring.108 Another identifying feature is the kick-loop strap handle, which indents gently inwards just above the base attachment and is visible on the central cup under Fairbairn’s sleeve.109 The filled neoclassical gilded porcelain teacups speak of plenty, especially when viewed in context with the other objects. Notably, Fairbairn’s womb is at centre of the painting, and it abuts against the laden tea-table with its filled vessels, paying a tribute to her fecundity, as do the surrounding children.

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In this case Hunt’s attention to detail and realism was exact. Another part of the set is a slop/waste bowl for leaves, an essential part of English tea services from the mid-1700s up to the early 1900s before cloth and paper teabags came into general use. The glimmering surface of the hot-water urn, made in a complimentary neoclassical pattern to the china service and distinguished by a lion with loop handles, ivory knob and a fluted base, was most likely Sheffield plate and reflects the rococo teapot (thus breaking up the stylistic matching set). However, this hotwater urn, yet another signal of wealth and initially affordable only to the affluent, was considered by some etiquette books as garish and a threat to women’s duties of pouring hot water from the heavier metal tea kettle. The urn was thought to induce laziness and diminish the wifely duties of the tea-table.110 In this picture, then, Hunt was commissioned to work with real family-prized possessions.111 However, the portrayal of family’s acquisitions did not stop Hunt from subtly changing the objects if needed to enhance the decorative elements of the overall picture. Hunt’s material manipulations are evident by the unified textures and colouring. He finessed the tea equipage, Fairbairn’s shawl and dress to create a silver and gold composition, the most dominant hues of the canvas, reinforcing the autumnal setting of the park. Her shawl is richly decorated with two gold over blue-embroidered panels and links to the cobalt blue and gilt china. He carefully repeated the gold fluting that embellishes the rectangular base of the urn on her collar and on the edge of her shawl. A critic from the Illustrated London News recognized Hunt’s penchant for focusing on separate objects ‘with concentrated attention’ for the sake of harmony but considered it a mistake: the draperies and accessories are aspects ‘we should least notice – [but] look far more real than the face . . . upon which our chief attention would fix’.112 By drawing out the materiality of these inanimate objects, Hunt, with or without intention, hinted at the materialism of the Fairbairns. The china tea service, in particular, contributes to the larger visual composition of gold, silver and blue hues, reiterating how Hunt doctored his objects for the sake of his artistic vision. Such attention to surface detail in his paintings links them with those of the Aesthetic artists. Two years prior to Hunt completing the canvas, Mary Elizabeth Braddon published her widely popular sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret. An examination of the scene in which Lady Audley serves tea to her mortal enemy Robert Audley, which Kowalesky-Wallace aptly describes as ‘an apotheosis of tea-making’, facilitates a reading that Hunt used china and other material objects as a subtle critique of an idealized portrait of feminine domesticity.113 Such an interpretation is made even more plausible through an explicit mention of the

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PRB in the novel.114 The hero and reluctant detective, George Audley, is transfixed by a portrait of Lady Audley and thinks to himself ‘no one but a Pre-Raphaelite could have given to that pretty pouting mouth that hard almost evil look in the portrait’.115 Sophia Andres recently explains that the presence of the painting serves to make the story current and realistic since readers would have been familiar with the PRB’s depictions of femmes fatales which were displayed in galleries or in reproduced engravings. Many viewers would have considered them decadent, just as the Lady Audley’s character is morally defective.116 As the story unfolds, we learn that Lady Audley, as stunning as she may be with ‘golden ringlets of feathery masses’, is also a bigamist and would-be murderer, though she certainly knew how to preside over the tea-table and disperse elegant teacups and saucers. Braddon relied on the trope of describing the tea-table from the male gaze, but rather than domesticity she conjures the mystery and magic of the tea-table as metonymies for danger. Robert Audley sees the temptress Lady Audley seated in her boudoir behind ‘the graceful group of delicate opal china and glittering silver’ and thinks to himself ‘surely a pretty woman never looks prettier when making tea’. Here the ‘tea-table is her legitimate empire’ but while she ‘reigns omnipotent’, she is also a ‘witch’ and the empire is exotic, and therefore not safe, since it is infused with ‘floating mists’, ‘scented vapours’, ‘spells’ and ‘secrets’.117 Braddon, therefore, alluded to the ‘foreign’ referents of tea-making and tea-drinking rather than British ones to destabilize domesticity, which was the normative connotation of Victorian teatime. However, the scene also demonstrates that the tea-table is a powerful social space for Lady Audley as it is for Lady Fairbairn. Lady Audley’s story provides a different view of Allison Fairbairn: she is at once a commanding woman of great fertility but not independent. We witness this scene from Hunt’s very male viewpoint. Fairbairn who is surrounded by her children and fine things hardly appears sinister and seductive like Lady Audley, but nor is she oblivious to her sexual powers like Margaret Hale. She too resides over her domestic domain of material affluence: the jewellery, tea service, the teapot and urn all appear to be English and demonstrate how Thomas Fairbairn, a captain of British industry, supported the local arts, including patronizing Hunt himself and owning his wife as one of his many objects. Moreover, she consumes exotic products harvested throughout the British Empire ignoring, or unaware of, the devastating effects on these colonies from such production and trade: tea from India, sugar from the West Indies, ivory from Africa, mahogany wood from the West Indies and a Kashmir shawl from India. The tea-table, therefore, stands for a contact zone of intersecting cultures to create a transcultural moment.118

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Art historians Tim Barringer and Carolyn Arscott point out that Fairbairn wears an Indian shawl, like the fallen woman in Hunt’s earlier The Awakening Conscience, painted in 1853 and owned by Thomas Fairbairn.119 In the latter, the paisley shawl is tied provocatively around the waist of the woman (modelled by Hunt’s mistress, Annie Miller), perhaps to protect her from her lover’s grasp; in contrast, Fairbairn’s resplendent gold-thread shawl falls appropriately over her shoulders. In Fairbairn’s case, her shawl and her sexuality are properly managed within the dictates of Victorian propriety. To be sure, Hunt portrayed Lady Fairbairn as a matriarch to fulfil his obligation as a portraitist, and his realistic depiction of teacups and shawl serves that purpose. However, these rich objects also function as subtle agents to allude to meanings and metaphors that items such as china cups and shawls can symbolize the inverse of power and fertility: seduction and fallen stature.

Conclusion Throughout the Victorian period the careful depiction of teacups, saucers and teapots in literature and painting transmitted important messages concerning morality for men and women of all classes. Whether on the teatable or on the mantel, these objects were meant to be read as analogical and metonymical agents that crossed class structures. They served as such strong motifs to gentrify the labouring class that genre and so-called realist artists even supplied their own dishes as models. Among the lower middle classes for whom china cups were desirable, but affordable only in small sets or not at all, it was common at tea parties to rent, bring your own, share or hastily wash the teacups. In portraits of upwardly mobile and socially established families, the china was finer, the service larger and the tea urn was silver, but they are similarly charged with symbolism. The tea vessels linked and bound the opposing forces of labour and rest, masculinity and femininity, luxury and necessity, chastity and wantonness, loneliness and fulfilment, racism and imperialism and mitigated and exemplified differences among the lower, middle and upper classes. The codes that transmitted the multifarious meanings and metaphors of empire, exoticness, domesticity, gentility and sensuality that teacups, saucers and teapots conveyed to the Victorians are no longer readily apparent to today’s audiences, but their strength at that time empowered the tea wares to tell wonderous tales of Victorian society.

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Figure 3.11  Cup and saucer, Minton & Co, Stoke-on-Trent, 1851, bone china, painted blue enamel, gilded, V&A Museum, 648&A-1853. Photo: Charles Meigh & Co Vase, 1851. Photo: ©Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Object analysis Wandering through​ the Great Exhibition of 1851, one critic mused that it is ‘absurd’ to compare British ornamental china to that of Sèvres, declaring that British crockery was far superior to a French blue-and-white porcelain cup and saucer costing three or four pounds (today’s worth around 660 pounds) (Figure 3.11) 120. This cup, made by Minton, is not an example of good English crockery but represents the pottery’s initiative to compete with the high-end European porcelain manufacturer but at more affordable prices by copying Sèvres’s product line. Minton was one of the most successful British potteries in the latter half of the nineteenth century, developing new clay bodies and techniques like majolica, encaustic and Parian ware. It did not, however, carry the same prestige as Sèvres, the French porcelain manufacturer located outside of Paris established in the eighteenth century and patronized by royalty and aristocrats. After the French Revolution, historical Sèvres became highly collectable among the French elite, and the factory continued to operate under the management

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of Alexandre Brogniart. Herbert Minton (son of founder Thomas Minton), who maintained close ties with leading design reformers Augustus Pugin and Henry Cole, also associated with Brogniart. Léon Arnoux joined Minton, as its principal designer in 1849 and had previously worked at Sèvres and his arrival at Minton further strengthened the connections with the French porcelain manufacturer. The cup and saucer, fashioned in the florid neo-rococo style, is an example of Minton’s useful, rather than ornamental, wares – tableware represented a major source of income for the pottery and an important part of its production. This was just one of many designs that it copied from Sèvres. Minton secured the mid-eighteenth-century plaster casts of the bowl form with entwined scrolling handle directly from the French manufacturer and kept ‘Old Sevres’ pattern books for its china painters.121 Made of bone china (calcined bone ash bonded in basic clay), it was stronger than French soft-paste porcelain and more heat resistant. Despite the scalloped gilding and hand-painted garlands of flowers (the outline first delineated in underglaze), production costs were kept down: only blue enamelling was applied rather than conventional pinks for the roses and greens for the leaves, which would have required multiple kiln firings for each additional colourant and therefore would have been more expensive. That Minton aligned itself with Sèvres while keeping its British identity, that it copied without the intention of deception or forgery (the wares were usually marked) and that it innovated illustrate the pottery’s complicated yet successful navigations to conquer the stratified marketplace. Indicated by its accession number, the South Kensington Museum approved of the design, acquiring it two years after production to inspire consumers, designers and other potters.122

4

British pottery Pride and piety

[T]he worst of it is, that when they suffer from this weakness, which you call sensitiveness, they think that they are made of finer material than other people. Men shouldn’t be made of Sèvres china, but of good stone earthenware.1 So claims Lady Glencora while gossiping to her close friend, Mrs Finn, about the suicide of the suave and unsavoury Ferdinand Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who they dismiss as an outsider, in Anthony Trollope’s 1876 political novel The Prime Minister. She expresses the view that French Sèvres porcelain invoked femininity and, by contrast, good ‘stone earthenware’ that was presumably English and conveyed masculinity. What is significant in this passage is that Glencora used different clay bodies, albeit incorrectly, as an analogy to evaluate moral character.2 Moreover, she cites a non-English porcelain for the ungentlemanly Englishman with foreign origins as an indication of weakness, suggesting that the country which manufactured the ceramic tableware as well as the type of clay body, in this case French porcelain, intimated immoral character. Glencora was not alone in utilizing ceramics as a tool to measure a person’s character. As I will argue in this chapter, pottery and porcelain often appear in Victorian literature and painting as attributes of strong or weak personalities, and the reason for this was grounded in two important Anglo traditions, pride of place and piety. In the Victorian era, pottery evoked strength of character, in part because it touched upon national imperialism and specifically alluded to Britain’s manufacturing expertise as especially seen in its burgeoning ceramic industry. Tableware made in Britain and exported around the world portrayed empire, metaphorically and sometimes literally, if it depicted transferware views of the colonies with pattern names like ‘British America’ and ‘Arctic Scenery’.3 What is more, a national rhetoric developed paying tribute to the British pottery

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industry in the pages of the Art Journal and espoused by Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and Owen Jones. The triumvirate (as they were sometimes nicknamed) insisted on using the term ‘pottery’ over the word ‘ceramic’ for the classifications of the material at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and at Marlborough House.4 As explained in the 1853 catalogue, the word ‘ceramic’ originates from Greek, and though employed in France and Germany as a generic term for all kinds of pottery, ‘there seems hardly any good reason for substituting this new word for our own English one, which is as comprehensive’.5 Markedly, Cole favoured the term ‘pottery’ when he edited the short-lived Journal of Design and Manufactures (1849–52),6 and Redgrave also privileged the word ‘pottery’ over ‘china’ and ‘ceramics’ in his Manual of Design in 1876.7 National pride focused, as the ArtUnion stated, upon the understanding that the pottery industry ‘gives value to materials that are otherwise worthless’.8 The Museum of Practical Geology founded in 1835 began collecting British pottery in the mid-1850s on a similar premise to show examples of the transformation of British minerals to finished product.9 Pottery produced in Staffordshire and other parts of England operated as a material culture that made average Britons aware of the empire and helped constitute their identities. As cultural historian Erika Rapport notes, ‘most Victorian imperial objects were, at least at some point, also commodities that taught Britons to see imperialism as a valuable and profitable enterprise’.10 I maintain this was the case with British china: the manufacturing and consumption of this domestic product encouraged Britons at home and around the world to be proud of their empire and therefore served to nation-build. Contributing to both a national rhetoric and a material culture, British pottery acted as agents of Britishness defining and denoting British identity. In this way British pottery affirmed collective illusions and myths to elevate the cultural and social values of Britain to the point of legend.11 And yet, I contend, there is still another important reason why British ceramics evinced moral character in the nineteenth century: while tied to nationalism it was also linked to piety. To be sure, ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, espoused by Methodist Reverend John Wesley, was a commonly held belief, which we saw with the previously discussed Moses and Gabriel Varden characters in The Old Crockery Shop and Barnaby Rudge respectively.12 Just as significant are the Bible’s and New Testament’s frequent references that man is modelled from a ‘lump of clay’ or ‘man is but God’s vessel’. Clay passing through the ‘fiery furnace’ transforming into an improved durable material also served as a metaphor of human endurance. These religious analogies of clay inflected

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Victorian texts and images, positioning ceramics as harbingers of morality and mortality. In this chapter, I first discuss how Victorian pottery connoted pride and patriotism evidenced in poetry and prose, as well as in other print media by a wide range of authors such as Thomas Hood, Jane Austen and Benjamin Disraeli. Nationalist rhetoric emerged in the eighteenth century as Britons became enthusiastic about their rapidly expanding ceramics industry, thanks in part to the inventions of Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode, and continued in the nineteenth century with artistic advances made by Minton, Doulton and other potteries. Britons believed, although not entirely true, as I explain later in the chapter, that their pottery industry developed without royal patronage, thus differentiating their entrepreneurship from that of continental Europe. British pottery manufacturing was promoted as a democratic exercise. Newspaper and magazine writers and novelists trumpeted, sometimes with a hint of sarcasm, that ‘useful’ wares at which Staffordshire excelled and exported all over the world were appropriate for both the ‘palace’ and the ‘cottage’.13 For these at once simple and complex reasons, ceramic objects themselves, either individually or in sets, served as both tokens and measures of Englishness for travellers like artist Mary Ellen Best and colonialists Susanna Moodie, Anne Langton and the aristocrat, Lady Hariot Georgina Dufferin. I then discuss how in England patriotism for the British ceramics industry manifested in factory tourism, a democratic pastime that appealed to all classes. Fictional characters, journalists, designers and both royal and middle-class patrons visited potteries to witness how ceramics were made. I maintain that blue-and-white transferware pottery, such as willow, which was displayed in the cottage cupboard or on the mantel, was a common literary and pictorial motif that not only represented a continuation of the seventeenth-century tradition of displaying material wealth but, more importantly, stood for patriotism, piousness and gentility. The image of a cupboard full of dishes to convey a positive image of the British workingclass cottage dominated the writings of John Ruskin, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot and was popular among so-called amateur artists like Best and Elizabeth Pearson Dalby and professional artist Henry Hunt. For the most part, these representations contrasted with the rapacious depictions of chinamania targeting the middle and upper classes originating with paintings and prints by William Hogarth and continuing in the nineteenth century with illustrations by Edward Linley Sambourne and George du Maurier in the pages of Punch.14 I conclude the chapter arguing that crockery linked with godliness was commonly used as a way to assess character in trade and religious publications and

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employed by leading authors George Henry Lewes, Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James. Consequently, since ceramics were infused with religious undertones, they also intimated life and death in the Victorian era. William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil is relevant to this aspect of my discussion because it exemplifies how pottery operated as an instrument of vanitas. Here the pottery does not simply stage the human action of the narrative but is integral to it and is emblematic of how pottery commands its own agency.

Pride and patriotism Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a British perception grew that Britons populated the world and controlled global trade through the country’s manufacturing of everyday tableware.15 This proud sentiment, developed in parallel with Staffordshire’s meteoric expansion, was tinged with a touch of snobbism as evident in Sir Charles Hanbury Williams’s popular satiric verse ‘Isabella, or the Morning’, published in 1740: To please the noble Dame, the courtly’ squire Produc’d a teapot made in Staffordshire: ‘Such works as this’, (she cries) ‘Can England do?’ It equals Dresden, and outdoes St. Cloud: All modern China now shall hide its head And e’en Chantilly must give o’er the trade: ‘Do thou, thrice happy England! still prepare This Clay, and build thy fame on Earthenware’.16

Williams’s tone pokes fun at the pride of the new-found industry: it was only recently that British consumers relied on imported stoneware from Rhineland, blue-and-white tin-glaze earthenware from Holland and export porcelain from China. However, by the 1740s Britain had made technological advances in utilitarian tableware, first with press-moulded white salt-glaze stoneware, followed by the innovative creamware and pearlware ceramic bodies developed by Josiah Wedgwood. At the higher end of the commercial spectrum, Josiah Spode perfected bone china (literally kaolin mixed with bone ash to make it whiter) that became an industry standard.17 In London during the 1740s, Chelsea, Bow and other ornamental porcelain manufacturers also opened to compete with fine continental porcelain.18

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Unsurprisingly, the aristocratic Williams preferred Meissen, known as Dresden, porcelain. He collected it when he served as ambassador for George II to the Court of Saxony in Dresden from 1747 to 1750 and subsequently loaned it to the Chelsea Porcelain Factory to make models. As has been well documented, the formula to make milky white, translucent hard-paste porcelain was the arcanum of Europe during the first half the eighteenth century, an innovation which only the elite could afford. The Meissen factory in Germany, under the royal patronage of Augustus the Strong, was the first European manufacturer to discover the secret of porcelain production and secure the critical ingredient of kaolin in 1709–10, some seven centuries after China.19 Williams’s taste for European porcelain reflected the collecting norm among the upper echelons of British society unless their hunt for acquisitions was circumvented by trade barriers or war.20 Another collectible type of ceramics of the period was Italian Renaissance maiolica, known as ‘Roman earthen ware’, that sometimes entered aristocratic collections after the seventeenth century when it was often acquired during the Grand Tour, which had become a popular activity for the British moneyed classes.21 Williams’s poem steeped with sarcasm continued to be republished throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 Jane Austen affirmed this pretension in Northanger Abbey when her narrator described General Tilney boasting about his breakfast service: ‘He thought it right to encourage the manufacture of his country; and for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden or Sèvres.’23 Because actions are evidently supposed to speak louder than words, the General then brags to the unworldly Catherine, who he is trying to impress under the misconception that she is wealthy, that, although he just bought the set two years ago, he was intending to buy another.24 What is important here is the messaging of the General’s ‘uncritical’ opinion that British pottery made in Staffordshire had caught up to the continental porcelains of German Dresden and French Sèvres, partly thanks to his patronizing the Potteries. Tilney is a foolish snob, and Austen intimated his conspicuous consumption by his desire to buy new and to upgrade his china pattern. The passage reveals that buying a service was not necessarily a one-time occurrence restricted to special occasions, such as nuptials or anniversaries, and that men shopped for everyday china. Despite the female-gendered nature of chinamania representations and discussions, men, too, were tempted with excess. Remarkably, the narrator stated that the ‘elegance of the breakfast set forced itself on Catherine’s notice when they were seated at table’, indicating how consumer

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objects such as ceramics imposed a strong presence in the minds of its consumers (albeit in this case fictional). The description affirms that crockery and pottery acted as social agents possessing an uncanny power to cause human action. This agency is borne out in the paintings of Mary Ellen Best. An amateur artist residing in Yorkshire, Best illustrated the rooms of her family’s upperclass homes, such as Dining Room at Langton, Family at Breakfast in the 1830s (Plate 22). Her grandmother and family members sit on regency-style chairs and dine on a green transferware service with a silver tea urn and coffee pot, not unlike the breakfast scene from Northanger Abbey. Likewise, the breakfast service would have ‘forced its attention’ on the viewers of the watercolour, as it did on the fictional young Catherine because the transfer is stained with a green colourant, a relatively new Staffordshire invention introduced in 1828.25 Despite Austen’s hint of sarcasm, her family were active consumers of the British ceramics industry. She wrote to her sister Cassandra that she enjoyed the ‘pleasure of receiving, unpacking & approving Wedgwood ware’, describing a vine leaf pattern that was to match their other china.26 She also accompanied her brother Edward Knight and his daughter Fanny to the Wedgwood London showroom when he ordered his creamware ‘dinner set’ with the Knight family crest and small lozenge purple and gilt border pattern. Austen’s mention of Sèvres in Northanger Abbey is an important acknowledgement that Meissen was losing its status as the pre-eminent European porcelain manufacturer, now supplanted by the royal French manufacturer.27 Likewise, Anthony Trollope has his character, Plantagenet Palliser, the aristocrat in Can You Forgive Her? (1864–5), gifting Sèvres china as ‘his’ wedding present for his wife’s best friend, Alice. He describes the china service as ‘very precious and beautiful’.28 Palliser, the soon-to-be prime minister and future duke, is a serious and sensible man and devoted to work with ‘the grinding energy of a young penniless barrister’ who ‘cares for nothing being pretty’.29 However, he makes the choice gift rather than his beautiful and impulsive wife, Glencora, because he knew that Alice’s fiancé liked china. Here, interestingly, Trollope’s narrator does not ridicule Palliser or the groom for enjoying fine china, often considered a feminine trait, but rather reveals a strong tradition enjoyed by English dukes. The diplomatic gifting of Sèvres services to British aristocracy began at the end of Seven Years’ War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.30 Palliser’s present was personal rather than political and demonstrates that it was acceptable and expected for the male elite to appreciate fine porcelain, marking how gender construction was intertwined with class. Here French porcelain is an appropriate gift and yet, as

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previously mentioned, Glencora referenced the material to slight a disagreeable foreign male associate, signalling the Sèvres brand as a mutable signifier among the English aristocracy. If the British aristocracy and upper class preferred continental porcelain, they also showed a noblesse oblige towards British pottery, with the understanding that it was superior in function to its global competitors but considered its design physically cruder and less aesthetically pleasing. This opinion became the consistent messaging of articles on the subject between the 1830s and 1880s, when critics argued that Britain excelled in utilitarian ware (dishes) rather than ornamental ware (vases, sculptures and figurines). Supplying the world with mass-produced everyday pottery was still deemed a considerable feat; it highlighted the importance of British global manufacturing and the growing empire’s ability to ‘civilize’ the world with crockery and dishes. As such, Thomas Hood’s popular verse ‘The China-Mender’ (c. 1832), which is inflected with the same satirical tone of Williams and Austen, espoused that sensible British functional tableware trumps the frivolous beauty of continental porcelain. Using the voice of the servant Mary, who prefers ‘good ironstone for wear’, Hood has her scoff at her mistress’s taste for foreign porcelain and dismissively observe that ‘whole crates of new Wedgwood and Spode’ cannot replace her taste for ‘Dresden’ and the ‘Mandarin porcelain’.31 Republished in ceramic collector books throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the poem’s satirizing an insatiable appetite for porcelain as a feminine vice continues the well-established trope which I discussed in Chapter 2. Also significant is the mention of durable ironstone china because this ceramic material was relatively new. In 1813, Charles James Mason in Staffordshire patented the recipe, which combined scoria or slag of ironstone with flint, along with Cornwall stone and clay to make it strong, and it was thereafter widely produced by potteries in England and Scotland and consequently exported around the world.32 The future British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli reiterated in his 1844 novel Coningsby the commonly held belief that Britain’s robust functional pottery surpassed global competitors. Calling for reciprocity between France and England – French fine wines for British tableware – the character Sidonia declares to himself, ‘[I]f we only had that treaty of commerce with France . . . the dinners of both nations would be improved: the English would gain a delightful beverage [wine], and the French for the first time in their lives would dine off hot plates. This exchange would be an unanswerable instance of the advantages of commercial reciprocity!.’33 As Disraeli and others knew too well, not only could British tableware withstand high heat allowing it to be warmed in the oven

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without cracking, in contrast to its continental competition, but it was more affordable and dependable.34 Patriotic statements that British pottery while not as artistic was more democratic were expressed in the pages of the Art-Union in the 1840s, often inflected with this apologetic tone. The journal boasted, ‘[T]here is not a doubt our ordinary earthenware, and more especially our dinner services are unrivalled in the world.’35 Later that year the magazine wrote that the turning point for British ceramics was Josiah Wedgwood that before him everything had been imported but now ‘English ware is served at every continental inn, the English traveller finds English porcelain in the palaces of the noble, and bits of English crockery in the hovels of the peasant’.36 As I discussed in Chapter 1, industry writers such as William Evans believed that in the areas of earthenware, ‘we have no serious rivals’.37 Léon Arnoux, the French-born long-running artistic director of Minton (1849–92), echoed this opinion in the 1850s, declaring that ‘all who are well acquainted with the trade know that British earthenware would be preferred on account of its strength which is much greater than that of the manufacturers of which we have just been speaking (France and Germany)’.38 Arnoux added, ‘As Mr. Minton has obtained these magnificent results by his own unaided efforts, and at his own pecuniary risk, many persons do not hesitate to award as much credit to them as to the manufacturers of Sèvres, (which is statefunded).’ He continued in a more defensive tone to explain that the absence of a crown manufactory in England ‘need not be regretted even if it cannot attain the quality of Sèvres’, thus also conceding that the French were still superior in ornamental ware.39 Arnoux was not the only one to express such ambivalence about British ceramics. In the article ‘Wandering in the Crystal Palace’, published in the Art Journal, one critic mused that it is ‘absurd’ to compare British ornamental china to that of Sèvres or Meissen because they are royal establishments. Instead, he suggested, ‘let us boast of our matchless display of useful, convenient, republican crockery, adapted to the wants of a clean, and much washing people. What charming jugs, baths and basin! How cool, and fresh, and bright, they look! . . . and all so well made and so appropriate, so substantial in countless varieties of form’.40 These pieces, he further opined, are far superior to a blue-and-white porcelain cup and saucer costing three or four pounds. Here then is that familiar sarcasm, especially evident when our wanderer concluded that ‘Future ages will infer from the crockery of our bed-rooms, that we were giants in these in our day, and will lament over their own degeneracy’.41 The phrase ‘republican crockery’ is palpable, suggesting the importance of British ceramic exports to the United States,

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an indication of pride in the entrepreneurial spirit of the Potteries who were working independently of royal funding and recognition of the important role ceramics was serving to gentrify and, therefore, elevate the lower class. Apsley Pellatt, a Staffordshire MP and owner of the Pilkington Glass company, made a similar point in the 1854 issue of the Art Journal. He observed that the pottery industry achieved its high level ‘entirely by individual enterprise’, unaided by state subsidies, and then offered a patriotic salute to the British industries manufacturing for the common people. In his opinion, all British domestic vessels from the coarse brown pans to ‘the elegancies of the table prove that every day the manufacturer is becoming of greater national importance, especially as England abounds with clay and coals, the latter being at the very foundation of our social industry’.42 The assertion that the English ceramics industry did not directly receive government or royal subsidies, in contrast to their continental competitors, was only partly true. Patronage from aristocracy was still very much needed to succeed and, as such, royal warrants were pursued and granted. Notably, Queen Victoria purchased from Minton a 116-piece blue celeste (turquoise) dessert service with hand-painted cupids, flowers and fruit which boldly copied the Sèvres style. Exorbitantly priced at 1,000 guineas, it was displayed at the Great Exhibition, and the Queen gifted some of the service to the Emperor of Austria. She also ordered more examples for Windsor and Balmoral Castle, inspiring members of the nobility to buy similar sets, which Minton renamed the ‘Victoria Service’ to capitalize on its royal patronage and was retailed by Mortlock.43 Queen Victoria’s commission elevated the commercial and critical success of Minton, just as Queen Charlotte had previously raised the status of Chelsea when she commissioned a service for her brother, the Duke Adolphus Frederick IV Mecklenburg, or gave permission to Josiah Wedgwood to call creamware, Queensware.44 British critics at the time cited the Great Exhibition and Minton’s display as a turning point for British pottery. They praised proprietor Herbert Minton for elevating ornamental ware through his refined clay bodies, such as Parian (a biscuit porcelain for statuary ware) and majolica (lead-based green glazed earthenware modelled after Italian Renaissance maiolica), developed by Arnoux.45 The Art Journal pronounced, ‘The Minton Majolica is one of the most successful revivals of modern pottery; the spirit of the early works is evidenced in the reproductive style and there is both in the materials and manufacture in the models, in their manipulation and in their decoration, a very marked and acknowledged superiority.’46 Minton’s majolica similarly received royal and state

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patronage when it was chosen as tiles to furnish the Royal Dairy at Windsor and the South Kensington Museum.47 Henry Cole contributed to Minton’s rising star through his friendship with Herbert Minton and his role as designer for the pottery. Remarkably, Cole noted that initially Minton was reluctant to brand his pottery with his own label in fear of the ‘dreaded retailers of London, who at one time ruled manufacturers with a rod of iron’.48 Cole explained that Minton believed they would stop selling his wares because they feared consumers would skip the retailer and buy directly from the manufacturer for a better price. Clearly, Minton and his nephew Colin Minton Campbell, who took over the pottery after Herbert’s death in 1858, overcame their hesitation and quickly built a recognizable brand name surpassing Wedgwood and other English firms. Their success was largely due to the artistic contributions by Cole, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and Arnoux followed by Marc-Louis Solon and William Stephen Coleman, as well as the much sought-after royal patronage. John Everett Millais’s 1862 painting Trust Me affirms Minton’s increased brand status in Victorian England (Plate 23a, b). To signal that the narrative of his painting was contemporaneous, the artist went to great length to paint the Minton stamp and date 1861 on the rim of the majolica flowerpot that closely resembles the manufacturer’s example with a water lily pattern. At this time Millais designed illustrations for Anthony Trollope’s novels, and Trust Me reflects this type of dramatic and moralistic literary composition.49 The father questions his daughter in the breakfast room about a letter she is hiding behind her back. The dated and branded pot is critical to the narrative because it shows that the family is fashionable, but its placement on the table that visually divides the figures reveals dissension. Significantly, the jardiniere featuring waterlilies holds crocuses, flower choices which held particular coded meaning for Victorians: the former symbolized ‘purity of heart’ and the latter ‘youthful spring’ and ‘abuse not’, prompting viewers with whom they should place their sympathies.50 After the Great Exhibition, critics argued that British ornamental ware, and not just functional ceramics, had greatly improved, thanks to the international fair and the others that followed. Now there was a shift in emphasis with commentators warning that British ceramics should always retain their roots in functional tableware.51 Sir Henry Doulton,52 the proprietor of Doulton Pottery and Porcelain Company, which had started as a manufacturer of industrial stoneware sanitation pipes and practical jugs, was swept up by the changing tide, led by Minton, to make artistic ceramics. He introduced art ware, produced at his Lambeth and Burslem studios, at the 1867 International Exhibition in Paris.

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By 1888, Doulton was repeating the familiar refrain in a public lecture on the success of the British pottery industry, ‘before the usual select circle’, which was reported in The British Architect. He concluded that ‘the progress of the last twenty-five years had compelled our continental neighbours to recognize the English style’.53 However, Doulton cautioned that ‘a school of purely decorative pottery is short lived, and doubtless the continuous productions of Wedgwood, Worcester and Minton are largely due to the careful attention paid to utilitarian requirements’.54 He went on to predict that in the next fifty years, the Victorian age would be remembered for the ability of the English potteries to combine ‘beauty and utility’. Evidently for Doulton pride of English pottery originated in function, and he meant this without irony, no doubt because his company’s success was founded on the manufacturing of sewage pipes.

Travel, colonialism and factory tourism Because British pottery served as symbols of empire it became common practice for British citizens to travel with their dishes when they lived abroad, as was the case with Mary Ellen Best. She, like many women artists in the nineteenth century, occupied a space between professional and amateur, selling and exhibiting her work in limited capacity as a means to supplement her income but ceasing to exhibit publicly once she married.55 Best painted still life in the Dutch manner, and her work typically depicts English crockery, which I suggest can be read as sign of her patriotism and strong English identity. This is particularly apparent in her replication of a Wedgwood ‘rosso antico’ (old red) jug, distinguished by the black basalt grape vine relief pattern set on a contrasting red body,56 which she had owned before her marriage and brought with her when she resettled on the continent. We know this because Best painted it in two still life paintings some thirteen years apart when she resided in England and Germany respectively. In Still-life with Bread and Oranges (private collection), completed in Yorkshire in the 1830s, she juxtaposed the Wedgwood jug (the most expensive) with a larger and more common stoneware jug found in taverns and lower-class domestic interiors; the latter is dipped in brown slip and clear lead glaze with a flat collar and engine-turned neck.57 Additionally, there are two plates, blue transferware and blue feather-rimmed. The three different categories of English pottery evidence its widespread consumption and make this a still life of English social mobility. Best’s particular interest in pottery can be inferred from her depiction of a china shop interior painted in 1836 displaying shelves of blue

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transferware, along with her visit to Augustus the Strong II, Elector of Saxony’s famous porcelain palace museum in Dresden, recorded in one of her illustrations of 1839. In Still-life with Blue and White Coffee Pot and Cake, Frankfurt (private collection), painted in 1843, she depicted the same rosso antico Wedgwood jug, now unobtrusively nestled between the towering German porcelain coffee pot and delicate porcelain cup and saucer. In this later work, I propose that the jug stood for, even evoked, home and that the arrangement may be interpreted on a more personal level, as a signifier of feeling transplanted and mismatched like the tableware.58 Best’s close attention to the materiality and details of her carefully grouped ceramic objects in conjunction with food and drink clearly reference Dutch still life painting that also celebrated a nation’s economic prosperity. In Best’s case, her use of the small English jug in conjunction with its ceramic neighbours implies ideas about the interrelationship between Best’s national and personal identities. It suggests the assertive role it played in creating and maintaining a national identity, especially valuable for Best during her extended trip to Frankfurt and other European cities in 1835.59 The desire to assert British status, respectability and the idea of empire through tableware was true for many English women from all social tiers who were living abroad. Despite their different classes, women in pre-confederation Canada relied upon the portable evidence of English crockery to exert their breeding and heritage within the complex cross-cultural realities of colonial society. However, as numerous published memoirs and personal diaries attest, china was not readily available because of the limitations of transatlantic shipping and poor road conditions.60 Susanna Moodie, one of the literary Strickland family, wrote Roughing It in the Bush in 1852, a popular account chronicling the endless challenges of pioneer life in Upper Canada. Moodie recounts that after a sleigh accident, her husband was thankful that everyone was safe, including the horses, and admonished his wife not to fret about the china. She admitted, ‘I should have felt more thankful had the crocks been spared too, for like most of my sex, I had a tender regard for china, and I know that no fresh supply would be obtained in this part of the world.’61 Residing in the bush highlighted all the more that British pottery operated as significant agents of gentility, improving modest homes, connecting them to their birthplace and declaring genteel manners in the New World.62 Likewise, Canadian settler Anne Langton, an upper-middle-class amateur artist and china painter, also complained about the want of common crockery ware in her private journals, which were published posthumously. ‘Things will break here as elsewhere’ [but] you have no idea what the extra value which

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glass, china etc., acquire by removal to the wilderness’.63 And finally, some thirty years later, on a higher social tier, Lady Hariot Georgina Dufferin, wife of the Governor General Lord Dufferin, faced the same obstacles as the settler women, grumbling in numerous letters home about ‘the lack of china, along with her plate and linen (all stuck in transit)’ which hindered her from hosting the expected balls and dinners at their official residence, Rideau Hall in Ottawa.64 Surprisingly, the residence ‘so far possessed about six plates and as many cracked tea-cups, nothing grand but made of thick-white earthenware’.65 Even for Lady Dufferin there was no English porcelain, which would have been appropriate for her position and, just as the previously discussed Jane Austen and Elisabeth Gaskell characters, she was forced to borrow cups and soup-plates from her neighbour for her ‘first Canadian entertainment’, a croquet picnic.66 For British residents of the UK an important way to support the British ceramic industry, in addition to purchasing, was to attend a factory tour and witness how pottery was made. The tradition of factory visits emerged in the late eighteenth century in aristocratic circles; notably George III and Queen Charlotte and the three princesses toured the Worcester Factory in 1788. The Prince of Wales visited Spode in Staffordshire in 1806 and a year later Worcester when he was Prince Regent.67 By the mid-1800s factory tours had moved down the social scale, a move welcomed by the industry to promote their trade to a larger clientele. Richard Redgrave and Henry Cole visited the Potteries in 1853, not surprisingly given their active role as educators and designers.68 However, a visit to the Potteries or Worcestershire was a day’s journey from London, and Redgrave complained that the distance limited artists based in London working with these industries.69 Nonetheless, collectors such as Lady Charlotte Schreiber visited Worcester, recording in her diary that she met the art director Mr Binns [Richard William] in 1869.70 Factory tours to meet the artists and see the manufacturing processes were widespread enough by the later decades of the century to enter popular literature for adults and children. In the children’s story The China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story, the fictional Johnson family goes on an outing to a china works to watch how a ‘perfect cup’ is made. The protagonist, Ellen, works hard at her new job in the porcelain factory where her mother and grandmother were once employed, and gives a tour to the upper-class family visiting the Worcester porcelain factory to witness the production of a cup being made from start to finish.71 Interestingly, the text does not appear to be written by someone who knew the factory process: it incorrectly described the progression of a moulding apprenticeship taking weeks rather than years,

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a practice which would have been alien to the ceramic factory. Likewise, the author’s depiction of Worcester was erroneous: the town of Worcester did not have a ‘great square’ and most factory workers lived within walking distance of the factory rather than the outskirts of town.72 Despite these inaccuracies, this story correctly describes a new popular touristic phenomenon attached to the novelty of industrial manufacturing. In her recent study on the Victorian glass industry, Isobel Armstrong identified the practice as ‘factory tourism’, a phenomenon common in glass, iron and textiles as well as ceramics. Armstrong writes, ‘Visits to factories were staged as journeys of sociological discovery, spectacle, courses of instruction in new technologies, and anatomies of work’; and, she claims, that it was an art of describing, representing ‘one of the earliest journalistic attempts at an ethnography of work . . . both to document and to mythologize’.73 Indeed, the print media published first-hand reports of individual ceramic factories or pottery regions, illustrating step-by-step the multitude of technologies and much more accurately than Ellen’s Cup. In 1843, the affordable Penny Magazine printed two separate supplements on porcelain and pottery, respectively.74 This focus on the ceramic industry, a material science, suited the Penny Magazine’s mandate to be educational and was directed to audiences who desired instruction.75 Shortly afterwards, the Art-Union issued a series that featured illustrated tours of the Staffordshire potteries between 1845 and 1846,76 only to be ridiculed the following year in the Punch article, ‘Punch’s Tour in the Manufacturing Districts’. Punch is presented with teapots, vases, crockery, shawls, blankets, quilts and other items, and the caption reads: ‘It is his purpose to make a tour in the manufacturing districts that he may, in his, pages, display to astonished Englishmen, the wealth and ingenuity of England.’ The commentary concludes with the wisecrack that Punch will begin with eatables to furnish his larder, thereby questioning the motivation behind these factory visits by implying that public benefit and patriotism are not the only reasons.77 More noteworthy, perhaps, was the factory tour of Copeland (formerly Spode) in 1852, published in a six-page essay and recounted as a ‘first hand experience’ in the previously discussed ‘A Plated Article’ for Household Words. Charles Dickens’s and William Henry Wills’s descriptions of the pottery manufacturing process, from the excavating and refining of the clay to the firing and final decorating, are accurate, detailed and vivid: a kiln is a dome-shaped cavern recalling the Roman Pantheon, for example, and mocha ware is made by a father who blows the brown colour from a blowpipe as the jugs and cups twirl on the lathe, while his daughter drops blotches of blue so they run into rude images of trees.78

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Both economic and art publications touted the values of the ceramic industry. John Walsh’s 1856 Manual of Domestic Economy devoted over a half dozen pages to ceramic manufacturing,79 and the Art Journal proudly announced that it had been covering and supporting pottery for the last fourteen years: ‘this branch of manufacture achieved its high level entirely by individual enterprise unaided by state subsidies’.80 The magazine’s documentation continued in the 1860s, when it published Llewellynn Jewitt’s monthly reports on individual British factories, which the ceramic historian later expanded into his seminal 1878 two-volume book, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain: From Pre-historic Times Down to the Present Day. Visiting the factories and meeting the owners, he gathered much of the information first-hand and for those he was unable to visit, he wrote inquiries to the factories or sent a proxy.81

Displaying dishes on the cottage mantel or in the cupboard Bringing their English pottery abroad when travelling or settling, participating in factory tours of the Potteries and other English manufacturers or reading journalistic accounts of how it was made were all common and important ways for Britons to express their support of their vibrant ceramics industry. However, the purchase and display of British domestic pottery were the utmost expression of patriotism to demonstrate imperial superiority and gentility among the British people from the palace to the cottage.82 In this section, I address how ceramic dishes, usually blue and white and most often displayed on the mantel or in the cupboard, became agents that defined and denoted idealized working-class cottage life. This trope became a dominant motif represented in Victorian literature and genre painting. Furnishing a cupboard or a mantel with pottery among the working and lower classes was a practice that indirectly descended from Queen Mary’s Porcelain Cabinet and passed to the great houses of Knole, Welbeck and Chatsworth.83 Ceramic consumption and display became increasingly affordable as the price of china and pottery dropped in part due to several factors related to technology and transportation: the advances of transfer printing, new clay bodies, canals opening in the Stoke-on-Trent region in the late eighteenth century and the development of the expansive railway network after 1840.84 As the Art-Union stated, ‘Crockery’, as it is familiarly termed, enters more largely into our domestic and social existence than any other production, even ‘the broken tea-cups wisely kept for show’.85 While John Ruskin shunned most commercial ceramics produced in his day, even going as far as dismissing artists he disliked by comparing them to

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production tableware, he recognized that crockery, the cup and the plate acted as necessary infrastructure for his ideal of the cottage. Ruskin opined that the cottage is ‘beautiful always, and everywhere and a healthier and happier place to live’.86 Most important for this discussion was his remark that the Englishman cottager is always modest apart from ‘his wife’s love of display shown by the rows of useless crockery in her cupboard’.87 In another lecture, Ruskin described the pottery of the peasant class as ‘a plain household-blue making a pattern on white’ and ‘spaniel’s colours of black and tan’.88 His remarks reverberated across Victorian England. Echoing Ruskin, Magdalene Bowles of Bremhill Rectory, the sister of a vicar, observed that an exemplary and well-kept cottage revealed ‘the cups and the saucers, of the meanest sort, no doubt, and some of them broken, are arranged to the best advantage upon the shelf . . . bespeaks a mind at peace with itself, and contented with the humble lot in which it has pleased God to place him’.89 Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton illustrated Ruskin’s view that domestic material comfort is tied to china, cottages and the proper role of women. Initially, before tragedy befalls them, the Barton family is enjoying a ‘comfortable life’, and Mary Barton, the wife of a factory mill worker, displays in a corner between the window and the fireside ‘a cupboard, full of plates and dishes, cups and saucers’.90 Gaskell wrote, ‘[I]t was evident that Mrs. Barton was proud of her crockery and glass, for she left her cupboard door open, with a glance round of satisfaction and pleasure’.91 Art historian Tamara Ketabgian argues that Gaskell ‘laments the habits of luxury and waste’ among Mary Barton’s working people. Gaskell peppers her texts with remarks faulting the Bartons for their ‘extravagance’ and ‘child-like improvidence’ as they ‘exhaust their savings on a single indulgent meal’.92 With regard to Mrs Barton’s china cupboard, however, I contend that its presence is less critique than an indicator of the status quo of Victorian life since even humble and generous Alice emulates the tradition, albeit in a smaller way in her cellar, ‘the perfection of cleanliness, of arranging her little bits crockery on the mantelpiece’.93 Although Gaskell did not distinguish the crockery, her passage exemplified Ruskin’s point that working-class women took pleasure in the display of their china. However, many other Victorian writers specified the pottery of the cottagers as willow, blue and white or delf. A generic name for blue-and-white transferware, nineteenth-century pottery writer William Evans explained that the ‘appellation of delft ware, is usually applied to the kind which manufacturers call cream colour’.94 Nineteenth-century delft, or ‘delf ’, held the lowest rank in the order of ceramic bodies, due to the fact that it was (and continues to be)

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a low-fired earthenware, not dependent on expensive fuel, therefore making it affordable to produce.95 Because it was reasonably priced it changed eating habits as more pieces could be economically added to the table and setting. This is illustrated in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, published in 1841. Little Nell and her grandfather are homeless and forced to seek shelter with a hospitable cottager whose home included a corner cupboard with a little stock of crockery and ‘delf ’.96 Crockery and blue-and-white delft provided the tranquillity and comfort for Little Nell ‘to which she had long been unaccustomed’97. In this passage Dickens distinguishes between the ‘delf ’ and the crockery, and this holds true for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whose delft tea set is her first consumer acquisition when she enjoys a new-found independence after receiving a modest inheritance that allows her to set up her own cottage. Eyre selects ‘necessary’ things, lent through the kindness of gentle and generous friends for her modest home: ‘a little room with white-washed walls, and a sanded floor; containing four painted chairs and a table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or three plates and dishes, and a set of tea-things in delf ’.98 That Dickens and Brontë specifically identified the delft suggests its special status imbued by the distinctive blue-and-white colour scheme and its role as exemplar of English contentment and civility. In Middlemarch, George Eliot similarly affirmed that the relationship of cottage, crockery and working-class women was a popular notion of comfort and respectability, but it is a concept she sought to undermine. Eliot’s sensible and practical Mrs Garth establishes an atmosphere of warmth and comfort through strength of character, rather than material goods. Others ‘thought her proud or eccentric’ and could not understand how she renounced ‘all pride in teapots, or children’s frilling’, which she had done ‘magnanimously’.99 Eliot touched upon the expectation that a husband equips his wife with china and, if he failed, would be condemned by peers. In Eliot’s earlier 1860 novel Mill on the Floss, Mrs Tulliver’s sister who ‘had married poorly as could be had no china,’ and when Mrs Tulliver’s own family becomes financially ruined, she is more upset about losing her china and table cloths than her dying husband because, as literary scholar John Plotz observes, ‘they seem almost physically attached extension of herself ’.100 Mrs Tulliver’s materialism discourages sympathy from her sisters and her daughter, the latter seeing it as an indirect reproach against her father. In these two cases, Eliot employs the conceit of pride of china: to both symbolize materialism and reject it altogether. Therefore, china in the cottage embodied contemporaneous issues: namely, the potent conviction that cleanliness, manners and temperance are all a reflection

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of moral character. These views were not only found in Victorian literature but were also depicted in British genre painting by amateur and professional artists alike. Such is the case with Best’s small-scale illustrations of interiors (no larger than 21 x 35 cm). Her paintings of Yorkshire cottages, farms and stately homes were affirmations that good character is connected to the abundance of blue transferware and other crockery on display in the kitchen and dining room of all classes. In A Farm Kitchen at Clifton, York, completed in 1834, Best carefully documents a prosperous family’s multipurpose room for laundry, cooking and eating (Figure 4.1).​ A woman inspects the rising bread and will soon have tea, revealed by the round-table set for two with blue transfer-print cups (without handles) on saucers, a slop bowl, a lidded sugar bowl and a large green teapot.101 What is remarkable is the quantity and mixture of different types of dishware. The two large floor-to-ceiling stained wood dressers filled with blue feather-edged dishes (popular pearlware) and more transferware dominate the room.102 They show the common ordering of dishes: large platters on top and a multitude of jugs hanging on hooks on the front.103 Art historian Tamara Balducci insightfully interprets Best’s representations of interiors as her method to reconcile her professional and domestic identities in terms of current definitions of femininity,

Figure 4.1  Mary Ellen Best, A Farm Kitchen at Clifton, York, 1834, watercolour, 25.4 × 35.5 cm. V&A Museum. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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as I discussed with her still life. Indeed, I further maintain that the dishes that Best depicted operated as an extension of this duality since many are in use and others are on display symbolizing the complexity of a woman’s role to be both functional and ornamental. Another amateur artist Elizabeth Pearson Dalby, aged sixteen, completed a study of a cottage interior (c. 1840), similar in both scale and subject matter to Best’s watercolours, thus confirming that the convention of presenting a woman preparing tea in a cosy cottage with her display of dishes was considered suitable for a young girl to illustrate (Plate 24).104 Ceramic historian Moira Vincentelli’s study of ceramics in Welsh dressers argues that the presentation of china in the cupboard functioned as an important mode for a woman to express herself.105 This is certainly the case with Dalby’s humble portrait. Among the large display of the eclectic group of domestic objects depicted, the pottery is the most conspicuous product, demonstrating that the elderly woman prizes her china as a collector. These open shelves operated as sights for the subject’s creative agency and not just conspicuous consumption. Despite the clutter, the dishes are clearly organized by style, pattern and sometimes colour, with a profusion of blue and white. Cups are stacked high or turned upside down, and there are at least three matching services, including ironstone Imari bowls referencing the Anglo taste for the Japanese imports, blue-feathered edge and the ubiquitous willow pattern, her largest service with a dozen or so pieces. Two teapots, one brown, one black, are placed on separate shelves prominently in the centre, where their monochrome colours boldly differ from the patterned dishes behind them. The seven jugs, no two alike, include lustreware, solid blue and banded designs. As seen here, the common practice was to hang jugs in front of transferware dishes, a practical strategy to take advantage of a limited display space while affording the utmost visibility of the collection and easy access to the vessels. The woman does not use her willow for tea and instead employs her plain blue-rimmed pearlware, reflecting a ceramic hierarchy. As part of this distinction, the china figurines have been given pride of place on the mantel. Design historian Margaret Ponsonby argues that in the nineteenth century ‘[i]ndividual items were important for status, display and symbolic value but these objects lost much of their display value owing to their disposition in the house’, especially in lower working-class multipurpose rooms, which ‘could not display them to advantage’.106 However, in the pictures that I examine, the china in the cabinet, dresser or mantel was privileged above other knick-knacks, reflected by their prominent and visible locations in the kitchen. Comparing

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Figure 4.2  William Henry Hunt, Hearing Lessons, 1842, watercolour, 35.56 × 34.29 cm, V&A. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

Dalby’s and Best’s watercolours with William Henry Hunt’s 1842 Hearing Lessons is informative, because it further demonstrates that the pairing of women and china motif was a common and popular type-form in both amateur and professional painting in England by the 1840s (Figure 4.2).107​ Ruskin and other contemporary critics admired Hunt as a leader of the English school of watercolour painting. Here, Hunt illustrates a young girl practising her lesson in front of her mother before she leaves for school, in a simple kitchen interior with the blue-and-white willow pattern proudly displayed on a Welsh dresser.108 Art historian John Witt identifies the interior as Hunt’s home in Bloomsbury and the subjects as his wife and daughter and, therefore, the scene also hints at autobiography. He has stripped the room of excessive objects, a compositional choice that heightens the presence of the willow dishes (large platters on the top) above the tea and sewing chests. All these paintings by artists, whether male or female, amateur or professional, reveal the important modes by which women experienced and displayed tableware to feminize and domesticate space, as well as demarcate identity, each negotiating the various degrees of idealized spaces – the same symbolism expressed in Victorian literature.

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Intimations of morality and mortality Henry Willett, a successful brewer based in Brighton and a follower of Ruskin, collected some 2,000 pieces of British ceramics ranging from inexpensive ‘delf ’ earthenware to costly porcelain. He selected and organized his pieces according to historical significance, in addition to more predictable classifications of material and country, because he wanted to show how so much of British pottery illustrated current events and social movements of England. His mode of collecting demonstrated not only patriotism but also what he believed to be his civic duty to improve society. Reiterating this conviction, he elected to donate his collection to the Brighton Art Museum, which he had helped to found, and published his own catalogue in which he wrote, ‘This Collection has been made to illustrate the principle, or rather in development of the notion, that the History of a Country may be traced on its homely Pottery’.109 In acquiring his ceramics for reasons beyond connoisseurship, Willett was a rare collector of his time, but his strategy certainly reflected his notion of empire when he established such original taxonomies as Royalty and Loyalty, Hero Worship, the Napoleonic Scare – Statesmen – Politics.110 He also collected pottery that he believed inculcated Christianity under the category Literature – Music – Religion. As discussed in the previous chapter, the temperance movement promoted tea over alcohol, and not surprisingly, tea’s utensils, particularly the teapot, embodied morality as did the act of tea-drinking. What better place to instil scripture than the teapot, such as one of Willett’s on which was inscribed ‘Let your conversation be upon the Gospel of Christ, i.e., talk about it over your tea table’ or another depicting the printed image of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.111 In addition to tea-drinking, there was an additional important reason why pottery encouraged Christian observance, and this originated in the idea of creation and its analogies to clay. The Wesleyan Conference Office (disseminating the teachings of John Wesley), the Religious Tract Society (RTS) and other bible groups published numerous accounts of ceramic production between the 1840s and the 1880s, and these texts are infused with strong religious references. For example, the aforementioned Reverend Wedgwood observed, ‘the lesson of endurance is forcibly illustrated by one branch of this trade. – The ware that endures the fire comes out unburnt, nay made beautiful and clear’.112 He further commented that the Methodism which took hold in the Potteries ‘effected a wonderful change at least in morals’.113 The Reverend followed the belief of salvation through Christ and his publication reflected the mandate typical of

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religious publishers that they educate their readers in the close and proper relationship between evangelical faith and new advances in industrial sciences.114 Stories of ceramics actualizing morals and ethics involving young women such as the previously discussed, ‘The New Crockery Shop’ in Eliza Cook’s Journal, were common. RTS was the largest of the evangelical publishers and supplied an abundance of affordable copies of this kind of moralistic literature to the working and lower classes.115 Historian Sara Maurer observes that the RTS promoted a style of reading that insisted ‘individual readers must always apply reading first and foremost to themselves in order for it to be morally effective’.116 The aforementioned The China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story, published by the RTS in c. 1865, is an example of such a text intended for juveniles. It reiterated the theme of endurance and clay: ‘Just as you would not soil or injure a fine piece of china, be careful to keep your bodies as well as your souls from all which you might defile them.’117 And so the young protagonist Ellen is warned. She and the allegorical china determine the title and the plotline: a girl of neat smooth hair and clean print dress regularly attends bible class where she is instructed not to fill a vase with rubbish, because like the vase, her body is a vessel that also originates from clay but is more precious. However, Ellen is falsely accused by her jealous peers of stealing a hand-painted bell-shaped cup.118 Exonerated in the end, she is herself ‘the perfect cup’, with the story emphasizing that ‘she did not forget that trouble and care will, with God’s blessing, help to perfect the vessel that is to shine in the Great Master’s House’ (Figure 4.3).119​ The volume was known in Worcester and given as a Sunday school prize, an appropriate gift for church parishioners since the ceramic vessel and the British pottery industry were closely aligned with piousness and nationalism.120 Biblical and New Testament references of resisting the fiery furnace, the creation of man modelled from a ‘lump of clay’ and ‘man is but God’s vessel’, infiltrated trade journals as well.121 The 1844 Art-Union Potteries’ report opened with a description of throwing a ‘formless mass of clay’ on the wheel: ‘[I]t is impossible for a Christian to look upon this process without remembering the frequent allusions to it as a type of creative power in the Old and the New Testament.’ The article proceeds to quote the biblical Jeremiah when he visits the potter’s house and watches him destroy a damaged vessel and throw a new one: ‘Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand.’122 Dickens and Wills in their 1852 account of the Copeland factory works also described plates that ‘spring from lumps of clay’.123

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Figure 4.3 ‘The Discovery’, Anonymous, The China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story, c. 1865. London: Religious Tract Society. Courtesy of Robertson Davies Library, Toronto.

Lord Carlisle’s lecture at Burslem in 1853 promoted the town’s newly opened government design school to the members of the pottery industry, where the Methodist movement flourished. He concluded with the religious metaphor: ‘We are all of us children of the clay, and moulded by the Almighty hand, modeled after the Divine likeness.’124 Religious metaphors extended beyond ceramic materials and processes to the consumption of china. Numerous nineteenth-century publications on the history and collecting of ceramics republished eighteenth-century poetry that ridiculed chinamania using strong religious references. For example, in ‘Epitaph in a Country Church Yard’, the analogy between clay and body is amusingly put: Beneath this stone lies Katherine Gray, Chang’d from a busy life to lifeless clay. By earth and clay she got her self, And now she’s turned to earth herself . . . Who knows but in a run of years, In some tall pitcher, or broad pan, She in her shop may be again.125

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This poem, satirizing Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ (1750–1), dismisses Katherine Gray’s moral character because of her supposed insatiable passion for pottery that contrasted her with the working classes who had only small collections of blue-and-white crockery. These various literary references suggest that it was a commonly held belief that crockery, and the process of manufacturing ceramics from clay, could either encourage strong pious values or highlight their lack thereof. In a similar way, ceramics also served as a widespread metaphor to signify strength or weakness of character or simply serve as a descriptive enhancement, as previously discussed in Lady Glencora’s assessment of Felix Lopez. Certainly, the literary critic and philosopher George Henry Lewes, who was the romantic partner of George Eliot, understood the signification of earthenware as common material in comparison to porcelain. Lewes used delft as a metaphor in his assessment of Dickens’s contribution to literature, observing ‘he worked in delf, not in porcelain. But his prodigal imagination created in delf forms, which delighted thousands. He only touched common life, but he touched it to “fine issues”.’126 Similarly, John Gay’s ‘To a Lady, on her Passion for Old China’, published in 1725, represents a popular poem ridiculing chinamania and reiterating the wellknown conceit that porcelain suggests delicateness, while earthenware evokes stronger stuff and was thus metaphorically appropriate for men.127 Or white, or blue, or speck’d with gold, Vessels so pure and so refin’d. Appear the types of woman-kind. Are they not valu’d for their beauty Too fair, too fine for household duty?. . . How white, how polish’d is their skin, And valu’d most when only seen! She who before was highest priz’d, Is for a crack or flaw despis’d. . . . But Man is made of coarser stuff, And serves convenience well enough; He’s a strong earthen vessel made, For drudging, labour, toil and trade; . . . Husbands more covetous than sage Condemn this China-buying rage.128

According to this poem, rough earthenware trumps refined white polished china, perhaps referencing soft paste which is weaker than hard paste, because

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the former easily breaks especially if containing a hot beverage. My point here is that a sophisticated understanding of different clay bodies of ceramics was invoked by writers to analyse character. The poem was reprinted often in the nineteenth century assuring continuation into the Victorian period of the trope where refined porcelain symbolized women or men of weak character, while courser earthenware and stoneware signified men.129 In this case, as was typical, Gay was censorious of a woman’s chinamania. In Gaskell’s final and what is to be considered most psychologically complex novel Wives and Daughters, published posthumously in 1864–6, she employed antique porcelain to articulate the fragility and uselessness of the ‘languidbeautiful’ Osborne Hamley. To the manor born, he need not buy his porcelain as it is inherited:130 What in the world can I do to secure an income? thought Osborne, as he stood on the hearth-rug, his back to a blazing fire, his cup of coffee sent up in the rare old china that had belonged to the Hall for generations[.] One could hardly have thought that this elegant young man, standing there in the midst of comfort that verged on luxury, should have been turning over that one great problem in his mind; but so it was.131

Hamley’s self-reflection reveals his lack of relevancy in an empire increasingly built upon science and industry. All the riches of old china, while appropriate to Hamley’s upper-class status, could not save him from his self-destruction and therefore, the delicacy of the porcelain also serves as a metaphor for his own fragility and untimely death. Well documented by contemporary scholars, the Aesthetic writer Henry James employed clay body analogies to measure character in The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1).132 The heroine, Isabel, is a ‘silver plate, not an earthen one’, therefore strong but neither high-born nor low-born, while the young, innocent and delicate Pansy is a Dresden (Meissen)-china shepherdess.133 Early in the story, Isabel ‘was stoutly determined not to be hollow’ and though she had no vocation she rejects several marriage proposals to prevent being turned into a frail porcelain ornament by her would-be suitors.134 James was well aware of the analogy that women were seen as ‘frail vessels’ and in his preface acknowledged that George Eliot saw her own characters like Hetty Sorrel and Rosamond Vincy as ‘frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection’.135 In his most evocative comparison between human nature and porcelain, the unscrupulous Osborne and his former mistress Madame Merle reveal

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when they are deep in conversation that they are acutely aware of these hidden meanings. While Osborne holds a rare porcelain cup in his hands, she ‘kept her eye on the cup’, warning him ‘to be careful of that precious object’. As if he were holding her fate in his hands, he ‘drily’ points out that ‘it already has a wee bit of a tiny crack’.136 What is more, Madame Merle earlier describes herself in these terms to her rival Isabel but with an important difference. Though she is fragile and ‘shockingly’ chipped like a cracked piece of porcelain, she has been cleverly mended and she accepts her now limited role in ‘the quiet dusky cupboard’.137 But Isabel recognizes the Madame Merle as broken as she was served as a negative and ‘powerful agent in her destiny’.138 As art historians Alden Cavanagh and Michael Yonan observe, James understood that ‘porcelain served not simply as a luxurious possession or an item of novelistic set-dressing but as a conveyor of social, cultural and especially psychological meanings – and often it is these very ideas that form the framework of the novels themselves, which often deal with issues of appearances and propriety, as well as the vulnerable and ephemeral nature of human happiness’.139 Cavanagh and Yonan’s observations can be aptly applied to William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868). In this painting the prominent vessel similarly underscores the psychology of human frailty and operates as a metaphor of death, but more overtly and with greater gravitas than in Gaskell’s and James’s narratives (Plate 25). The story depicts Giovanni Boccaccio’s Florentine tragedy (retold by John Keats) of the mad Isabella mourning her lover Lorenzo who was murdered by her brothers,140 a favourite subject of the PRB. Some twenty years prior to Hunt, John Everett Millais had painted Isabella in 1848–1849, which I will first discuss as a precursor to Hunt’s interpretation (Figure 4.4).​ Millais focused on a different scene from the poem where Isabella and her brothers are dining with Lorenzo; significantly, they dine on istoriato maiolica dishes and so ceramics figure prominently here, albeit less so than in Hunt’s work. Maiolica was historically appropriate for the Italian trecento setting, since this style of earthenware was technically and aesthetically innovative and expertly crafted in Italy at the time, and Millais, determined to be historically accurate, carefully researched the dress and other objects. As previously discussed, English potteries such as Minton were actively reviving maiolica production under the name ‘majolica’, which contributed to its popularity among Victorian connoisseurs.141

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Figure 4.4  Sir John Everett Millais, Isabella, 1848–9, oil on canvas, 109.9 × 142 cm. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. Photo: © National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

Like Hunt, Millais’s picture is skilfully rendered with careful attention to detail characteristic of an early example of the PRB realistic styling. Much scholarship has been completed about Millais’s use of objects to symbolize the upcoming violence.142 While these dinner plates are relatively small and inconsequential in comparison to Hunt’s monumental maiolica pot, Millais copied the istoriato style with his designs depicting violent scenes, such as the beheading of Goliath by David, to foretell Lorenzo’s own decapitation. In another maiolica plate, Lorenzo offers a blood orange, a symbol of passion to Isabella. Both dishes operate as portents, agents of the doomed events to come. In Hunt’s portrayal of the poem, it is not surprising that he chose to illustrate the scene of Isabella grieving her lover, since it frames his own personal tragedy: at the time of the painting, he had lost his wife Fanny (née Waugh). She had died six weeks after childbirth from fever while they were staying in Florence on their belated honeymoon. His granddaughter Diana Holman Hunt reported that he combined into this one composition the last two pictures he had painted of her, one barefoot in her nightdress and the other lying in bed.143 She recounted the family legend of how gruesome Fanny’s days must have been

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during her confinement, sick and in the Florentine heat, modelling to please her husband’s art, and ‘when too exhausted even for this, she lay on the bed without a mosquito net, her dark hair spread on the pillow and her huge eyes staring ahead’.144 Whether or not this account was accurate is irrelevant; what it signifies is that the painting and the pot at once embodied death and solace for Isabella as well as for Hunt. In Hunt’s memorial, the pot is just as monumental as the painting itself (118 cm x 116.5 cm). Isabella both cradles and embraces the vessel elevated high atop the prie-dieu, her long strands of hair draping over it; it becomes her pillow of comfort and support. Inside is Lorenzo’s head, which she decapitated after his murder and then concealed under the basil plant. It is well documented that it was Hunt’s custom to design many of his own props. Indeed, according to Fortnightly Review, Hunt ‘could not find a mayolica vase to his taste, yet he would not trust himself to a slipshod imagination. He designed a vase, had it cast, painted it himself, obtained a fragment of mayolica to study the glaze, and then painted from the model so created’.145 Hunt’s friend John Roddam Spencer Stanhope remembered that when they were on a leisurely walk Hunt suddenly questioned whether the pot would be ‘large to admit a man’s head’ and insisted on going home to measure it, ‘which he did and not finding it large enough by about an inch he had it broken up and the present one made in its place. It was no good arguing the difference was so trifling’.146 It is not surprising, therefore, that since Hunt had not just one but two pots made according to his specifications the maiolica pot is the largest and most striking object in the painting. For Isabella, Hunt adapted his original sketch of Fanny lying on the pillow, which was substituted with the pot.147 The top half of the vessel is decorated with a geometric pattern (referencing the carpet design on the prie-dieu). Its pedestal base, wide rim and handles resemble a traditional urn shape, such as the eighteenth-century lustre footed bowl from Valencia in the recently acquired Soulages Collection of Renaissance art at the V&A. However, the pronounced moulded skulls under the handles, embellished with painted red hearts pierced with arrows evoking a war bonnet, firmly place the pot into a world of fantasy. To focus the viewer’s attention on the vessel, Hunt has highlighted it in a wash of white. He similarly used light to accent the metal watering can, which is conventionally positioned in the front corner of the canvas, guiding the viewer’s eye into the room, and through the directionality of the spout also points directly up to the maiolica. In this way, the watering can serve as a secondary player reinforcing the role of the pot, since it holds the water to keep the plant, a

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signifier of the lover, alive. Hunt also transformed the can’s handle and a support around the spout into a curvilinear design to evoke the tendrils of Isabella’s hair and painted a reflection of a skull to echo the memento mori symbolism of the clay pot. Hunt, therefore, maximized the material presence of this majestic maiolica and its sidekick watering can by manipulating size, design, pattern and form to activate both their visual and narrative effects. Hunt’s hyperrealism and his desire for perfection (remember he made two versions of the pot) invoke such a strong agency that the pot of basil becomes a monument to death that dominates the entire picture. As such, its agency is far greater than the pots replicated by his peers, be they genre or Aesthetic painters, because it has a starring role in this painting, both visually and metaphorically.

Conclusion British ceramics and the national rhetoric surrounding its production and consumption facilitated narratives about Victorian class and empire across a complex network of relationships and constantly shifting identities. As such, British ceramic tableware and crockery shaped ideas about Victorian pride and piety, morality and mortality, traversing boundaries between domestic and commercial and national and global spheres. They signified British imperialism, democracy, industriousness and ingenuity, and afforded a creative space for women to display within the domestic sphere. Pottery that conveyed moral and immoral character, life and death, served frequently as metaphors in Victorian text and image. China in the cottage embodied contemporaneous issues, namely the potent conviction that cleanliness, manners and temperance were a reflection of good moral character. This view was not only held in Victorian literature but also strongly echoed in British genre painting by women and men amateur and professional artists alike who also portrayed pottery as a form of selfexpression. Conversely, however, pottery and porcelain on display could communicate the opposite: weakness of character and excessive materialism. Victorian writers harnessed the strong religious connotations of clay stemming from the Bible and the New Testament to link commercial British ceramics manufacturing to moral character, thereby assuring that British pottery became an agent of godliness.

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Figure 4.5  Gravy drainer with ‘Indigenous [formerly Indian] Scene of the St Lawrence’ – from the Lake Series (1845–61), adapted from William Henry Bartlett, Canadian Scenery, vol. 1, 1840, transfer-printed earthenware, Francis Morley & Co, 1.5 × 32 × 24.5 cm. The Barbara and James Moscovich Collection of Canadian Historical China, Gardiner Museum, G13.15.38.

Object analysis The gravy​drainer, also known as a mazarine, is decorated with a green transfer print of Indigenous people on the St Lawrence River within a rose swag foliate border, an image adapted from Canadian Scenery Illustrated from Drawings by W.H. Bartlett, a two-volume set published in 1842 (Figure 4.5). The green colourant, a relatively new Staffordshire invention introduced in 1828, was less common than cobalt blue transfer prints.148 Francis Morley in Hanley, Staffordshire, produced the design between 1845 and 1858, and it was part of a larger pattern named ‘Lake’.149 The views were idealized and contributed to attracting immigration and tourism. Depicting human activities on the water, they messaged that the Canadian colonies were peaceful, where Indigenous peoples lived harmoniously with settlers. English topographical artist William Henry Bartlett executed over 100 ‘tamed’, identifiable landscapes in 1838 when he toured British North America.150 His style reflected the popular picturesque. Sketching on site, he formatted his

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drawings to almost the same size as the engraving plate: 7 ¼ x 4 ¾ inches (18.4 x 12 cm).151 Bartlett catered to the Victorians’ racist objectification of Indigenous people by inserting a tepee in the foreground instead of the proverbial cathedral, castle or ruin rendered in his European views. He also used props, borrowing an ‘Indian costume’ from one of his publishers to inspire forest scenery, affirming that he doctored his onsite sketching to heighten exoticism.152 Another popular trope was the canoe; colonial administrator T. R. Preston who remembered the St Lawrence River’s beauty stated, ‘wanted nothing to complete but the presence of an Indian, in his primitive garb, paddling a canoe’.153 Given this sentiment, Bartlett did just that adding six canoes in his scene to satisfy his Victorian clientele. Publisher George Virtue initially sold Canadian Scenery in individual folios, followed by complete volumes. James Wyatt, mayor of Oxford (1842–3) and art dealer, owned a set.154 In her novel Shirley, Charlotte Brontë described views of Canadian green forests and blue water hung on the walls of the sitting room beside a ‘night-eruption’ of Vesuvius and stained-glass medallions of William Shakespeare and John Milton, a testament to the owner’s erudition and desire for exotic tourism enjoyed in the comfort of his home.155 Sir William Dawson, the principal of McGill University in Montreal, and the Ewings, a Scottish family proprietor of a seed company also residing in the city, both owned Morley’s Lake tableware, (with the latter’s set gilt-edged) and thus displaying their pride of place.156 Staffordshire potters did not pay copyright fees for the Bartlett views and took liberty with the images for expediency.157 In this example, the canoe in the foreground and a fallen tree stump are absent, figures are fewer, but fishing rods are added. The dramatic contrast between light and dark, one of Bartlett’s signatures, is lost in the clay iteration. Moreover, function triumphed over form: the image on the mazarine is pierced with holes to allow the juices to drain, along with one large centre hole to facilitate lifting the oval strainer from the platter.158 In this way, Staffordshire potters advanced the circulation of foreign views, releasing them from bound albums and frames displayed in the parlours and libraries. Transforming the wondrous vistas and landscapes into utilitarian objects for the dining room, kitchen and pantry, they served colonialism as a British dish.

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A Victorian pitcher speaks a thousand words

One day as he [Silas Marner] was returning from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile and his brown pot falling, with force against the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken into three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.1 As this passage so eloquently reveals, the character Silas Marner, in George Eliot’s 1861 titular novel, shows strong nurturing feelings for his clay water jug. His deep affection is surprising for two reasons: first, it is an inanimate object, and second, Marner is a recluse who loves his ‘guineas most’. A linen weaver by profession, the narrator also dehumanizes him for ‘living [an] insect life existence’ and calls him a ‘spinning insect’.2 However, just as Eliot employed ceramic teapots and the willow pattern in Middlemarch to accentuate the personality traits of her characters and to heighten the narrative, she elevates the agency of the jug to shed light on Marner’s unexpected kindness and humanity. The narrator explains that Marner’s brown earthenware pot, which he used for fetching water, was ‘his most precious possession’ because ‘it had been his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the morning, so that its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with having the fresh clear water’.3 This description emphasizes the multi-sensory appeal of the pot, where the body of Marner and the jug are intertwined. We read Marner’s tactile engagement with the object, ‘how the imprint of the handle feels in his palm’ and ‘the handle offering a lending hand’ that suggests it acts as an extension of Marner himself and that through its form it befriends and aids him. This tangible interaction contrasts with the agency of the willow and Chelsea plates, which I discussed in Chapter 2, in which the surface designs, but not the tactility of the plates, trigger the affection of the user.

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Importantly, Eliot anthropomorphized the jug, drawing on an old tradition that equates the features of a vessel with parts of the human body (foot, belly, neck and mouth).4 Eliot established the jug’s agency, its potential to impact courses of action, to loosely borrow from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory.5 Whether intact or broken, the jug’s agency forces Marner into action while also functioning as a metaphor for his character, broken and in need of healing. Eliot employed his profession, as the friendly Dolly Winthrop tells Marner (and the reader), ‘you’re partly as handy as a woman, for weaving comes next to spinning’6 to complement his nurturing feelings to repair the pot, thereby disrupting the binaries of Victorian patriarchal ideology. His desire to restore the jug shows his caring nature and foreshadows his taking in the orphan child Eppie as his own daughter.7 The German philosopher Martin Heidegger reiterated the metaphorical agency of the jug in his 1950 seminal essay, ‘The Thing’. He argued that it was not simply an object of use but a thing containing poetic meaning operating beyond the intention of its maker and its functionality.8 ‘The self-supporting jug has to gather itself for the task of containing’, stated Heidegger.9 The essential thingness of the jug is that it at once creates and defines the impalpable void, making it timeless and of the earth, and ultimately a vessel that gathers multifarious meanings. As such, I argue that Eliot and other Victorian writers and artists elevated the clay jug as a gathering point affording metaphorical meanings about the values and hierarchies of everyday life. In doing this, they capitalized on the jug’s ubiquity, recognized by the Art-Union as ‘articles of use in every house’.10 Available by the piece, in sets of progressive sizes (usually three), or as part of larger dinner, dessert or tea services, they stored and served liquid in the home and transported it from the local water pump or tavern, and were conveniently named according to function: beer, creamer and milk jug, for example.11 Jugs gathered together materials, people, liquids and ideas in Victorian literature and painting. Victorian studies scholar Lara Kriegel observes that ornament provided an ideal vehicle for class reconciliation and enabled the ‘domestication’ of the industrial revolution.12 I argue the same is true for ceramic tableware and especially the common jug. Affordable and used by all, the jug as a singular entity at once traversed and reinforced class distinctions and, as such, contributed to the twists and turns of everyday life, performing as a metaphor for love and death, exalted and fallen status, crime and punishment, conspicuous consumption and as a marker of feminine and masculine gender, domesticity and stability. What is more, jugs falsified their measurements, violated copyright and made

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ideal weapons for brawling – all new applications for jugs beyond their original purpose of containment. Surveying a diverse array of mid-nineteenth-century artistic production, I examine in this chapter the work of both traditional and avant-garde artists as well as more obscure texts and visual images to reveal the layers of meaning that can attend to objects such as the humble jug. I first consider how jugs were employed to personify women and different aspects of womanhood: a broken jug for fallen women, an undamaged jug for wholesomeness, purity and goodness. I then revisit Richard Redgrave’s genre painting of the 1840s, but I also look at the artwork of Frank Stone, George Elgar Hicks and Lilly Martin Spencer to address how these artists depended on the vessel, either cracked or intact, to symbolize feminine attributes. Building upon the theme from Chapter 1 that ceramics significantly contributed to the Victorian design reform movement, I maintain that the jug, because it was a mass-produced commodity and subjected to so many fashion crimes, became an important subject for Henry Cole’s circle to critique aesthetically in the pages of the Art Journal and other magazines. Major authors George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy, as well as minor writers, are brought into the discussion to show how these metaphorical meanings are echoed in their narratives. I then discuss what jugs, especially drinking vessels, symbolize when aligned with men, and, not surprisingly, a familiar pattern of virtue and vice unfolds: a whole jug signifying strong moral character and the embodiment of happy England or a broken jug representing weak character corrupted by alcohol. Here I consider the works of illustrator John Leech and British genre painters Thomas Webster, Frederick George Cotman, Thomas Campbell and James Collinson, in discussion with Charles Dickens and other less-known writers. I conclude this analysis of the Victorian jug as a gatherer of a multitude of meanings with the revealing discovery that contemporaneous newspapers evidenced how the clay jug became an agent of nefarious acts, functioning far beyond manufacturers’ original intentions. Finally, by turning to John Everett Millais’s The Flood and linking it back to Eliot’s Silas Marner, I argue the jug ultimately was perceived as a metaphor for humanity.

The jug as a female signifier in Victorian painting and literature By definition, the ‘jug’ or ‘pitcher’ (the terms being interchangeable at the time, as it is today) is quite simply a vessel with a handle for lifting and a spout for

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pouring. The nineteenth-century pottery industry classified jugs as ‘hollowware’, a term still in common usage. As in the case today, jugs were thrown on the wheel or, if cast from moulds, were formed in two or more parts from liquid (slip) or solid clay.13 The glazing and kiln firing completed in the final stages of production sealed the clay making it impermeable and thus ideal for holding liquids. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the jug as ‘a deep vessel, of varying shape and size, for holding liquids, usually with a cylindrical or swelling body’.14 The jug’s swelling body and its function of holding nourishment made it a conventional personification of feminine virtue, or lack thereof, in eighteenthand nineteenth-century visual and literary culture. The frequent pairing of jugs with women echoes Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s often-cited observation about the mediations of eighteenth-century women and china: they were both decorative empty vessels waiting to be filled. Moreover, she argues that china in the eighteenth century is more than a metaphor for the female condition: ‘[It] is also a crucial reminder that femininity is a continual historical construction, one subject to changing economic interests and pressures.’15 The idea of femininity, then, like the jug and like woman as vessel, is itself waiting to be filled and emptied according to functional requirements. As I will discuss, nineteenthcentury British genre painters Richard Redgrave, Frank Stone and others paired jugs and women in their work as a construction of femininity. To be sure, rendering three-dimensional jugs on a two-dimensional canvas is not unique to nineteenth-century British art. Replicating pots in paintings was a common practice in Renaissance still life, and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists painted pottery to evoke the familiar in domestic genre painting and to evince iconographic symbolism such as material wealth, well-being or vanitas. However, by the eighteenth century a common depiction was to show the cracked or chipped vessel next to a young woman or pubescent child to signify the inevitable loss of innocence or recent fallen virtue. French artist JeanBaptiste Greuze painted the subject in The Broken Pitcher (1771) depicting a young girl in disarray, clutching her skirts at the level of her groin with her breast partially uncovered and the broken jug hanging on her arm (Figure 5.1).​ Her expression is one of dismay and powerlessness of having lost her virginity.16 The printed engraving was widely circulated in English publications into the next century.17 Thomas Gainsborough’s Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785), now in the National Gallery of Ireland, was an English example of the metaphor depicting a prepubescent girl with cropped hair, dressed in rags and clutching a puppy in one arm and the broken jug in the other. In this way,

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Figure 5.1 La cruche cassée, after Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1771), engraved by Jean Massard, 1773, 50.8 × 36.9 cm. British Museum, 1895, 1214.120.

Gainsborough emphasized her childhood innocence and poverty rather than her sexuality making her abuse all the more tragic.18 The illustration A Young Hussey Charging Old Toothless with an Impossibility, or the Cracked Pitcher (1778) critiqued the theme of lost virtue and exploitation of young girls; here the woman is in command of her sexual agency, appearing to turn the table on her male exploiter – fittingly the broken pitcher is pointing directly to the buttons on the old man’s breeches and his groin is at the same level as the pitcher, which she is intently regarding (Figure 5.2).​ Similar depictions of women’s virtue or lack thereof continued into the following century. Indeed, as art historian Lynda Nead observes, ‘fallen women has long been recognized as a popular theme for artists and writers during the nineteenth century’.19 Literary scholar Amanda Anderson adds that the concept of the fallen woman in Victorian society referred to ‘a range of feminine identities: married women, prostitutes who engage in sexual relations with men, victims of seduction, adulteresses, as well as variously delinquent lower-class women’.20 Building upon Anderson’s and Nead’s analyses, I argue that artists depended upon the jug to articulate messages of sexual values and morals that impacted a wide range of Victorian women.21 Richard Redgrave’s

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Figure 5.2  A Young Hussy Charging Old Toothless with an Impossibility, or the Cracked Pitcher. Robert Sayer and John Bennet. London, England, 1778, ink and paper, 19540019.003. Bequest of Henry Francis Du Pont. Courtesy, Winterthur Museum.

The Sempstress (1846) exemplifies this approach (Plate 26), and as an authority on British painting, he would have been familiar with eighteenth-century precedents. His canvas focuses on the plight of the needlewoman inspired by Thomas Hood’s popular poem of 1843, ‘The Song of the Shirt’.22 As recent scholars point out, Redgrave’s technique and compositional format deliberately recalled Renaissance religious and Dutch seventeenth-century painting, presenting the sempstress as a saint-like figure looking upward.23 As such, the virtuous seamstress has not yet fallen, but her situation, living in a small garret with few comforts and working to support herself into the late hours of the night, is economically, socially and therefore, in the Victorian era, morally precarious. In the original version completed in 1844, known only through an etching, a cup and dish of bread are by the side of the seamstress, similar to the placement of pottery in Redgrave’s 1845 Poor Teacher discussed in Chapter 1. However, in his later oil painting, Redgrave altered the composition, removing these small nourishing comforts and replacing them with tools of her trade. The relationship between the woman and the bulbous red earthenware pitcher

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is emphasized through his composition: the jug’s spout points to her womb which is in the centre and implies her role. The jug’s agency as a signifier of her potential fall is heightened in relation to another pot, the chipped, whiteglazed basin in which it sits. The crockery, positioned low to the ground, indicates her working-class status. It lacks ornament, is utilitarian, is common and mismatched. The broken china, therefore, personifies the seamstress herself through its colour scheme that echoes her apparel: her dress is red like the pitcher, while her white collar repeats the colour of the basin. Like the crockery, she too is mismatched, a gentlewoman ‘not a low-born drudge’, as suggested by the Art-Union, but a country girl now in the city, dwelling in a poor garret, who is suffering in a ‘vulgar world’.24 The universal forms of the pitcher and basin remind the viewer that she is not unique but part of a larger collective, just one of many women suffering the same ordeal, a message reinforced by the view of other rooftop attics from her window. In the engraving the table partially obscures the jug and basin, but the broken rim remains visible; moreover, the spout lips are also chipped and face the viewer. However, in an earlier watercolour sketch now in the V&A, the red pot appears intact and rests on a cloth, indicating that Redgrave has not yet elected to foreshadow her fall.25 In contrast to Redgrave’s previously mentioned paintings where he represents pottery as agents of solace, this painting positions it as an agent of distress. The broken crockery in The Sempstress may also signify his acknowledgement of the 1843 parliamentary reports that many needlewomen were forced into prostitution to survive, which would have been familiar to his viewers since it was widely discussed in The Times and other papers.26 What is more, the vernacular language of the time made the association clear: the word ‘jug’ was a slang term of disparagement, a noun for a homely woman.27 The word ‘pitcher’ had the bawdy connotation of the female pudendum, a cracked pitcher stood for harlot, the expression ‘to crack a pitcher’ meant to deflower, while the lips/ spout symbolized vaginal lips.28 The power of this metonymy rested in the close association between a jug and the common domestic duties of a woman for whom it was a tool. Similarly, damaged jugs and pitchers served as a popular literary device in novels and short stories to represent flawed women. George Eliot used the brown jug in such a way in her first novel Adam Bede, written in 1859 and set in the late eighteenth century. As in Silas Marner, the jug and the actions around it provide insights into character and foretell future events, but here the jug operates as metonymy for a broken woman unable to nurture. While Redgrave’s seamstress

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may or may not fall, Eliot composes a ‘fatalistic jug-breaking’ scene to indicate that the character Hetty Sorell, a coquettish dairy maid who is so pretty, the narrator informs, that her image should be painted as Hebe (the Goddess of youth, wife of Heracles, and, not uncoincidentally, a vessel bearer) is doomed.29 The first jug is broken by the maid for the simple reason that she is clumsy. However, when moments later Hette’s aunt Rachel Poyser breaks a second jug in reaction to the girl’s attire of a Methodist cap and severe black dress, worn in jest to mock her missionary and morally superior cousin, the narrator adds: [P]erhaps jug-breaking, like other crimes, has a contagious influence. However it was, she [Mrs Poyser] stared and started like a ghost-seer, and the precious brown-and-white jug fell to the ground, parting for ever with its spout and handle.30

Mrs Poyser insists that the jug is bewitched and the breakage was not caused by poor design of the ‘nasty glazed handles’, but ‘there’s times when the crockery seems alive an’ flies out o’ your hand like a bird’. The fallen jug personifies Hette: like her it is ‘bewitched’. Hette’s suitors Adam Bede and Captain Arthur Donnithorne similarly ‘fall under her witchery’; she is a ‘sorcerer’ who ‘affected’ her beholders.31 The ‘fatalistic jug breaking’ foretells Hette’s downfall and crime brought on by an ill-fated love affair with the Captain, the future squire who is above her station, a tragedy that leads her to commit infanticide. The broken jug symbolizes that her womb is a cracked vessel and not fit for the purpose of motherhood and thus her destiny is sealed. As Mrs Poyser says about the jug itself: ‘What is to be broke WILL be broke [.]’ Legal scholar Lucia Zedner recently observed that such a woman who kills her own child was viewed at the time ‘as an object of peculiar compassion and sympathy and everything that was reprehensible in womanhood’.32 In the 1860s, infanticide and illegitimacy were hotly debated in the media, since it was public opinion that they were on the rise in British urban centres although actual statistics proved otherwise.33 A. Herbert Safford published a paper for the annual meeting of the Social Science Association in 1866 stating: ‘That a mother should be capable of killing her baby is a fact that even the strong intellect of man cannot compass’.34 Remarkably, Eliot chose a pastoral landscape to tell the tragedy, rather than seedy London, making Hette’s crime a sin universal, not specific to time or place, to disrupt the moral prejudices against such crimes.35 Adam Bede was an extremely popular novel in its day. Queen Victoria held it in such high regard that in 1861 she commissioned artist Edward Corbould

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to paint two watercolours illustrating the story.36 One work depicts Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser’s Dairy, where the tragic couple first meet (Plate 27). The agency of the jugs is evident: two unbroken brown pitchers sit on the windowsill and an earthenware milking basin is positioned close to Hetty’s womb.37 Corbould visually captures Eliot’s words: ‘such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces’.38 The jugs and basin are represented whole because in this scene Hetty is still wholesome and virginal and is similarly fragrant with creamy skin, the sources of Donnithorne’s attraction. Frank Stone’s earlier sentimental The Last Appeal (1843), well known to the public as a popular engraving, similarly positioned the jug in the centre of the story, depicting a young woman rejecting her beseeching lover in the setting of a country well (Figure 5.3).39​Noticeably, her hands rest over a bulbous stoneware jug, as if to protect her virtue, and his hands hover above hers.40 The Art-Union critic understood the message, admiring ‘the chaste propriety which marks every part of this work’, adding that the maiden is ‘full’ [like the jug] and ‘too pure to

Figure 5.3  Frank Stone, Last Appeal, 1843, engraved by Samuel Bellin, 1845, 70.5 × 53.5 cm. British Museum, 2021,7081.5726.

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give her hand’.41 Genre painting and their printed reproductions often inspired writers to create short stories. Based on Stone’s engraving, Ann S. Stephens, a prolific American writer,42 authored such a story published in an 1846 issue of the Philadelphian Peterson’s Ladies’ National Magazine.43 Not unlike Eliot’s later Adam Bede, the plot centres on a young woman falling in love with a man above her station while forsaking a more appropriate suitor from her own class, which leads to the tragedy of murder-suicide. The assignations take place at the well, and the pitcher plays an active role aiding the heroine’s flirtations and deceptions: with her jug filled with well-water she becomes ‘the pretty water carrier’, attracting the lord; when the jug is empty and placed on its side it falsely signals to her scorned lover that she has departed. The jug or pitcher operating as a metaphor or metonymy for virtuous or fallen woman in the aforementioned works is deeply rooted in the Christian belief that the Virgin Mary is the divine receptacle of god. Famously, the Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) (c. 1427), by the Workshop of Robert Campin now in the Met Cloisters, codified the image in a contemporaneous Dutch interior with realistic objects. A conspicuous maiolica jug holding a lily sits on the table next to Mary to mark her purity. Dante Gabriel Rossetti continued this Quattrocento tradition in his first painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-9) held in the collection of Tate Britain. A large double-handle red octagonal-shaped pot, holding a white lily for young Mary to copy in her embroidery, operated like the Merode Altarpiece’s jug, to illustrate that it and Mary are receptacles of god. The vessel form appears contemporary and the red enamel glaze and the gilded ‘turkish’ surface decoration a Rossetti invention to complement the colours of the tapestry. Children stories published by the Religious Tract Society, such as Ellen’s Cup, which I discussed in the previous chapter, echoed this trope of pairing young virginal woman vessels. In The Old Worcester Jug; or John Griffin’s Little Maid (c. 1882), an antique Worcester pitcher fulfils the purpose of a Sunday-school object lesson, common in Victorian juvenilia literature, in which owners try to become worthy of their possessions.44 In this morality tale the young heroine Maggie, who with her widowed mother has fallen on hard times, is forced to sell the family china, the ‘last vestiges of [their] former, respectable life’. The shopkeeper John Griffin cunningly buys the old Worcester jug for much less than it is worth, but he subsequently regrets his exploitation, especially after he learns of the mother’s death. By adopting Maggie, who renews his faith in Jesus, he is able to redeem himself .45​ The jug, which is meticulously described, resembles Worcester’s production of the 1760s (Figure 5.4). It is distinguished by cartouches filled with secular

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Figure 5.4  Cabbage-leaf milkmaid’s jug, c. 1768, Worcester Porcelain Factory, moulded porcelain, h. 22.86 cm. British Museum, 1921,1215.19. CR.

pastoral scenes of milking maidens, set on a pale yellow ground colour over an embossed cabbage-leaf body and a grotesque mask relief under the spout.46 In the late nineteenth century, collectors prized old Worcester, but nevertheless it was less esteemed than rare Chelsea and Sèvres porcelain.47 Maggie carefully cleans it daily – reiterating the metaphor cleanliness is next to godliness – until an elderly gentleman recognizes the family heirloom and buys it, consequently reuniting with his long-lost granddaughter who is, indeed, Maggie. The jug, ‘perfect with no cracks or flaws’,48 represents the girl, but also is an agent that brings the shopkeeper to religion and Maggie to her long-lost family. Several of the illustrations make this message clear including that of the transference of the jug embodying good Christian values between Maggie and Griffin (Figure 5.5). The porcelain jug is prized because of its rare form and ornamentation; however, what sets it apart from other consumer goods and antiques is that it is made of fired clay and therefore has passed through ‘the trial of fire of endurance’, a metaphor I discussed in the previous chapter. In addition to teaching these Christian values, jugs twinned with married women in both painting and literature operated as instruments of their domesticity in the Victorian home. George Elgar Hicks exemplified this

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Figure 5.5  ‘A Pleasant Duty’, Eglanton Thorne (Elizabeth Emily Charleton), The Old Worcester Jug; or John Griffin’s Little Maid, 1882. London: Religious Tract Society, 107. Private collection.

convention in Comfort of Old Age, the last panel of his triptych Woman’s Mission (1862) (Plate 28). The auburn-haired woman (believed to be Hicks’s wife) acts as the dutiful daughter, tenderly caring for her elderly father in the bedroom where the wallpaper in a cruciform pattern echoes her saintly actions. A matching fivepiece ironstone toilet set, including a jug and shallow basin, is decorated with a neoclassical keystone or fret pattern, a style that had met the approval of taste arbiter Charles Eastlake some five years later.49 It sits on the marble-top circular table specifically designed for toilet sets, although still not quite in vogue because the basin is not recessed compared to other models available in the marketplace.50 Directly above it is a portrait of a woman (possibly his wife or daughter), and the jug unites it with the living woman, underscoring the generations of women whose role is to dutifully and tenderly administer care. A Manual of Domestic Economy (1874) advised the housewife to use ironstone or stone china for chamber ware and dinner ware because it is ‘hard’, ‘tough’ and ‘thick’.51 Hicks emphasized the metaphorical role of jug by making it part of a complete set and replicating it in strong English china to serve as a personification of the dutiful daughter. The china lauds the middle class who can purchase in a complete set

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of stone china that is tastefully decorated, that very social and economic group to whom the painting was aimed and who fuelled the successes of imperialistic, industrialized nineteenth-century Britain.52 Hicks’s triptych was recognized in its day as an expression of the suitable conduct of women paralleling Reverend John Angell James’s sermon, ‘Women’s Mission’ (1853), Coventry Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel in the House’ (1854) and John Ruskin’s later lecture, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1864).53 Tom Taylor, from The Times, understood the analogy, describing Hicks’s series as: a ‘woman in three phases of her duties as ministering angel’.54 Nonetheless, the critic found them ‘intensely vulgar’ with ‘unformed tastes’, ‘highly finished’ and dismissed the men for having ‘lovely complexions’ and ‘irreproachable whiskers out of fashion-book illustrations’.55 Taylor’s remarks remind us that the subjects and their surrounding objects, including the china, should be understood as idealized, albeit highly influential, representations of middle-class materiality, which by today’s standards would be the equivalent of accessories in a glossy decor magazine.56 However, acquiring china dishes was not simply aspirational or materialistic, but rather strongly tied to refreshing a home, no matter how humble; if a dinner service were out of reach, a new jug and basin would suffice.57 Such is the case in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–3). Stephen, a young architect in the making, returns home to his working-class parents and hears how, in anticipation of his arrival, his mother has scrubbed the house through and ‘bought a new basin and jug of a travelling crockery-woman that came to our door’.58 Conversely, Anthony Trollope, in Barchester Towers (1857), has his insufferable Mrs Proudie, the wife of the Bishop, insist that their palace be fitted with gas and hot-water pipes because, she says, ‘Surely there should be the means of getting hot water in the bed-rooms without having it brought in jugs from the kitchen’.59 For Mrs Proudie the jug and accompanying basin were old fashioned, signalling they were not keeping up with the neighbours, while for Stephen’s mother they were a symbol of domestic cleanliness to perfect her successful son’s homecoming, and in both examples they were tools to limit or heighten the woman’s agency. In my last example of a jug serving as a female signifier, I consider Britishborn American genre artist Lilly Martin Spencer’s Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses (1856), where the replication of the jug is so prominently detailed and provocatively placed that it is clearly associated with the woman it who is the subject of painting (Plate 29). However, its message differs from the other works I have examined, in part because it was painted by a professional woman artist and, as I argue, operates as an autonomous expression of self. The large white

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decorative relief-moulded jug abutting the subject’s voluptuous skirt alludes to the young woman’s charming disposition. Historian David Lubin describes the painting as a ‘sentimental kitchen comedy, with some evidence of subversion’.60 Spencer herself explained the content for the Cosmopolitan Art Association, which commissioned the work:61 It represents a handsome, coquettish girl, apparently busily engaged in peeling apples. She is teased by some person whom the picture does not show, who is trying to kiss her, as we see by the expression on her face. She quietly seizes a spoon from the bowl of molasses on the table beside her, has it ready poised to give the ‘provoking fellow’ a daub. She looks around with arch expression and laughing eyes, and says, ‘Kiss me, and you’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses.’ The still life on the table covered with good things, will be beautifully rendered. In fact, I intend it shall be the best thing of the kind I have yet produced.62

Just as Spencer desired, all the objects are sensually rendered with minute details, such as the young woman’s dangling berry basket earrings that suggest the theme of ripe fruit for the plucking. The jug’s design closely resembles the ‘Tulip and Sunflower’ fashionable relief-moulded Parian ware made in Bennington, Vermont (1852–9), identified by its scalloped handle and the floral pattern (Figure 5.6).​ American Parian ware can be traced to John Harrison, a potter from Copeland & Garrett, who emigrated and introduced the technology of Parian press-moulded jugs in 1846 to the American pottery, Norton and Fenton. The manufactory was operated by Julius Norton, Christopher Webber Fenton and Henry Hall, who aspired to make higher quality artistic wares in the New England region under the company name, Norton and Fenton.63 A few years prior in 1842, both Staffordshire potteries, Copeland & Garrett and Minton claimed to have developed Parian porcelain, a biscuit-like clay body named for its resemblance to marble from the ancient Greek marble quarries on the island of Paros. Used largely for statuary ware, the typically unglazed porcelain featured a soft gloss, in part due to the addition of feldspar. The marble-like body was also employed in relief-moulded jugs, such as the Bennington one illustrated in the canvas.64 The floral and tulip design was most likely a British import, since the pattern was also produced there, indicating that Bennington may have bought the mastermoulds from an English pottery and then made their own production moulds. Belgian potter Stephen Theis, who had immigrated to America in 1847 and worked at Lyman and Fenton Pottery between 1850 and 1858, before opening a pottery in 1859 in West Troy, New York, with other Bennington associates, also produced the design, but it is uncertain if he originated it.65

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Figure 5.6  Syrup jug, US Pottery Company, Bennington, Vermont, 1852–9, Parian, 21.59 x 10 cm. Gift of Miss Caroline Craig Darlington, Bennington Museum, 1973.205.

In the late 1840s and early 1850s the moulded-relief jug, at the height of production, became a lightning rod for design reformers and critics concerned with issues of copyright protection and appropriate and judicious application of decoration, especially naturalism versus schematic ornament. According to the Art-Union, the jugs were ‘pet’ products of manufacturers and popular with the public. They were marketed with such a plethora of designs that it was inevitable they became subjected to design reform critiques as did pictorial wallpapers and carpets, more commonly discussed in recent scholarship.66 This design reform discourse, expressed in the British art journals and decor guides, continued well into the late 1860s.67 Predictably, some protested against the elitism and moral superiority of the design reformers Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and Owen Jones. One such vocal critic F. J. Prouting, a Manchester-based economist who wrote under the pseudonym Argus, took offence to the design principles required of a humble milk jug.68 He argued that ‘we doubt you [Redgrave], have any Principles’ and criticized him for ridiculing the ‘mixture of styles on Stone jug’, while he wasted £400 of taxpayers’ money for a badly carved cabinet with ‘the same defect’.69 Argus called Redgrave, Cole and Jones the insufferable ‘Triumvirate, Triunity

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Figure 5.7  ‘Punch’s Milk Jug’, Punch, vol. 14 (1848): 238. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

or Triad of National Taste’, who had no right to dictate the aesthetics of a simple jug. Punch magazine concurred with Argus, publishing a satirical image of a relief-moulded milk jug with devils revelling around a water pump (Figure 5.7).​ The caption at once derided the pious temperance movement and the design reform’s theory of true or false principles: we present the Teetotal Societies with the pattern of the beautiful Milk Jug we have had in our family for the last fourteen – we were going to write years, but we mean days . . . [I]n our Milk Jug the water is all on the outside . . . Mr. Felix Summerly is welcome to our design, providing he charges something less than 10 pounds for any earthenware specimen he may make out of it.70

Punch criticizes Cole/Summerly for his expensive designs and his principles of suitable subject matter that befits the purpose of the object. The accompanying illustration violates these rules since the milk jug is decorated with a water pump rather than the conventional milking maidens and cows. Punch also mocks both collectors of antiques and fashion victims, since its design either serves as a family heirloom or is ‘days old’. Novelty jugs remained controversial, as evinced by Charles Eastlake in his influential 1868 decor guide, Hints on Household Taste. He believed that the

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demand for novelties, such as press-moulded jugs, violated every principle of good design and was an ‘absurd love change simply for the sake change’.71 Eastlake added that ‘The forms of swans, bulrushes, sea-weed and ivy, have lately been pressed into this special service, whether by the caprice of the manufacturer or the bad taste of the public, I will not venture to say. In either case the result is melancholy to contemplate’.72 He conceded though that there has been a great improvement in the design of ordinary water jugs such as those in the simpler fret pattern. However, he preferred the fashionable Grès de Flandres similar to a design that originated in Cologne in the seventeenth century and was reproduced by Doulton after 1875.73 Jugs and pitchers, therefore, played an active role in the prevailing aesthetic debates of the Victorian age; while ornamentation was the focus, the theory behind it touched upon the moral high ground of fitness for purpose and appropriate decoration. If pitchers and jugs, common quotidian objects, successfully achieved these objectives, then the consumers who acquired them demonstrated refined, moral and enlightened good taste. How does Spencer’s Parian jug fit into this design discourse? The floral ‘Tulip and Sunflower’ design is an example of naturalism, but it does exhibit restraint since the surface reliefs do not overpower the form: no ‘violent projections occur to interfere with the general contour of the vessel’, to quote what the Art-Union wrote about another press-moulded jug.74 Moreover, its motif that evokes the harvesting of foliage and fruit for syrup and is florid and fertile like the girl who uses it demonstrates fitness for purpose. Thus, the imagery of abundant ripe fruit complements the fecundity of the girl herself. Spencer genders the vessel as feminine making it specific to the women’s sphere, an important strategy that offers an alternative to the available male imagery, commonly found on jugs of this period, such as hunting, revelling and soldiering scenes. Spencer signals the significance of the jug by placing it prominently near the girl’s back bow, highlighting it with a wash of white paint and inflecting the lower half with green to match her dress. It points to the well-furnished parlour and thus suggests further refinement of the household. Both the curvaceous girl and the vessel are common but attractive agents necessary for carrying out domestic chores, but the welldesigned jug, which is coquettishly placed against the hip of the equally flirtatious and self-possessed girl, ensures we are aware of the tastefulness of the scene. Spencer’s Young Wife: First Stew painted in 1854, two years earlier than Kiss Me, is similar in size and features the same Parian jug (identified by the floral pattern), as well as the wooden kitchen table with turned legs and the chair in the foreground (Figure 5.8).​ Here Spencer depicted a new wife (rather than

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Figure 5.8  Lilly Martin Spencer, Young Wife: First Stew, 1854, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 76 cm. Gift of Bruce and Susan Luek, 2017. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.369.

an enticing girl), who weeps while peeling onions, suggesting her own state of distress in completing the incessant domestic chores required of her.75 The jug’s spout points directly to her; remarkably, however, the curved handle is broken, contributing to the wife’s distraught disposition. Despite the carefully rendered details of abundance in this painting, the broken and partially obscured jug reiterate a different message than Kiss Me, one of the careworn struggling wife. Contemporary art historians believe that the women portrayed in both works represent a self-portrait of sorts since they physically resemble Spencer, who was newly married in 1854.76 That Spencer selected a known design for her pitcher, rather than an anonymous one, is consequential. The fashionable American pitcher with Anglocontinental origins reflects her own status, born in Britain of French parents who emigrated to America, is another indicator that the white Parian jug might metaphorically represent Spencer. In one painting, she is saucy but not wanton, and in the other, dutiful but not necessarily capable. Indeed, Spencer’s household

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was an unconventional one. Because of the success of her artistic profession, she assumed the role of the breadwinner, while her husband ran the household and helped raise their many children.77 Spencer’s appropriately stylish Parian jug either whole or broken operated as an agent of womanhood and domesticity, albeit in a far less romanticized light than the previously discussed works, to assert her own independence or to illustrate her problems assuming her role as housewife.

The jug as a male signifier in Victorian painting and literature While Victorian jugs were commonly paired with women to embody certain feminine and female attributes, jugs were produced and represented in visual culture and literature to personify men. Tall and slender or short and squat, these were typically brown and red stoneware and often further coded as masculine props if they were embellished with hunting imagery, such as hounds and drinking parties. In many cases depictions of a jug placed near a male subject signified alcohol consumption, and, depending upon the message, this was either depicted as the right or blight of every Englishman. Portrayals of men drinking that convey both moralistic and cheerful messages date to seventeenth-century Netherlandish rustic genre art. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British artists often referenced these images, which were collected and then reproduced in Britain from the early nineteenth century onwards.78 William Hogarth’s pair of illustrations, Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751), were meant to be viewed together and exemplified the moralizing message on the effects of alcohol, clearly favouring locally brewed beer over the imported ‘Gin cursed Fiend’, as the former r picture states. Nicknamed ‘Madame Geneva’, gin was initially inexpensive and potent, making it appealing to the poor. In Beer Street, we see, among other things, the heavyset labourer with his foaming mug of beer and pipe, an image that served as a model for nineteenth-century British illustrators and artists. Hogarth made his sympathies clear in the caption of Beer Street: ‘Beer happy Produce of our Isle Can sinewy Strength impart, And wearied with Fatigue and Toil can chear[sic] each manly Heart’. Hogarth’s illustrative campaign led to the passing of the Gin Act in 1751, which limited the number of gin vendors and doubled the consumption taxes.79 Large-scale harvesting of hops in England had begun in the sixteenth century and contributed to the notion that beer was a national drink. Moreover, beer was often considered safer to drink than water and nutritional for the poor. An affordable pot of beer rather than a dram of gin became England’s national alcoholic drink.80

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John Leech’s 1846 Punch illustration depicts the jug in the camp that adhered to the belief that it is an Englishman’s right, no matter his class, to drink his foaming brown jug at home around the hearth or in the public house (Figure 5.9).81​ A fat lion is anthropomorphized to represent a British gent: he sits comfortably with his legs extended while he leisurely smokes his pipe and drinks his jug of ale. Here the cartoon advocates for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the benefits of the onset of free trade.82 Descriptions of men contentedly drinking ‘foaming brown jugs’ of beer with their pipes comfortably perched in their mouths also populated the pages of Victorian novels and were commonly represented in paintings as signifiers of the ease and comfort of the English workingman.83 Charles Dickens explored the relationship between a man and his jug in his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge, exemplifying the positive signification. Gabriel Varden, the affable locksmith, is described as more attached to his Toby Jug than his ‘undoubtedly real china tea-service’, which I discussed in Chapter 2. The Toby Jug made its appearance in the late eighteenth century. It was produced by the Wood family pottery, a manufactory active in Burslem, Staffordshire, between 1784 and 1840, and later by other British potteries throughout the nineteenth

Figure 5.9  ‘The British Lion in 1850; or, the Effects of Free Trade’, Punch, vol. 10 (1846): 60. Courtesy of the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

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century and is still produced today. Its distinct design involves the hollow vessel shaped as a seated male who wears a three-cornered hat and holds a jug of frothing beer and sometimes a clay pipe (Figure 5.10).​ The iconographic source for the design is unclear: some ascribe it to the Shakespearian Sir Toby Belch, the cheerful drunk in Twelfth Night, while others credit Toby Filpot (note the pun fill pot), the nickname for Henry Elwes, an infamous Yorkshire drinker, reported to have drunk 2,000 gallons of beer. The beer drinking exploits of Elwes’ inspired the popular verse The Brown Jug, first published in 1761.84 In the whimsically wicked poem the ‘brown jug foams with mild ale’ and, like other eighteenth-century verse about pottery, starkly reminds readers of their mortality that they are of the earth and will return to the earth.85 However, for Varden the Toby Jug is his stable ‘constant friend’, and he refers to him as such: ‘put Toby this way’, he tells his daughter, because he wants ‘Toby at his elbow’.86 In addition to this anthropomorphism, the two resemble each other: the narrator tells us it is a ‘goodly jug of well-browned clay, fashioned in the form of an old gentleman, not by any means unlike the locksmith’.87 Like Varden, Toby is a thoroughly English product, made and moulded from English

Figure 5.10  Toby Jug, c. 1780. Ralph Wood the Younger, Burslem, Staffordshire, leadglazed earthenware, 24.8 cm. Gift of R. Thornton Wilson, in memory of Florence Ellsworth Wilson, 1943. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 43.100.24.

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clay and containing English beer, an agent of pride and patriotism. As KowaleskiWallace observes in her recent essay on the subject, Fat Toby ‘denotes English values that are tied to the larger expression of both a political economy and the homegrown “characters”, who will actualize that economy’.88 Dickens’s narrator announces that hard work rewarded by a draught of ale is the key ingredient to a happy England: There he [Varden] stood working at his anvil, his face all radiant with exercise and gladness, his sleeves turned up . . . – the easiest, freest, happiest man in all the world. Toby looked on from a tall bench hard by; one beaming smile, from his broad nut-brown face down to the slack-baked buckles in his shoes.89

In this way, Dickens expressed the same ideas about honest labour found in Hogarth’s Beer Street and in the writing of Thomas Carlyle who famously declared: ‘a man perfects himself by working. The blessed glow of Labour in him’.90 At the conclusion of Barnaby Rudge, when the tumult in London streets has stopped, we read that Varden is ‘the rosiest, cosiest, merriest, heartiest, bestcontented old buck in Great Britain or out of it’, whose final words are: ‘Come bring Toby again.’91 The motif of the jug acting as the workingman’s friend was repeated throughout Victorian genre painting, and it was mostly represented as browndipped stoneware or earthenware. Thomas Webster, leader of the Cranbrook artist colony based in Kent, painted intergenerational rustic scenes, and his pottery representations contributed to his message about the industriousness and self-reliance of the lower working classes.92 In Good Night (1846), Webster has placed next to the eldest patriarch a substantially sized brown and beige dipped jug with a bulbous body, corresponding to the jug in the Punch cartoon and thus appropriate for his gender and status (Figure 5.11).​ Moreover, the eight modest pieces of pottery on display are carefully chosen by the artist for their symbolic and compositional value. They ‘talk’ to one another and to the viewer through their actual materiality: the mother in her role as matriarch and nurturer carries a large earthenware casserole and holds it near her waist signifying her fertility especially since she looks at her children. That this is a respectable lower middle-class home is conveyed by the sensible and class-appropriate two white bowls and two plates resembling creamware, a point further communicated by the presence of cutlery and a pressed tablecloth. In addition to the stock motif of dishes on the table, Webster used the visual trope of pottery in the foreground to draw the eye into the composition, placing the baluster-shaped stoneware water jug beside a red-and-white glazed

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Figure 5.11  Thomas Webster, Good Night! 1846, oil on panel, 71.4 × 118.7 cm. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Photo © Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives/Purchased, 1957/Bridgeman Images.

stoneware basin in the lower right corner. The agency of the basin to emphasize respectability is increased by the water soap, sponge and white laundry that together signal the importance of good hygiene.93 Taken together and, in relation to the subjects, other material elements and position in the room, the ceramics represent attributes of hard work and good manners – all necessary elements for the aristocratic Webster’s (his father was a member of the George III’s household) idealized view of cottage life.94 The patriarch’s beer jug as part of a group of respectable ceramics in a loving home informs the viewer that the Englishman’s right to drink beer is not necessarily a blight. Another telling example of the brown jug standing for the English everyman is found in Frederick George Cotman’s One of the Family (Plate 30).95 This painting of an intergenerational family gathering at mealtime shows English tableware coded with meaning and similarly evinces how the jug serves as positive metaphor for the patriarch in the family. Painted in 1880, almost forty years after Webster’s Good Night, One of the Family was purchased immediately by the Walker Art Gallery. Despite the gallery acquisition, which would have served as a consecration of its artistic value, the picture had its detractors: the Illustrated London News complained that it ‘is absurdly large for its subject matter’, and The Times agreed commenting that its scale is ‘both obtrusive and vulgar’.96 For this investigation, however, One of the Family’s expansive size (274 x 172.72 cm), dimensions usually associated with history painting, allows for a close reading

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of the pottery, each piece of which informs us of a history of British ceramics and late Victorian eating patterns. As we saw in Joseph Clark’s The Labourer’s Welcome in Chapter 3, the picture illustrates the Victorian convention of dividing the spheres of masculine and feminine labour: the mother and grandmother are symbolically in the act of distributing food – there is plenty even for the animals, hence the whimsical title of the painting – while the husband returns from the field.97 The children drink from personalized mugs, polychrome pearlware for the boy, blue sprig heart for the girl, while the adult women drink cider or ale from glasses, and the farmer has a pewter beer jug at his empty chair. There is no single set of dishes but rather an assortment of English patterns, mostly blue and white, be it banded or transferware. A chipped blue willow dish (indicated by the distinctive zigzag/ fret border) suggests that damaged dishes still hold value in such a household. Significantly at the front of the table, the brown stoneware jug draws the viewer’s eye into the canvas and thus serves as a pictorial device, but, I argue, because brown jugs of this type represent masculinity, its position at the front of the composition with the family sitting around the table not only signifies the labourer’s return but also serves as his substitute. The final examples that I examine, James Campbell’s Girl with Jug of Ale and Pipes (1856) and James Collinson’s Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (1850) and Home Again (1856), present a more cautionary reading of the jug as a male signifier. In these paintings the jugs speak about the perils of alcohol or the tensions between the genders. For his message suggesting the deleterious effects of alcohol, Campbell relied on the common trope of a young girl with a pitcher; however, the heavy gallon jug that she carries with both hands and the three clay pipes suggest they are filled with beer for an older male relative who is absent (Plate 31).98 She returns from the tavern and does not engage with the viewer but looks down, carefully minding that she does not spill. The jug’s moral significance is ambiguous as to whether the alcohol it holds is an Englishman’s blight or his well-earned reward.99 Campbell who was based in Liverpool painted the work during the emergence of the second wave of the temperance movement in response to the 1830 Beerhouse Act, which had reduced the licensing fee to brew and retail the beverage and lowered the individual drinking tax.100 As a result, some 24,000 beer houses opened across England and Wales by the mid-century.101 And while the working classes enthusiastically welcomed the Act, many from the upper classes blamed it for instigating increased debauchery, in other words causing England’s drunkenness problem with its accompanying social ills. The problem of excessive

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drinking was considered so widespread that the Manchester-based UK Alliance Party, established in 1853, advocated the banning of alcohol altogether. Campbell, who lived in the commercial hub of Liverpool, linked by rail to the nearby industrial city of Manchester, would have been acutely aware of these concerns.102 The subject of Girl with Jug of Ale has a saintly appearance created by her halo-like bonnet, and her dark brown dress and the twisted clay handles of the pipes that lie against her skirt strongly recall the Franciscan habit – a rough brown robe with a cord belt. The neighbouring parish church visible in the distance underscores this perspective. However, her cleanliness, paisley shawl and the decorative blue-and-white pitcher indicate that she comes from a home that has seen better days and these are the vestiges of that better time. The jug and the girl are united as one, playing an active role in the narrative to show the dangers of alcohol.103 James Collinson, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, albeit only briefly, purposefully referenced conventional genre painting to help the PRB ‘confront the modern world’.104 I argue that his representations of ceramics in intergenerational family scenes contribute significantly to the political and social tensions of his narratives touching upon contemporary issues such as alcoholism and gender divisions. In his 1850 painting Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, the family appears to be trapped by their station in life, suggested by the tense exchange between the husband and wife which is mimicked by the children’s expressions (Figure 5.12).​ The man of the family is examining the map of South Australia, suggesting they may choose to follow the half million people who left Britain between 1847 and 1852.105 The labourer’s pottery attribute is a tall, inexpensive stoneware baluster jug with iron slip, defined by its high shoulders and narrow shape and contrasts with Richard Redgrave’s swollen belly earthenware jug personifying women in The Sempstress.106 The single-fired stoneware vessel (detailed with iron spots) is placed at the front of the canvas, on the floor and grouped with the man’s work tools.107 What the jug holds is unclear to the viewer, but a clue to its contents is found in the pale mocha mug by his elbow on the windowsill, an example of factory-made utilitarian earthenware manufactured in England since the mid-eighteenth century and popular as an ale mug in both the tavern and the home.108 The design is created from tobacco juice dribbled into the glaze, a process that enhances the ceramic’s agency as a male signifier. The mug closely interacts with the more delicate and thus decidedly more feminine transferware pedestal cup and a small blue-and-white tea bowl with no handle that resembles inexpensive Chinese export ware.

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Figure 5.12  James Collinson, Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, 1850, oil on panel, 70.1 × 91.2 cm. Photo © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

The contrasting vessels referencing feminine and masculine functions underscore the divisions between husband and wife. For example, opposite her husband, his wife sits by the fire surrounded with pottery that befits her household duties: by her feet, a bright oversize red earthenware crock for washing denotes good hygiene; near her waist in the shadows, a smaller bowl sits beside the black kettle on the hearth; and at the far end of the stove a white reliefmoulded fluted jug, likely made of ironstone, suggests her strength. This jug is industrially produced in Stoke and therefore a higher stature embodying British industry and contrasts with her husband’s locally made stoneware country jug. Both jugs are partially obscured because they are in shadow and are at opposite sides of the room; the distance between them speaks to the emotional and philosophical distance between the parents as well as identifying their roles inside and outside the home. This representation of ceramics (ten pieces in total) and subjects, in conjunction with the caged bird by the window, underlines the theme of emigration and the desire to escape their station in life, which does not appear to be mutual since he sits by the open window and she by the hearth keeping the home fires burning. Further emphasizing her domesticity is the framed image of the Madonna and Child and the decorative chimney rail pieces

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such as the delftware vase and Staffordshire figurines, possibly of Victoria and Albert, as well as a metal platter that, understood together, indicate her pride of and attachment to home.109 In Home Again painted in 1856, a few years after Answering the Emigrant’s Letter, Collinson instilled in his pottery stronger iconographic content to imply the perils of alcohol, subtly critique imperialism and define gender expectations. Once again, the jugs perform a particularly active role in driving the narrative (Plate 32). The subject of a soldier returning home echoes Richard Redgrave’s The Deserter’s Home of 1847 discussed in Chapter 1. However, in Collinson’s painting the soldier is not a deserter: he arrives wearing the uniform of the Coldstream Guards from the Crimean War.110 Like Redgrave, Collinson arranged the ceramics in the two standard conventions on the floor and on the table and relies on the motif of the laundry basket and tablecloth to reveal the family’s good manners and their respectable social station. The two thickly potted, common brown stoneware beer jugs (also known as ‘muggs’) with chipped spouts are damaged just like the soldier. One, on the low table, has a monochrome brown glaze and is decorated with the imperial coat of arms (made from a separate plaster mould and applied with liquid clay/slip, a technique known as sprigging). The second jug, with a robust strap handle, sits higher in the composition on the table and has a similar ‘Dutch jug’ shape, popular after 1830, characterized by a low bulbous body and a wide circular collar around the neck.111 It is a ‘hunting jug’ (indicated by the hounds and revellers in relief), a common British design enjoyed by all classes at fox hunts and taverns as a patriotic vessel to drink beer.112 Until about 1840, jugs of this type were produced all over Britain, including Norwich, Staffordshire, Mortlake, Lambeth, Fulham and Glasgow. Targeted to male consumption, they were inexpensively priced at a few shillings a piece, but by the 1840s, the roughsalted utilitarian jug (salt was literally thrown in the kiln at high temperature, over 1,200°C, to vaporize, which left a glassy coating of sodium alumina silicate over the vitrified body, making it impervious to liquid and very durable) was replaced by mocha and transferware.113 Ceramics historian Howard Coutts observes that any moulded, applied or coloured decoration added to a basic pot implies an element of show or display, and the imagery on these utilitarian pieces would have been understood by the viewers at the time as at once imperialist, masculine and patriotic.114 They link masculinity with drinking and hint that the soldier may well be a drinker or become one. The soldier appears to not have returned unscathed and is blinded. His broken status is alluded to by the blue-and-white plate, carried by the soldier’s daughter

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or younger sister, filled with broken eggshells. On the mantel are moulded hollow ceramic figurines, and these chimney piece decorations reiterate the paradoxical messaging regarding war: notably an imperial pearlware lion figurine resembling those produced by the Staffordshire Wood family pottery attests to British pride, and an enamelled pearlware pastille burner in the shape of a house denotes domesticity.115 Even the blue-and-white transfer plate would have been recognized as British, expressing the common belief that Britain populated and conquered world trade through its manufacturing of affordable everyday tableware. In this canvas, Collinson very deliberately and realistically replicated British pottery with decorative imagery to reinforce the complex and fraught pairing of patriotism and domesticity in order to critique the disastrous military strategies of the Crimean War.

The jug as an agent in nefarious acts In Campbell’s and Collinson’s pictures, the jugs denote fraught relationships, social evils and the misfortunes of war, associations that intensify in the context of the numerous reports in newspapers published between 1840 and 1890 across Britain of injuries, even fatalities, caused by a jug. As Louis Gordon Rylands recognized in his 1889 book Crime: Its Causes and Remedy, ‘drink has been found to be the effective cause of crime’,116 and, as this chapter has argued, alcoholic beverages were often associated with jugs. At times jugs were not the actual weapon of destruction but nonetheless played a secondary role acting as an accomplice to the crime, and in this way, they were not always associated with strong spirits. As recounted by the Limerick Reporter, such was the case when a young doctor was killed by his paramour after receiving a ‘tremendous blow of a jug to his head’.117 Colourful newspaper headlines typically name the jug as the weapon: ‘The Serious Assault with a Jug’; ‘Killed by Jug in Whitechapel’; ‘Fatal Jug-Throwing Case’; ‘The Assault with Jug’; and ‘Wounded with a Jug’ represent just a few accounts.118 ‘Singular and Fatal Accident’ (1847) recounted how, while preparing breakfast, the wife of a Manchester druggist poured hot coffee into a china jug ‘when a piece flew out of the broken jug’ and the scalding water spilled onto her young daughter with fatal results. In ‘A Child Found in a Jug’ (1882), a deceased infant was tightly rammed in a gallon jug, and thus the jug was either an accessory to or cause of the crime.119 In another tragedy implicating a jug, a daughter mixed the wrong herb, monkshood, in a jug of boiling water and

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accidentally fatally poisoned her father. The jug’s significant role in the last event is borne out in the short announcement that mentions the word ‘jug’ four times, the same number of times as the lethal herb.120 Similarly, the jug and often the basin are prevalent in Victorian literature, embodying and contributing to events of life and death. For example, Charlotte Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre saves Mr Rochester because she has the presence of mind to bring a water jug to extinguish the flames burning his bed curtains.121 She and the jug are not present during the next fire and, therefore, unable to prevent his severe injuries. The jug can save a life and cause its loss. In a passage in her novel Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell has the murderer – Mary Barton’s father – emerge as ‘a wan, feeble figure, bearing with evident and painful labour a jug of water from a neighbouring pump’.122 His painful labour of transporting the water suggests his own tragic events that led him to his descent from loving husband and father to murderer. Finally, John Everett Millais’s A Flood, painted in 1870, is a rendition of a true event at the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864. The jug does not assist in a crime in this instance but operates as a metaphor of life as it floats along in the flood waters beside an infant, Moses-like, in a cradle (Figure 5.13).​

Figure 5.13  Sir John Everett Millais, A Flood, 1870, oil on canvas, 99.3 × 144.0 cm. Photo © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

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Material cultural studies historian Ann Smart Martin notes that the halfsubmerged mocha jug ‘floats almost magically along with child and cat – the survival of each, a symbol of hope’.123 Significantly, art critic Marion Spielmann reported in 1898 that he ‘retouched the picture extensively with the view to restoring to it some of the sparkle of which Time had robbed it; . . . where the jug now floats there was at first a pig’.124 Such a significant alteration implies that Millais privileged the common everyday domestic object, already heavily laden with metaphorical associations, to better dramatize the tension between humankind and the forces of nature. Millais employed the jug prop as a poignant agent of life embodying domesticity, nurture and stability in a scene of danger. In the words of Martin, ‘the vessel is magical, mythical, practical, and sublime’.125 Historians of material culture document how objects very often function quite differently from the makers’ original intentions.126 This is true of the jug that inadvertently played a role shaping violent modes of behaviour, since it was frequently filled with alcohol or used for storing money that made it a target for theft.127 What is more, jugs were known to cheat and violate copyright. In 1847, the Northampton Mercury reported the case of the Royal Vauxhall Gardens using ‘earthenware “brown stout jugs”’ unstamped and otherwise illegal by their being considerably deficient of the quantity they represented’. Typically, three or four ounces short of the pint or the quart, the infractions resulted in fines paid and the jugs being ‘condemned’.128 This news item indicates the importance that jug designs adhered to government legislation standards to ensure accurate measurements. Press-moulded jugs, given their wide distribution and popularity, were particularly topical among design reformers regarding copyright infringement. For instance, Ridgway and Abington, a Staffordshire pottery specializing in relief-moulded jugs, claimed that their ‘Bulrush’ design had been violated by a competitor ‘by removing the heads of the bulrushes and substituting bluebells or lilies’. It cautioned ‘All dealers and hawkers of earthenware’ ‘against selling such fraudulent imitation of the aforementioned’.129 Henry Cole’s Journal of Design and Manufactures printed Ridgway’s violation notice with the biting criticism that the design closely resembled, Richard Redgrave’s earlier ‘Well Spring’ carafe (1847), manufactured by his company, Felix Summerly’s Art Manufacturers and discussed in Chapter 1.130 To be sure, not all jugs were party to nefarious acts. However, by understanding that they were such familiar and commonplace consumer products that had enough

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agency to violate copyright or act as weaponry and cause death deliberately or accidentally enhances their power as metaphors for life and death.

Conclusion In this chapter, I argue that ceramic jugs and pitchers were standard objects for both the wealthy and the poor, and because of their ubiquity they took on a variety of multiple functions and meanings in everyday life. Like other pieces of ceramic tableware, such as the cup and the teapot, they embodied and shaped significant attitudes and actions related to gender behaviour, morality and mortality; however, they accomplished these tasks with an important difference. As Heidegger recognized, the universality of the object that at once contains and defines space makes it a profound metaphorical holder of meanings. On a basic level, the jug aided Victorian artists to enrich their narratives consciously or unconsciously or to emphasize specific stylistic and artistic compositional objectives. It served as female and male character attributes and gendered social expectations, at times straightforward and other times psychologically complex. This mainstream commercial product, referred to as a ‘pet’ among Stoke manufacturers, contributed to the significant debates of nineteenth-century design reform concerning the nuanced line between good and bad ornament. What is more, the jug shaped modes of behaviour, lending a helping hand in the pouring and transportation of liquids or conversely assisting in drunken brawling and other nefarious activities. Ceramic historian and curator R. J. C. Hildyard recently argues, ‘[I]t can never be emphasized too strongly that pots truly come to life only when they are handled.’131 While I agree that studying the materiality of a ceramic object by tactile and empirical investigations is critical to their understanding, I also maintain that examining jugs (and other ceramic objects) mediated in Victorian criticism, paintings and literature, be they sentimental or progressive, demonstrated that pitchers speak a thousand words: used, exalted or denigrated they played a central role through networks of exchange and through the eyes of many actants: critics, writers, artists, readers, viewers and consumers. As hybrid and mutable signifiers, jugs and pitchers both embodied and moulded a vast array of refined and unrefined elements of Victorian stratified society and, ultimately, as Silas Marner reminds us, mirrors back what it means to be human.132

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Figure 5.14  Jug after the Portland Vase. Samuel Alcock & Co., Hill Pottery, Burslem, Staffordshire, c. 1850, Parian porcelain, lavender, relief-moulded, 19 × 11.5 cm. Gift of Rosemary Knox. Gardiner Museum Study Collection.

Object analysis Relief-moulded​jugs, such as this adaptation of the Portland Vase, were a lucrative business for the Potteries and, despite the initial manufacturing costs of the original model and moulds, they became a British specialty (Figure 5.14). Between 1830 and 1870 there was a boom in the marketplace for pitchers in historicist styles. The jugs were commonly pressed from wet clay in a mould (as opposed to being thrown on the wheel), where the relief decoration was integrated into the mould; however, here the relief of neoclassical figures was moulded separately, in the technique known as sprigging. It is made of Parian porcelain, a biscuit-like clay body named for its resemblance to marble from the ancient Greek marble quarries on the island of Paros.133 The design streamlines Josiah Wedgwood’s jasperware Portland Vase into a practical single-handled jug. Wedgwood’s limited edition from the 1790s, which set the industry standard, was itself a transfiguration of the Roman cameo-glass

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amphora housed in the British Museum. In 1845, an intoxicated museum visitor smashed the antiquity into 200 pieces, and this act of vandalism and subsequent restoration led to further reproductions. Catering to Victorian prudery, Samuel Alcock, as with other Victorian potters, draped the nudes in these new versions. Alcock’s relief was stained in pale lavender, a signature colour of his pottery, and because the pigment was applied as part of the moulding process rather than painted separately, production costs were reduced. Alcock probably licensed the patent by Richard Boote in 1843, but Charles Eastlake and other taste arbiters soon dismissed the popular lavender and purple colours as vulgar, along with the genre of novelty and historicist jugs, altogether.134 The concerns of design reformers in the nineteenth century and the antiVictorian views unfolding in the twentieth century, along with the brown discolouration in the Alcock jug’s clay body, did not deter the last private owner from treasuring it. Octogenarian Rosemary (née Savary) Knox donated it with another Staffordshire novelty jug in the neo-Gothic style to the Gardiner Museum in Toronto in 2012. Knox noted that previous generations of her family who worked in the British colonial civil service had brought them to postings in Africa and the Caribbean.135 The only difficult voyage for the jugs was from Kumasi (Ghana) to London in the 1930s when ‘everything was broken: the cut crystal from Belgium was in shards but the hearty jugs were fine’.136 She added that her ‘family never experienced a settled home, but carried the trappings of house and hearth which they shipped in containers all over the world’.137 No members of her family were ‘china hunters’, caught in the fever known as ‘chinamania’ – a craze that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, striking men and women of all classes in both Britain and America. Still, the family used them purely for display in the glass front cabinet, either in the dining or in the drawing rooms in their various bungalows. For the Savary/Knox family, both jugs expressed their British status within the complex cross-cultural realities of colonial society.

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The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there1 L. P. Hartley’s observation, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’, is a truism; nonetheless, it remains highly relevant especially to this project. In our current habitus, it is almost impossible to fathom the volume of ceramics that populated the Victorian world and the magnitude of their importance. A few pieces of blue ware brought colour to plain cottage interiors; breakfast, tea, dinner and dessert services were produced in large numbers to accommodate twelve, eighteen or twenty-four (and often greater) place settings; multi-piece toilet sets were situated in each bedroom; and a plethora of jugs was designed for all kinds of domestic and commercial uses.2 However, after the First World War ceramic consumption went into decline, partly due to the adoption of smaller residences and a vanishing serving class who washed the dishes, making the ownership of multiple services less desirable.3 What is more, throughout the twentieth century a diversified global industry diminished the Staffordshire Potteries’ status as Britain’s largest region of ceramic production. While one Victorian observed ‘tall chimneys of brick soar[ed] up into the sky and spread their clouds of smoke through the sooty air’, there now exists largely empty factories, warehouses and heritage sites.4 Without a period eye, it is difficult to appreciate the power and agency of ceramics in nineteenthcentury Britain, especially because of the current depletion of the production and consumption of industrially produced British household ceramics. In the ‘Introduction’ I posed three questions that the chapters in this book were to answer: Do ceramic objects bestow meaning in text and painting or is it the author and painter, reader and viewer, who imbue them with an agency? If Victorian identities and cultures were expressed, represented and reinforced through the ownership of things, how did ceramics – portable, functional and often decorative objects – assist in and contribute to shaping these modes of experiences? How were they used and how did they participate in the discourse of allegory and metaphor? This book contends that, whether rare or plentiful,

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Victorian ceramics were so ingrained and part of Britons’ daily life that the relationship between subject and object was co-dependent. A plate pattern could talk or be read and therefore signify a message and as the Chartist Eliza Cook believed ‘were superior in motivating and teaching the uneducated than inaccessible “Raphaels, Claudes, and Poussins”’5; a jug facilitated positive or negative actions if poured, stored or weaponized. Taken further, ugly and dirty dishes allegorized the great unwashed, Jews or the Chinese, while clean dishes personified the pious and the gentile. Tableware played the same role as the literary trope of ‘talking’ or ‘it’ objects, to instruct and entertain its user. Anthropomorphizing ceramics objects was common in Victorian literature further emphasizing this close connection between subject and object. A broken jug stood for fallen virtue while an intact jug served as an amiable friend for the working man and a plate pattern dished out pearls of wisdom or biting observations. Therefore, interacting with pottery and china by touch or sight triggered a response from its users. Oscar Wilde put it best when he stated, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’, wryly affirming that china indeed affects the actions of their owners.6 Consumers delighted in the opticality of their pictorial dishes or their cupboard full of blue-and-white crockery often in contradiction to the recommendations of the design reform circle especially if they were accented with gilding, tinted in lavender or overtly pictorial. Wilde parodied the tyranny of taste and collecting, but ceramics also contributed to and facilitated large and small customs of Victorian society. A little-known behaviour that surfaced in my research was the practice of renting or borrowing teacups when there was not enough to go around, or in a pinch, when courting couples were encouraged to share a single cup, thus giving new meaning to the concept of a loving cup. When taken together, the mixture of examples for research and analysis from canonical literary works and unfamiliar and more ‘popular’ material show how far-reaching and endemic the metaphorical meanings of ceramics were in the nineteenth century. A teacup, a teapot or a tableware pattern performed multilayered agencies that contributed to and reflected the grammar of representation in text and image. The mediations of ceramics in the Victorian period evidenced their agency of bearing witness, and personifying, along with partaking within the design reform debates of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this way, ceramics performed an agency through its surface decoration along with form and function. This was also true regarding the choice of technique or clay body employed to metaphorize character: ‘delf ’ signified the common folk,

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earthenware solid British stock and porcelain foreignness and fragility. Writers and painters created the tropes or relied on existing ones, but in either scenario, pottery operated as agents to add signification and symbolism of gender, patriotism, godliness and mortality. For these reasons, ceramics of the past should be viewed today as complex works that reveal insights into the artist, the subject and the audience reinforcing individual and collective illusions and actualized morals. Each chapter opened with a Victorian passage that directly or indirectly referenced ceramics be it an object, pattern or clay body. The five textual passages, whether by noted authors or by relatively unknown writers, demonstrated how pottery’s agency that was so deeply fixed in the consciousness and language of the Victorians was charged with symbolism about labour and rest, luxury and necessity or loneliness and fulfilment, which no longer resonate in current discourse. A material and a visual analysis of Victorian ceramics, functional but decorative, closed each chapter to illustrate the challenges and contradictions that the design reformers faced when putting their theories into practice, be it executing the principles of fitness for purpose or schematized design while juggling historicism and naturalism, innovation, such as the challenges of choosing water flowers for carafes or the emulation of the Sèvres style on bone china. Some objects revealed insight into the owner of the Staffordshire pottery and the subtle and not-so-subtle reasons for their cherishing them as tokens of personal and national identity be that a jug in the style of the Portland Vase or the latest tableware pattern; and while dishes were plentiful for those who lived in the metropoles, they were hard to come by for settler women of middle and upper classes making them even more valuable. Crockery patterns demonstrated British imperialism and the fascination with the exotic by portraying idealized views such as indigenous peoples paddling canoes and, thus, how British colonialism served so well as a British dish. Concentrating exclusively on ceramics and specific type forms and how they interacted with other objects and subjects offers new ways to study Victorian ceramics, art history and material culture. Teacups, teapots, jugs, vases dishes and basins (full or empty) in position with the objects in the room (carpet, tablecloth, food or lack thereof) and placement high or low or near their subjects (at the side of man’s elbow or pointed to a woman’s womb) all served as a visual grammar in which familiar patterns of character revealing vice or virtue, strength or weakness unfold. These motifs comprise the visual and literary rhetoric of ceramic representations that both artists and writers employed, personalized

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and critiqued. Whether as objects or clay bodies they were meant to be read as analogical and metonymical agents that crossed class structures. This book has not focused on the ceramics industry in Staffordshire and the difficult and often lethal working conditions at some 300 potteries that operated between 1850 and 1890 and which employed anywhere between 20 and 2,000 workers who operated the machinery and tools manually. As recent authors have documented, the demanding work requiring multiple skills and steps was divided by gender – women made up 40 per cent of the workforce, but the men were given the higher paid positions: throwers, turners and pressers; the greater the skill meant increased independence and the opportunity to work on contract among the factories.7 Instead, I examined aspects of the social history of production that were inflected with allegorical and metaphorical readings of the texts, paintings and objects. That the ubiquitous willow pattern blocked design innovation contributed to its becoming a popular metaphor for disparagement outside the ceramic industry, demonstrating how production techniques directly implicated the design’s metaphorical interpretations. The leisurely activity of factory tourism reported in both popular literature and trade journals evidenced national pride and Christian values intertwined with ceramic production, affirming that knowledge of manufacturing enhanced the psychological meanings of everyday tableware, since consumers associated their British tableware with patriotism and piety. The connections drawn between text, painting and objects provide a tangible link to the past that illustrates the pervasive metaphorical meanings of pottery and porcelain that shaped critical, popular and sentimental material culture of the Victorian period. By entering a painting or a text via a plate or a jug, we are afforded new readings of metaphors and symbolism that demonstrate the dominance of these artistic conventions. While either entirely neglected or seriously marginalized in ceramic histories, both academic and popular, British-made and consumed nineteenth-century pottery played a critical role in shaping and reflecting the contemporaneous actions and perceptions of Britons. The representations of British-invented softpaste porcelain and creamware, stoneware and earthenware containers, plain or decorated with prints, painted designs or moulded with embossed reliefs that were featured in Victorian paintings and literature, speak to a grammar of social and aesthetic conventions that challenge contemporary viewers and readers. The language of their placement within not only interiors but also the structure of a painting or written text reveals their metaphoric agency which often inflected and reflected the actual physical and social agencies of objects and people alike.

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I give Jane Eyre the final word about the agency of ceramics: [a] certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it.8

Here a young Jane dared to dream and escape her physical and mental abuse using a china plate, affirming the potency of pottery in the Victorian age.

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Notes Introduction 1 George Eliot, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, chap. 7, in Adam Bede, 1859. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/507​/507​.txt (accessed 30 June 2017). 2 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3 Elaine Freegood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1, 4. 4 Michael Baxandall developed his concept of the ‘period eye’ in his book titled Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Peter Thornton also argued for the period eye for interior restoration in Authentic Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (New York: Viking, 1984). See also Jo Dahn, ‘Politics and Meaning in Transferware: The Period Eye’, in Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, ed. Paul Scott and Knut Astrup Bull (Oslo: National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, 2015), 172. 5 Lynn Pyckett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’, Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1–5. Victoria Mills, ‘Introduction: Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (2008): 1–14. Jennifer Sattaur, ‘Thinking Objectively: An Overview of “Thing Theory” in Victorian Studies’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012): 347–57; Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Erika Rappaport, ‘Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response to Navsa 2007’, Victorian Studies Journal 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 289–96. John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 6 See Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sophia Andres, The PreRaphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005); Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘George Eliot and John Everett Millais: “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Realism”’, Victorian Studies 60, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 361–89; Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

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7 For more discussion on the idea of remediation, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). See also George P. Landow, ‘Material Object: Virtual Spaces’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 6 (April 2008): 1–6; David Trotter, ‘Household Clearances in Victorian Fiction’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19, no. 6 (April 2008): 1–39. 8 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1, 2. For discussion on a Bourdieu picture ‘reading’, see also Catherine Roach, Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Ashgate, 2016). 9 See Graham Harman, Tool Being-Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 10 Bill Brown, Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003), 13. 11 Ibid., 9, 12. 12 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13 See Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life Things, Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007). 14 Scholars who make this observation about prioritizing questions over theory include Cary Carson, ‘Material Culture History: The Scholarship Nobody Knows’, in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field, ed. Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis Dupont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 412; Judith Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (New York: Berg, 2000), 42; Daniel Miller, ‘Why Some Things Matter’, in Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. 15 Paul Greenhalgh, ‘Social Complexity and the Historiography of Ceramic’, Fourth Annual Dorothy Wilson Perkins Lecture, The Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University, 14 October 2001. Available online: http:// ceramicsmuseum​.alfred​.edu​/perkins​_lect​_series​/greenhalgh (accessed 8 March 2018). 16 Kenneth Ames makes this point in ‘The Stuff of Everyday Life: American Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings’, in Material Culture: A Research Guide, ed. Thomas Schlereth (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 79–111. See also John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, eds., Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings of and Pleasures of Collecting (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 20–35; Karen Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teacup? Punch, Domesticity and Gender in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 205–21. 17 Here I paraphrase the question asked by Giorgio Riello, ‘Things that Shape History. Material Culture and Historical Narratives’, in History and Material Culture:

Notes

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19 20

21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28

29 30

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A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. Karen Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2009), 29; and Attfield, Wild Things, 3. Much has been written on the search for the porcelain arcanum. See Alden Cavanaugh and Michael Yonan, eds., The Cultural Aesthetics of EighteenthCentury Porcelain (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010); Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, ed., Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilized Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Hilary Young, English Porcelain, 1745–95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London: V&A Publications, 1999). Young, English Porcelain, 3. Such collecting societies include English Ceramic Circle (founded in 1927); the Oriental Ceramic Society (founded in 1921); the American Ceramic Circle (founded in 1970); and the Northern Ceramic Society (founded in 1972). Hilary Young, ‘Manufacturing Outside the Capital: The British Porcelain Factories: Their Sales Networks and Their Artists, 1745–1795’, Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 258. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, vol. 2 (Royal Commission, 1851), 120. Department of Practical Art, Marlborough House, A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art, in the Museum of the Department, vol. 2 (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1852), 39. Simeon Shaw, History of the Staffordshire Potteries (1829; repr., London: Scott, Greenwood & Co., 1900). Geoffrey Godden, Jewitt’s Ceramic Art of Great Britain 1800–1900 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), xi. Joseph Marryat’s Collections Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain (London: John Murray, 1850); Ann Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 129. William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain of the Renaissance and Modern Periods (1863; repr., London: Bickers & Son, 1874); The Graphic (9 July 1870), 38–9. The chancellor Exchequer William Gladstone also gave a public lecture on Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Wedgwood: an Address’ on 26 October 1863, to the Wedgwood Memorial Institute in Burslem. Available online: http://www​.thepotteries​.org​/docs​ /005​.htm (accessed 10 December 2020). Eliza Meteyard, The Life of Josiah Wedgwood: From His Private Correspondence and Family Papers (London: Hurst and Blanket, 1865). Annie Trumbull Slosson, The China Hunters Club (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878); Alice Morse Earle, China Collecting in America (New York: Charles

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33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

Notes Scribner’s Sons, 1892); George Miller, ‘Marketing Ceramics in North America: An Introduction’, Winterthur Portfolio 19, no. 1 (1984): 1–5. Louis Marc Emmanuel Solon, The Art of the Old English Potter (London: Bemrose & Sons, 1883). R. L. Hobson, Catalogue of the Collection of English Pottery in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1903); Arthur Hunt, Exhibition of Early Earthenware (London: Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1914); Bernard Rackham and Herbert Read, English Pottery: Its Development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1921). W. B. Honey, English Porcelain: A Handbook for Collectors (1928; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 213. J. F. Blacker, Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art (Toronto: The Copp, Clark Co. Limited, 1912), 11, 19. George Wolliscroft Rhead and Frederick Alfred Rhead, Staffordshire Pots & Potters (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1906). Hugh Wakefield, Victorian Pottery (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962), 6, 37–9. Wakefield served as general editor of Victorian Porcelain, Victorian Costume, Victorian Embroidery, Victorian Silver and Plate, Victorian Glassware, and Victorian Jewellery. Asa Briggs also renewed interest in Victorian scholarship with Victorian People (1955), Victorian Cities (1963) and Victorian Things (1988). Wakefield, Victorian Pottery, 16. Robert Charleston, ed., World Ceramics (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1971). Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1. R. J. C. Hildyard, English Pottery, 1620–1840 (London: V&A Publications, 2005), 2004. See in particular, ‘From Warehouse to Antique Shop: The Fashion for Collecting’, 204–21. Hildyard, English Pottery, 8. Young, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain, 1, 4. Simon Spero, ‘What We Do Not Know about 18th-Century English Porcelain’, ECC Transactions 19, no. 2 (2006): 315–42. Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 6. Ibid., 3. Cassidy-Geiger, Fragile Diplomacy, 2007. Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History 9, no. 2 (1998): 141–87; Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2010). There has been a backlash to Finlay’s simplification of cross-cultural exchange by some authors, such as Anne Gerritsen and Ellen Huang. See Anne Gerritsen and

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50 51

52 53

54 55 56

57 58 59

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Stephen McDowall, ‘Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History’, Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 3–8; Ellen Huang, ‘From the Imperial Court to the International Art Market: Jingdezhen Porcelain Production as a Global Vision Culture’, Journal of History 23, no. 1 (2012): 115–45. Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (London: Europa Publications, 1982), 100–45. Lorna Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire 1660–1760 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). Neil Ewins, ‘Supplying the Present Wants of Our Yankee Cousins . . .’: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775–1880 (Stoke-on-Trent: City Museum & Art Gallery, 1997), 1. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University, 1997), 52–69. Stacey Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Material Cultures: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, 1740–1920, ed. by John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 20–35; Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teapot’; Christine Jones, Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France, Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Culture series (Lantham, MD: University of Delaware Press, 2013); Eric Weichel, ‘“Every Other Place -it Could be Placed with Advantage”: Ladies-in-Waiting at the British Court of the “Excessive”, Display of Ceramics as Art Objects, 1689–1740’, in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010, ed. Julia Skelly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 41–62. Cavanaugh and Yonan, The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, 6. Eugenia Zuroski and Michael Yonan, ‘Material Fictions: A Dialogue as Introduction’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 1 (2018): 1–18. The following articles are in the 2018 ECF: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Character Resolved into Clay: The Toby Jug’, 19–41; Emma Newport, ‘The Fictility of Porcelain: Making and Shaping Meaning in Lady Dorothea Banks’s “Dairy Book”’, 117–42; Joanna M. Gohmann, ‘Colonizing Through Clay: A Case Study of the Pineapple in British Material Culture’, 143–61. Michael Yonan, ‘Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies’, West 86th 18, no. 2 (2011): 232–48. Anna Jackson, ‘Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception and Acquisition of Japanese Culture’, Journal of Design History 5, no. 4 (1992): 245–56. John Haddad, ‘Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics 1780–1920’, Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 1 (2007): 53–80; Patricia O’Hara, ‘“The Willow Pattern that We Knew”: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow’, Victorian Studies 36 (Summer 1993): 421–2; Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s

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62

63 64 65

66

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Notes Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Anne Smart Martin, ‘Magical, Mythical, Practical and Sublime: The Meanings and Use of Ceramics in America’, in Ceramics in America, ed. Robert Hunter (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2001), 29–46. Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry, 1870–1955 (London: Women’s Press, 1990); Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Also important to the expansion of this area is the Oxford Journal of the History of Collections, founded in 1989, which as its website states is ‘dedicated to providing the clearest insight into all aspects of collecting activity’. Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures, Public Beneficence’, 127. See Hildyard, English Pottery, chap. 10, ‘From Warehouse to Antique Shop: The Fashion for Collecting’. Patricia F. Ferguson, Ceramics: 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Anna Somers Cocks, ‘The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country During the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 25, Symposium. Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between East and West (London: Phaidon, 2005); Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007); Charlotte Gere, Artistic Circles: Design and Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement (London: V&A Publishing, 2010); Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Phaidon, 1996); Anne Anderson, ‘Coming Out of the China Closet? Performance, Identity and Sexuality in the House Beautiful’, in Oriental Interiors, Design Identity Space, ed. John Potvin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 127–43; Anne Anderson, ‘“Fearful Consequences . . . of Living up to One’s Teapot”: Men, Women, and “Cultchah”’, in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896 Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 111. Julie Codell, ‘Exotic, Fetish, Virtual: Virtual Excesses in Victorian Painting’, in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010, ed. Julia Skelly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 89–110; Emalee Beddoes chap. 2 ‘The Art of Tea: The Table as a Liminal and Symbol of Britishness in Late Nineteenth Century Painting’ is a recent example of research that addresses ceramics represented in Victorian painting and reflects some of my own approaches. Emalee Beddoes, ‘The Art of Tea: Late Victorian Visual Culture and the Normalization of an International National Icon’ (MA diss., University of Birmingham, 2014). Available online: http://etheses​.bham​.ac​.uk​/4915​/2​/Beddoes14MPhil​.pdf (accessed 1 May 2015).

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68 Susan Weber et al., eds., Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 (New York: Bard Graduate Centre, Walters Art Museum, 2021). 69 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996); Penny Sparke et al., eds., Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). 70 Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (London: The British Museum Press, 2010). 71 Erika Rappaport, ‘Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party’, in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 125–46; Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Deirdre McMahon, ‘Tea, Gender, and Middle-Class Taste’, in Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain, ed. Deirdre McMahon and Janet Myers (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 135–54; Julie Fromer, A Necessary Luxury (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008); Tamara Ketabgian, ‘Foreign Tastes and “Manchester Tea-Parties”: Eating and Drinking with the Victorian Lower Orders’, in Consuming Cultures in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives in Consumption, ed. Tamara Wagner and Narin Hassan (Plymouth: Lexington Books: 2007), 125–40. 72 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2008), 4. See also Julie Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1771–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 4. 73 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; repr., Boston, MA: James Good and Company, 1872), 224. 74 See, for example, Ward and Lock, Home Book: A Domestic Encyclopeædia Forming a Companion Volume to ‘Mrs. Book of Household Management’ (London: Ward, Lock and Company, c. 1881), 304. 75 Silverpen, ‘The New Crockery Shop’, in Eliza Cook’s Journal, vol. 1 (London: John Owen Clarke, 1849), 37, 38. 76 Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain, 1560–1960 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 57–8. 77 Between 1790 and 1880 more than seventy companies in Britain produced the pattern. See Knut Astrup Bull, ‘New Paths into Old Landscapes: The Blue-andWhite Tradition and Contemporary Ceramics’, in Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics, ed. Paul Scott and Knut Astrup Bull (Oslo: National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, 2015), 39. 78 See Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 72. 79 Reverend G. R. Wedgwood, The History of the Tea Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1878), 138, 145, 146, 152.

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80 ‘Illustrated Tour in the Manufacturing Districts’, Art-Union (December 1846): 317; ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (June 1863): 110. 81 S. A., ‘Wanderings in the Crystal Palace No. 2’, Art Journal (1851): 198. 82 ‘Lord Carlisle at Burslem’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (26 February 1853): 144; Charles Dickens, ‘A Plated Article’, Household Words 5, no. 109 (1852): 118; ‘The Potteries’, Art-Union 65 (1844): 107; Wedgwood, The History of the Tea Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art, 123. 83 ‘The Vintage Jug’, Art-Union (November 1846): 332. 84 Henry Willett, Introductory Catalogue, Pottery & Porcelain in the Brighton Museum, Lent by Henry Willett (Brighton: John Green George Bishop, 1893), 3–16. 85 Ibid., 3–4. 86 Clive Dilnot, ‘The State of Design History, Part I: Mapping the Field’, and ‘The State of Design History, Part II: Problems and Possibilities’, in Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 213–33. 87 Attfield, Wild Things, 5.

Chapter 1 1 Silverpen, ‘The New Crockery Shop’, in Eliza Cook’s Journal, vol. 1 (London: John Owen Clarke, 1849), 21, 22. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 37. 4 Ann Smart Martin makes a similar point in ‘Magical, Mythical, Practical and Sublime: The Meanings and Use of Ceramics in America’, in Ceramics in America, ed. Robert Hunter (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation, 2001), 29–46. 5 Shirley Bury, ‘Richard Redgrave and Felix Summerly’s Art-Manufacturers’, in Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), ed. Susan Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 36, 40. 6 Ibid., 38. 7 Ibid., 37. 8 John Ruskin, ‘Modern Manufacturer and Design’, A lecture delivered at Bradford, March 1859. Cited in Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Paintings and Politics, 1875–1890 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 9. 9 Julie Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1771–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate 2012), 4. 10 See Anne Anderson, ‘“China Mania”: Collecting Old Blue for the House Beautiful, c. 1860–1900’, in Material Cultures: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, 1740–1920, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 109–28; Anne Anderson, ‘“Fearful Consequences . . . of Living up to One’s Teapot”: Men,

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Women and “Cultchah”’, in Rethinking the Interior (c. 1867–1896), Aestheticism and Arts and the Crafts Movement, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 111–30; Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007); Charlotte Gere, ‘Artistic Circles, Design & Decoration’, in The Aesthetic Movement (London: V&A publishing, 2009); Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (New York: Phaidon Press, 2011); Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). 11 For more discussion on the idea of remediation, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 12 John Ruskin, ‘The Sixth Morning, The Shepherd’s Tower’, in Mornings in Florence in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 14 (Philadelphia: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh, 1891), 106. 13 John Ruskin, Unto This Last, and Other Essays on Political Economy (1860; repr., London: Ward Lock Co., 1912). Available on online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ files​/36541​/36541​-h​/36541​-h​.htm. 14 John Ruskin, ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: G. Allen, 1903–12), 180–204. 15 John Ruskin, The Two Paths Being Lectures on Art and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacturer, ed. Christine Roth (1859; repr., West Lafayette: Parlour Press, 2004), 66. 16 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 5 (New York: John Wiley and Son, 1869), 261. 17 John Ruskin, ‘Letter to Edmund Oldfield Geneva, June 3, 1844’, in The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 12, ed. Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903). Available online: www​.ebooksread​.com​/authors​-eng​/john​ -ruskin​/the​-works​-of​-john​-ruskin​-volume​-12​-ala​/page​-48​-the​-works​-of​-john​ -ruskin​-volume​-12​-ala​.shtml (accessed 10 July 2015). 18 John Ruskin, ‘Of the Division of the Arts’, in Aratra Pentelici, vol. 20 (1870; repr., New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1885), 10–11. 19 Richard and Samuel, A Century of British Painters (1866; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 444. 20 Ibid., 360–3. 21 Ibid., 200. 22 The distinction between fine and mechanical arts was strictly observed and enforced by the Royal Academy of Arts since it was established in 1768. 23 Henry Cole, ‘Lecture to Manchester School of Art on December 21, 1877’, in Objects of Knowledge, ed. Susan Pearce (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 46.

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24 Julian Lubbock, Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design, 1550–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 235, 248. 25 ‘Illustrated Tour in the Manufacturing Districts’, Art-Union (December 1846): 317. 26 Apsley Pellatt, M.P., ‘Essay on Pottery and the Fictile Art, Historically, Chemically, and Practically Considered’, Art Journal (1 February 1854): 33. 27 Between 1850 and 1890, there were about 300 potteries and each had 20 to 2,000 employees. See Miranda Goodby, ‘“The Fearful Malady of the Clay” Working Conditions in the Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire Potteries’, in Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, ed. Susan Weber et al. (New York: Bard Graduate Centre, Walters Art Museum, 2021), 97. Today the six towns are amalgamated under Stoke-on-Trent. 28 Trade unions arrived in Stoke in 1824, and major strikes occurred between 1836–7 and 1842, the latter as part of the 1842 General Strike. William Evans, a member of the United Branches of the Potters’ Society, advocated for higher pay and promoted the emigration of potters to America in the hope of finding a better living. He insisted that he tried to the assist potter in getting better wages, but he never incited strikes of 1836 and 1837, which had a ‘disastrous turnout’. Evans was also editor of the weekly Staffordshire Gazette, Potter’s Examiner Workman Advocate published between 1837 and 1847. William Evans, Art and History of the Potting Business (Shelton: Examiner’s Office, Miles Bank, 1846), viii, 9. See Goodby note 1, 107. 29 Ibid., ix. 30 ‘Illustrated Tour’, 317. 31 Gilbert Redgrave, ed., Manual of Design Compiled from the Writings and Addresses of the Richard Redgrave (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876), 117. 32 Ibid., 118. 33 Charles Meigh owned framed reproduction prints of the Winterhalter Royal Portraits, ‘Sales by Auction’, Staffordshire Advertiser (12 May 1855): 8. The vases were not accessioned into the V&A collection until 1963. They were purchased from Kenway Antiques in Earl’s Court under the curatorship of Hugh Wakefied. The vases are on display in the British Galleries. 34 ‘Decorative Art Analytically Considered’, Art Journal (February 1853): 37–8. 35 See Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 66, 293. Charles Dickens and William H. Wills, ‘A Plated Article’ (1852): 120. 36 Dickens, ‘Murdering the Innocents’, ch. 2 in Hard Times, 1854 (London: Chapman Hall), 7. See Katherine Kearns, Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 66, 293. 37 Dickens and Wills, ‘A Plated Article’, 120. 38 Léon Arnoux, ‘On Ceramic Manufacturers’, in Reports on the Universal Exhibition; Part II (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1856), 370.

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39 Martha Kelleher, ‘Richard Redgrave RA “An Artist of His Age”’ (MA diss., University of East Anglia, 1985), 1, 5–7. 40 ‘The Autobiography of Richard Redgrave, ARA’, Art Journal 12 (1850): 49. In addition to the paintings that portray women in distress discussed in this chapter and Chapter 5, Redgrave also painted The Reduced Gentleman’s Daughter (1840, present whereabouts unknown), Bad News from the Sea (1842, private collection), Going to Service (1843, private collection), Fashion Slaves (1847, private collection) and The Outcast (1851, Royal Academy). Redgrave’s genre painting varied in size between 67 and 80 × 100 cm, consistent with genre painting and considerably smaller than the grand scale of historical narrative and old master paintings but appropriate for furnishing the living rooms of the merchant classes. 41 ‘The Autobiography of Richard Redgrave, ARA’, 49. 42 Athenaeum (27 May 1843): 512. Note the critic’s use of italics to emphasize his point. 43 The original was exhibited at the Royal Academy 1843 and now missing, and engraved by William Giller. According to Redgrave’s memoir, he painted four versions, see Frances Margaret Redgrave, Richard Redgrave, C.B., R.A., A Memoir Compiled from His Diary (London: Cassel & Company, 1891), 43. The V&A and the Shipley Art Gallery have a replica oil in their collection. 44 ‘Governesses’, The Lady’s Newspaper (January–July 1848): 506. 45 See Trev Broughton and Ruth Symes, The Governess: An Anthology (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997); Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess (London, Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press), 1993. 46 Redgrave, A Memoir, 21, 93, 26. Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 18; ‘The Autobiography of Richard Redgrave, ARA’, 49. 47 Art-Union 57 (1843): 174. 48 Other details differ; for example, Redgrave added a piano and children playing in the V&A version, at the request of John Sheepshanks, the patron who wanted to lighten the sombre scene. Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 111–14. 49 Art-Union 57 (1843): 174. 50 Patricia F. Ferguson, Ceramics: 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 120. 51 R. J. C. Hildyard, English Pottery 1620–1840 (London: V&A), 223, 227. 52 ‘Illustrated Tour’, 317. 53 Ferguson, Ceramics, 113. 54 Hildyard, English Pottery 1620–1840, 223, 227. 55 Ward and Lock’s Home Book: A Domestic Encyclopædia Forming a Companion Volume to ‘Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management’ (London: Ward, Lock and Company, c. 1881), 399. 56 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair were released four years after Redgrave’s Poor Teacher series in 1847.

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57 Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 130. 58 The Spectator 19 (8 August 1846); Samuel Redgrave, Official Handbook of Church and State (London: Church and Murray, 1855), 240–1. See Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 84. 59 The Times (1 May 1847): 6. 60 Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 131–2. 61 John Ruskin, ‘Of the Queen’s Garden’ 1864 lecture published in ‘Sesame and Lilies’ (Kent: George Allen, 1889); Charlotte Gere with Lesley Hoskins, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (London: Geffrye Museum, 2000); Frances Collard, ‘Historical Revivals, Commercial Enterprise and Public Confusion: Negotiating Taste, 1860–1890’, Journal of Design History 16, no. 1 (2003): 35–48; Penny Sparke, ‘Furnishing the Aesthetic Interior: Manuals and Theories’, in The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 126–33. 62 Annelise Madsen, ‘Recipes for Refinement: Art and Sociability in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Art and Appetite: American Painting Culture and Cuisine, ed. Judith A. Barter (Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 88–7; Gaye Blake-Roberts and Susan Weber, ‘From Teapots to Flowerpots, the Use of Majolica in the Victorian Home’, in Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 112, 122. 63 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; repr., Boston, MA: James Good and Company, 1872), 224, 229. 64 Ibid., 229. 65 Ibid., 207, 224, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235. 66 Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Company, 1878), 238. 67 Robert William Edis, Decoration and Furniture of Townhouses (London: Canto, 1880), 250, 251. 68 ‘Artistic’ signified decor in the Aesthetic Movement style. 69 Ward and Lock, Home Book, 304. 70 Ibid., 399. 71 Ibid., 400. 72 Ibid., 34. 73 Ibid., 30. 74 See, for example, ‘Price Fixing Agreement’ (1770) reprinted in Arnold Mountford, ‘Documents Relating to English Ceramics of the 18th & 19th Centuries’, Journal of Ceramic History- 8, no. 99 (1975): 4–15. 75 John Henry Walsh, Manual of Domestic Economy: From a 100£ to 1000£ a Year (London: Routledge, 1857), 195. John Henry Walsh, A Manual of Domestic Economy Suited to Families Spending from £150 to £1500 a Year (London: G. Routledge, 1874), 197.

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76 For larger incomes the differences were more substantial: the 1856 edition listed a dessert service at £12.12, a china dinner service at £30 and a breakfast and tea set at £10.10s, while the 1874 version priced the dessert service and ‘best’ china at £15, a common dinner set at £6 and breakfast and tea sets at £7. The 1856 publication listed Staffordshire breakfast services at 6s and Staffordshire dinner service at £1 for the lower income families. The same values are published in the 1874 edition. For mid-range salaries of £250, the 1856 price list for a Staffordshire breakfast set was 15s and a Staffordshire dinner service £3. In 1874 the recommendation for a family in the mid-range (£350) income was a breakfast service, tea service and dinner service for £3 and common china at £1. 77 ‘Novelties in Decoration’, in Sylvia’s Home Journal for Home Reading and Home Use (London: Ward, Lock, and Co., 1879), 107. 78 See Anderson, ‘“China Mania”’; Anderson, ‘Fearful Consequences’; Merrill, The Peacock Room, and Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement. 79 Notable collections included Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey in 1823, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill 1842, Stowe in 1848 and Sir Ralph Bernal in 1855. 80 Cole working with Thomas Fairbairn organized a kind of bridge financing to the museum between 1859 and 1865 in return for being able to show the collection on long-term loan in Manchester, his primary residence . Herbert Minton and Léon Arnoux were also involved in securing the Jules Soulages collection, which was located in Toulouse near Arnoux’s home town. 81 Rebecca Wallis, ‘Majolica Sources of Inspiration’, in Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, 38. 82 Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Works of Sir Henry Cole Accounted for in His Deeds, Speeches and Writings, vol. 1 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 105, 290. Ferguson, Ceramics, 183. 83 Ibid. See also Anne Anderson, ‘Vasemania: The Huntington Gold Anchor Chelsea Vases’, The British Art Journal 8, no. 2 (Autumn 2017): 72–80. 84 Joseph Marryat’s Collections: Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain (London: John Murray, 1850); Ann Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 129. 85 William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain of the Renaissance and Modern Periods (1863; repr., London: Bickers & Son, 1874); The Graphic (9 July 1870): 38–9. See also ‘The Old China Craze’, The Pottery and Glass Trades Review (May 1878): 68; Anderson, ‘“China Mania”’. 86 Times obituary cited in Charles Dawson, ‘In Search of the Marksman: William Chaffers’, a lecture presented to the English Ceramic Circle, 1 October 2020. 87 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 208, 214, 230. For a discussion on the Victorian desire for new household objects, see Penny Sparke’s chapter ‘“Those Extravagant

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Draperies”: Domesticity Contested’, in As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (San Francisco: Pandora/Harper Collins, 1996), 50–69. 88 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 224. 89 Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley, cited in Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), note 22, 24. 90 Mary Haweis, The Art of Decoration (London: Chatto, 1881), 11, 15, 16. 91 Ibid. 92 Montague Guest, ed., Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals: Confidences of a Collector of Ceramics and Antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria, and Germany, from the year 1869–1885, vol. 1 (London: Ballantyne and Co., 1911), xxv. Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures’, 129. 93 Wilkie Collins, part 1, chap. 10 in Basil: A Story of Modern Life, 1852. Available online: http://www​.org​/files​/4605​/4605​-h​/4605​-h​.htm (accessed 15 March 2015). 94 Collins, part 2, chap. 3; Steven Dillon, ‘Resurfacing Collins’s Basil’, The Wilkie Collins Journal, no. 3 (2000). Available online: http://wil​kiec​olli​nssociety​.org​/ resurfacing​-collinss​-basil/ (accessed 13 August 2015). 95 Collins, part 1, chap. 7. 96 Anthony Trollope, ‘Plumstead Episcopi’, chap. 8 in The Warden (1855; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 1998), 60. The description suggests eighteenth-century Broseley Dragon pattern, but the expensive price of a pound each is more suggestive of Chelsea. 97 George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, chap. 8 in Scenes of Clerical Life (1857–8) (repr., Aukland, NZ: Floating Press, 2010), 485. 98 Leah A. Kind, ‘Arming Herself in Leaden Stupor: Janet’s Repentance and the Role of Female Alcoholism’, George Eliot – George Henry Lewes Studies, no. 64/5 (October 2013): 72–9. 99 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Widower and the Widow’, chap. 9 in Wives and Daughters, 1864–6. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/4274 (accessed 18 September 2020). See Karen Boiko, ‘Reading and (Re)Writing Class: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 1 (2005): 85–106. 100 Chelsea merged with Derby porcelain factories in 1770. See Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: British Museum, 2001); John P. Cushion and Margaret Cushion, A Collector’s History of British Porcelain (Suffolk: Antique Collector’s Club, 1992), 33–48. 101 Gaskell, ‘The Widower and the Widow’. 102 Punch 63 (5 October 1872): 145. 103 Popularly called Kangxi for their reign marks (1662–1726) or Nankin for the port they shipped from.

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104 Stacey Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums: The Field of Chinese Ceramics in Britain (1560–1960) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 57–8. 105 Captain J. H. Lawrence-Archer, ‘Chinese Porcelain, Particularly that of Ta Ming Dynasty’, Art Journal (London, 1875): 241, cited in Pierson, Collectors, Collections and Museums, 61. 106 It is worth mentioning here that there were countless of commercial British potteries manufacturing transferware patterns incorporating Aesthetic motifs, such as fans arranged in asymmetrical compositions or incorporating blank spaces to counter the decoration. Sometimes the designs were restricted to border patterns and incongruously juxtaposed with Western views, such as in Wallace Gimson & Co.’s ‘The World’ series. Adding to these mass-produced designs was William Stephen Coleman’s ‘naturalist’ series for Minton. Christopher Dresser’s ‘Japonism’ designs, E. W. Godwin’s limited pottery designs and James Hadley’s satirical androgynous teapot for Worcester similarly referenced and promoted Aestheticism. See Sonia Solicari, ‘Ceramics’, in Calloway, The Cult of Beauty, 148–51; Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, ‘Aesthetic Forms in Ceramics and Glass’, in In Pursuit of Aesthetic Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 199–235. 107 William Holman Hunt, ‘Visit to Gladstone 1862–5’, chap. 8 in Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1905), 201–2. Thank you to Carol Jacobi from the Tate Museum for pointing out this reference. 108 Hunt, ‘Visit to Gladstone 1862–5’, 202. 109 To commemorate Gladstone’s death, Doulton mass-produced his face, ‘the face of the Great Commoner’, on a commercial jug with the message that ‘Effort – honest, manful, humble Effort – succeeds, by its reflective action upon character, better than success’. See Asa Briggs, ‘Victorian Images of Gladstone’, in Gladstone, ed. P. J. Jagger (New York: Hambledon Continuum, 1998), 33–49. 110 Ibid. 111 ‘Mr. Alfred de Rothschild’s Collection’, Art Journal (1885): 216–19, 240–1. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Hints to Collectors’, Art Journal (July 1881): 197–200. 115 Ibid., 200. 116 Ibid., 197, 200. 117 Codell, Transculturation, 4. ‘The Old China Craze’, 68. 118 Ibid., 199. 119 O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Paintings and Politics, 1875–1890, 177. Caroline Ascott points out that art critic F. G. Stephens distinguished between the ‘art-decorative’ and the ‘art pictorial’ in the work of Edward Burne-Jones. See Caroline Ascott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones Interlacings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 209.

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120 ‘Mr. Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock”’, lecture delivered in London, Cambridge, Oxford, 1885, cited in James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, ed. Sheridan Ford (Paris: Delabrosse, 1892), 155. Also cited in Merrill, The Peacock Room, 43. 121 Merrill, The Peacock Room, 51–60; Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 62–3. 122 Anna Whistler to Reverend James Gamble (10 February 1864) in K. Abbot, ‘A. McNeill Whistler, The Lady of the Portrait, Letters of Whistler’s Mother’, Atlantic Monthly (1925): 323–4. Cited in Richard Dorment and Margaret Macdonald, James McNeill Whistler (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), 86. 123 Prior to the blue-and-white period, Whistler replicated ceramics in his work such as Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room (1859–67, Freer Gallery of Art), a portrait of his half-sister Deborah Haden. While the painting style is more realistically rendered with tighter brushstrokes, many of Whistler’s signature devices are present, including an empire-style vase on the mantel reflected in the mirror, and its colour scheme of white and red and green is echoed in the curtains. The vase is present in an earlier etching of 1858. 124 J. M. W. to Fantin Latour, ca. January 4/February 3, 1864, cited in Merrill, The Peacock Room, 54. 125 Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright, Pugin A Gothic Passion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 126 ‘Royal Academy (Third Notice)’, Observer (15 May 1865): 6; Linda Merrill, ‘Whistler and the “Lange Lijzen”’, The Burlington Magazine 183, no. 1099 (October 1994): 683–90. 127 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (1 June 1864): 165, cited in Merrill, The Peacock Room, 53, 56. 128 Emalee Beddoes, ‘The Art of Tea: Late Victorian Visual Culture and the Normalization of an International National Icon’ (MA diss., University of Birmingham, 2014), 22. 129 ‘The Old China Craze’, 68. 130 Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement, 35–6. 131 Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s, 63; Rossetti to James Anderson Rose, 24 February 1864; Pennel, Whistler Collection, Library of Congress DC, cited in Merrill, The Peacock Room, 60. 132 William Rossetti commented that his brother’s appetite for blue-and-white china exceeded his interest in Japanese art and that he and Whistler were friendly rivals in their chinamania. William Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters with a Memoir, vol. 2 (London: Ellis, 1895), 34. See Clive Wainwright, ‘ “A Gatherer and Disposer of other Men’s Stuffe”, Murray Marks, Connoisseur and Curiosity Dealer’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14, no. 1 (2002): 161–76.

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133 Calloway, The Cult of Beauty, 216. 134 Codell, Transculturation, 4. ‘The Old China Craze’, 68. 135 Jessica Feldman, Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69–71; Jerome McGann, ‘Monna Rosa, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1867’, in Rossetti Archive (Charlottesville: Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, 2005). Available online: http://www​.rossettiarchive​.org​ /docs​/s198​.raw​.html (accessed 28 February 2019); Merrill, The Peacock Room, 88–90. Two years earlier in Blue Bower (1865), Rossetti had reimagined the prunus/hawthorn pattern into an octagonal tile mural to create a backdrop for his model Fanny Cornforth, thus demonstrating, as art historian Julie Codell points out, ‘the alchemical Aesthetic authority to make objects ‘more beautiful’. Julie Codell, ‘Exotic, Fetish, Virtual: Virtual Excesses in Victorian Painting’, in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010, ed. Julia Skelly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 125. 136 The highest price sold for prunus/hawthorn jar was 5,000 pounds, Gere, ‘Artistic Circles, Design & Decoration’, 46. 137 ‘The Old China Craze’, 227. 138 Robyn Asleson, Albert Moore (London: Phaidon, 2000). On the taste for monochrome Chinese pottery in the nineteenth century, see Oliver Impey, ‘Lever as a Collector of Chinese Porcelain’, Journal of the History of Collecting, no. 2 (1992): 232–3. 139 William Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Albert Moore’, Magazine of Art 8 (1885): 191–5. Asleson, Albert Moore, 86; Allen Staley, ‘Moore, Albert Joseph (1841–1893)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Available online: http://www​.oxforddnb​.com​.proxy​.queensu​.ca​/view​/article​/19094 (accessed 11 June 2019). 140 Art Journal (July 1881): 197, 200. 141 Monkhouse, ‘Albert Moore’, 191. 142 An example of a porcelain stem cup painted with an underglaze copper-red fish is in the V&A collection (accession number C.109–192). https://collections​.vam​.ac​ .uk​/item​/O187926​/stemcup​-unknown/. Asleson, Albert Moore, 85. 143 Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s, 120. 144 William Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition Part II (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 32. 145 Moore also included the pot in the watercolour Oranges (1885). See Asleson, Albert Moore, note 113, 127. 146 Casteras and Parkinson, Richard Redgrave, 1804–1888, 39–42, 148. 147 Argus (pseudonym) ‘A Mild Remonstrance Against the Taste-Censorship at Marlborough House, in Reference to Manufacturing Ornamentation and

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Decorative Design, to Manufacturers, Decorators, Designers, and the Public Generally’, Part 1 (London: Houlston & Stoneham, 1853), 22, 28. 148 Well Spring | Redgrave, Richard (CB, RA, ARA) | V&A Explore the Collections (vam​.ac​​.uk), (accessed 29 August 2022).

Chapter 2 1 Charles Dickens and William Henry Willis, ‘A Plated Article’, Household Words 5, no. 109 (1852): 118. The story was republished by Spode in 1930 and 2010, 120. 2 Mark Lemon, ‘A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood [sic] Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern’, Bentley’s Miscellany 3 (1838): 61–5; J. B. L., ‘The Story of the Common Willow-Pattern Plate’, Family Friend 1 (1850): 124–7, 151–4. The generic nature of the story – poor lover, rich girl, thwarted love, evil father – is a theme that was often used in Chinese blue-and-white patterns, including export ware. They include Story of the Western Wing, Romance of the Western Chamber and Peony Pavilion. 3 Dickens and Willis, ‘A Plated Article’. 4 Ibid. 5 Between 1790 and 1880, more than seventy companies in Britain produced the pattern. See Knut Astrup Bull, ‘New Paths into Old Landscapes: The Blue-andWhite Tradition and Contemporary Ceramics’, in Horizon: Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics (Oslo: Arnoldsche Art Publishers Oslo National Museum, 2015), 39. 6 Llewellynn Jewitt, ‘Salopian China: A History of the Coalport Porcelain Works’, Art Journal (1 March 1862): 68. 7 Ibid. The Caughley factory, located in Shropshire by the Severn River near the town of Broseley and Worcester, operated 1754–1814, changing ownership several times including Ambrose Galimore and Thomas Turner. It was known for its blue-and-white porcelain and supplied Chamberlain and Grainger, and Worcester factories in the early nineteenth century. Stanley Fisher, English Blue and White Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century (London: B. T. Bastsford, 1947), 119; Caughley Society, Caughley Blue and White Patterns (London: Caughley Society, 2012). Jewitt, ‘Salopian China’, 68. 8 Ibid. 9 Llewellynn Jewitt, The Ceramic Art of Great Britain, ed. Geoffrey A. Godden (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), xxv; William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain of the Renaissance and Modern Periods (London: J. Davy & Sons, 1866), 354.

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10 Alice Morse Earle, China Collecting in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 131. 11 N. Hudson Moore, The Old China Book (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1903), 13, 59–60. 12 Lemon, ‘A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood [sic] Hieroglyph’, 61–5; J. B. L., ‘The Story of the Common Willow-Pattern Plate’, 124–7, 151–4; ‘A Dish of Gossip Off the Willow Pattern, By Buz, and Plates to Match by Fuz’ (London, 1867): 9; Francis Talfourd and W. P. Hale, The Mandarin’s Daughter, or the Willow Pattern Plate (n.p., 1851); F. C. Burnand, A Tale of Old China (London and New York: Routledge, 1874). 13 George Meredith, ‘Mrs. Mountstuart and Sir Willoughby’, chap. 34 in The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative (Toronto: Broadview Editions, 2010), 381. 14 John Haddad, ‘Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics 1780–1920’, Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 1 (2007): 53–80; Patricia O’Hara, ‘“The Willow Pattern that We Knew”: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow’, Victorian Studies 36 (Summer 1993): 421–2. See also Anna Jackson, ‘Imagining Japan: The Victorian Perception and Acquisition of Japanese Culture’, Journal of Design History 5, no. 4 (1992): 245–56; Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University, 1997), 59–60. 15 Alison Syme, ‘Pattern of Romance and Mystery’, in Willow (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 101–33. 16 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 17 Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 72. 18 Ibid. 19 Julie Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1771–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate 2012), 4. 20 Mark Blackwell, ‘Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory’, in The Secret Life Things, Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in EighteenthCentury England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 10–11. 21 John Plotz, ‘Discreet Jewels: Victorian Diamond Narratives and Problem of Sentimental Value’, in The Secret Life Things, Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 329. 22 Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 72. 23 For a description of the process and use of stock illustrations, see ‘A Day at the Staffordshire Potteries’, Penny Magazine Supplement (May 1843): 206 and Reverend G. R. Wedgwood, The History of the Tea Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1878), 108.

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24 Paul Scott and Knup Astrup Bull, eds, Horizon Transferware and Contemporary Ceramics (Oslo: Arnoldsche Art Publishers Oslo National Museum); ‘Hair Pin Turns, Bridges, Remorse and Wild Roses’, 8. 25 Susan S. Frackelton, Tried by Fire: A Work on China-Painting (New York: D. Appleton Company, 1886), 66. 26 For more on willow and its variety of renditions, see Connie Rogers, The Encyclopedia of British Willow Ware (Atgen, PA: Schiffer, 2004); David Quintner, Solving the Problem of the 200-Year Love Affair with the Willow (Burnastown, ON: General Store Pub. House, 1997). ‘Classic’, ‘standard’ willow and other classifications of the pattern’s many variations are post-Victorian and, therefore, beyond the scope of this book. 27 George Miller, Ann Smart Martin and Nancy Dickinson, ‘Changing Consumption Patterns: English Ceramics and the American Market from 1770 to 1840’, in Everyday Life in the Early Republic, ed. Catherine Hutchins (Winterthur: Henry Francis Dupont Museum, 1994), 226. 28 ‘The Willow Pattern, What Was Its Origin’, Supplement to the Pottery Gazette (1 June 1885): 706. 29 Ibid. 30 G. W. Rhead and F. A. Rhead, Staffordshire Pots and Potters (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1906), 284. For more information on the Rhead potting family, see the exhibition catalogue, Rhead Artists & Potters 1870–1890 (London: Geffrye Museum, 1986). 31 Geoffrey Godden, ‘The Willow Pattern’, The Antique Collector 43 (1972): 148–50; Robert Copeland, ‘Josiah Spode and the Origins of the Willow Pattern’, The Antique Collector 49 (1978): 99–101. 32 ‘A Day in the Staffordshire Potteries’, Penny Magazine (1843): 208. 33 ‘The Potteries-Introductory’, Art-Union 64 (April 1844): 83. 34 Charles James Richardson, ‘A Letter Addressed to the Council of the Head Government School of Design’ (6 October 1846), in Report of a Special Committee of the Council of the Government School of Design (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1847), 31. Cited in Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 41. See also Anthony Burton, ‘Richard Redgrave as Art Educator, Museum Official, and Design Theorist’, in Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), ed. Susan Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 5; Quentin Bell, The Schools of Design (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1963). 35 Kriegel, Grand Designs, 40–1; ‘The School of Bad Designs’, Punch 9 (1845): 21, 70, 115, 117. 36 Ibid., 199. 37 George Eliot, chap. 36, in Middlemarch, 1870. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/145 (accessed 15 September 2014).

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38 Ibid., chap. 36. 39 Ibid., chaps 2 and 11. 40 Ibid., chap. 64. 41 Ibid., chap. 36. 42 Charlotte Gere makes a similar observation about jewellery in Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (London: The British Museum Press, 2010), 178. 43 Brontë Parsonage Museum. Available online: http://bronte​.adlibsoft​.com​/detail​ .aspx​?parentpriref=# (accessed 5 March 2019). 44 Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 57, 58. 45 The story takes place in 1812 during the Napoleonic wars and focuses on a love story during the labour strife in the Northern textile mills. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Briarmains’, chap. 9 in Shirley, a Tale, 1849. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/30486​/30486​-h​/30486​-h​.htm (accessed 20 July 2015). 46 Ibid., ‘An Evening Out’, chap. 12. 47 ‘Mr. Ayrton’, 25 February 1863. Available online: http://hansard​.millbanksystems​ .com​/commons​/1862​/feb​/25​/kensington​-gore​-and​-bayswater​-road​#S3V0165P0​ _18620225​_HOC​_56 (accessed 1 August 2015). 48 ‘The Pryor’s Bank Fulham’, Fraser Magazine 32 (December 1845): 637. 49 John Henry Newman, chap. 10 in Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, 1848. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/24574​/24574​-h​/24574​-h​.htm (accessed 15 January 2021). 50 Emalee Beddoes, ‘The Art of Tea: Late Victorian Visual Culture and the Normalization of an International National Icon’ (M.A. diss., University of Birmingham, 2014), 29. 51 Laurel Bradley, ‘Millais, Our Popular Painter’, in John Everett Millais, Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, ed. Debra N. Mancoff (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 181–205. 52 David Drakard and Paul Holdway, Spode, Transfer Printed Ware, 1784-1833 (Ann Arbor, MI: Antique Collectors Club, 2002). 53 Quintner, Solving the Problem of the 200-Year Love Affair with the Willow, 127. 54 Helena Liu, ‘Beneath the White Gaze: Strategic self-Orientalism among Chinese Australians’, Human Relations 70, no. 7 (2016): 781. 55 ‘Pottery Eight Dinner Plates’, Journal of Design and Manufactures 4, no. 1 (1849): 106. 56 Ibid. 57 Elizabeth Gaskell, chap. 2, ‘A Manchester Tea-Party’, chap. 4, ‘Old Alice’s History’, in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/2153 (accessed 3 February 2016). 58 J. B. L., The Family Friend (1849).

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59 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘Kéramos’, in Keramos and Other Poems, 1878. Available online: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maine Historical Society Website, http://www​.hwlongfellow​.org​/poems​_poem​.php​?pid​=307 (accessed 4 October 2015). 60 Syme, ‘Pattern of Romance and Mystery’, 114. 61 Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Works of Sir Henry Cole Accounted for in His Deeds, Speeches and Writings (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 106. 62 Charles Lamb, ‘Old China’, London Magazine 7 (March 1823): 269–72. 63 For interpretations of eighteenth-century porcelain and gender, see Stacey Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in EighteenthCentury England’, in Material Cultures: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, 1740–1920, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelez (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 20–35, and Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 52–69. Karen Fang offers a more nuanced example of porcelain as a cross-cultural signifier in ‘Empire, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb Consumer Imagination’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43, no. 4 (2003): 815–43. 64 Lamb, ‘Old China’, 272. 65 Ibid., 270–1. 66 The Treasure Houses of Britain 500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 478. 67 Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet, 28–9. 68 According to Lutz, the Brontës owned both volumes of Bewick’s History of British Birds in their library, which they adored, 31, 32, 117. 69 Thank you to ceramic expert John Sandon for helping with this identification. The Chelsea Porcelain Factory, founded in London circa 1745, was considered one of the finest of the British porcelain manufacturers. The last period known as the ‘gold anchor’ (1759–69) because of the makers mark of that description. Chelsea merged with Derby porcelain factories in 1770. See Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: British Museum, 2001); John and Margaret Cushion, A Collector’s History of British Porcelain (Suffolk: Antique Collector’s Club, 1992), 33–48. 70 Charlotte Brontë, chap. 34, in Jane Eyre, 1847. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/1260​/1260​-h​/1260​-h​.htm (accessed 3 February 2016). 71 Fannie V. Wright, Hints of How for Amateur Artists and Home Decorators: A Hand Book of Practical Instruction (Lancaster, MI: no publisher cited, 1888). For more on Wright, see Charles Edward Potter, ed., Genealogies of the Potter Families and Their Descendants in America (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1888). 72 ‘The Pryor’s Bank Fulham’, 635. 73 Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye, 89. 74 Frackelton, Tried by Fire: A Work on China-Painting, 66.

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75 ‘Art in June’, Marion Harry Spielmann, ed., The Magazine of Art, vol. 9 (London: Cassell and Company, 1886), 358. See also Elree Harris and Shirley Scott, A Gallery of Her Own: An Annotated Bibliography of Women in Victorian Painting (London: Routledge, 1997), 243. The V&A has an earlier version titled, Mother and Child (1864). 76 James Giles, Poems Domestic and Miscellaneous (London: W. B. Wittingham & Co., 1881), 64–65. Lynn Festa, ‘The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Object Narratives’, in The Secret Life Things, Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 311. 77 Thomas Hood, ‘The Broken Dish’, in The Comic Poems of Thomas Hood (1839; repr., London: E. Moxon, Son & Company, 1876), 95, 96. 78 Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2005), 30–2; Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 43, 44; Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene (London: Papadakis Publisher, 2000), 165; Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism 1869–1891 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 123. 79 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), cited in Lionel. Trilling and Harold Bloom, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature vol. 5, Victorian Prose and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 54; Rosamond Allwood, George Elgar Hicks: Painter of Victorian Life (London: Geffrye Museum, 1983), 22. 80 Allwood, George Elgar Hicks, 22. 81 Barringer, Men at Work, 30–2. 82 Leone Levy, ‘Report on the Wages and Incomes of the Working Classes to Sir Arthur Bass’ (1885), 30, cited in John Burnett’s Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 1989), 110. This statistic of labourer’s salary at 15s or 16s per week between 1855 and 1857 is also documented in Returns of Wages, Published Between 1830 and 1860 Great Britain Board of Trade (London: Board of Trade, 1887), 50. 83 ‘Old Alice’s History’, chap. 4 in Mary Barton. 84 ‘Noah and Moses’, in Shirley, chap. 8. 85 ‘The New Crockery Shop’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, vol. 1 (London: John Owen, Clarke, 1849), 21–2. 86 George R. Sims, Mary Jane’s Memoirs, Compiled from Her Original Manuscript (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887). 87 Ibid., 25. 88 George R. Sims, ‘Mary Jane Married’, chap. 1 in Mary Jane Married Tales of a Village, 1888. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/60899​/60899​-h​ /60899​-h​.htm (accessed 17 January 2021).

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89 Dickens and Wills, ‘A Plated Article’, 120. 90 John Ruskin Letter to Tthe Times (3 May 1851). Models wearing various shades of blue brocade, velvet or satin in Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic painting became a signature device employed by the artists: Arthur Hughes, April Love (1854, Tate); Philip Hermogenes Calderon, Broken Vows (1856, Tate); James Collinson, The Empty Purse (c. 1857, Tate); John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past (1858–9, Tate); John Everett Millais, Spring (Apple blossoms) (1859, Tate); and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine (1874, Tate). 91 Charles Dickens, ‘Old Lamps for New Ones, Household Words (15 June 1850): 12–14. Available online: http://www​.engl​.duq​.edu​/servus​/PR​_Critic​/HW15jun50​ .html (accessed 2 August 2020). 92 Millais and Dickens became friends in the mid-1850s, and the criticism ceased. For more their relationship, see Andrew Sanders, ‘Millais and Literature’, in John Everett Millais, Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, ed. Debra N. Mancoff (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 72. 93 Andrew Lang, ‘Ballade of Blue China’, Scribner’s Monthly 19 (November 1880): 160. 94 ‘The Old China Craze’, The Pottery and Glass Trades Review (May 1878): 68. 95 ‘The Blue-and White China Mania’, Crockery and Glass Journal (June 1878): 12. 96 Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1833–1867, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1904), 220–1. I would like to thank Anne Anderson for pointing out this Elizabeth Siddal reference. Anne Anderson, ‘Coming Out of the China Closet? Performance, Identity and Sexuality in the House Beautiful’, in Oriental Interiors, Design, Identity, Space, ed. John Potvin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 134. 97 Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 202–3. 98 ‘Inventory and Valuation of the Furnishing Contents at Kelmscott Manor, The Property of the late Miss Mary Morris October 31–December 8, 1938’, 24, 26. Thirty blue and Minton plates are listed in the auction catalogue, organized by Hobbs and Chambers and held 19 and 29 July 1939. William Morris Gallery Archives, Walthamstow, London. 99 George du Maurier, Punch cartoons: ‘The Passion for Old China’ (2 May 1874); ‘Chronic Chinamania (Incurable)’ (17 December 1874); ‘Acute Chinamania’ (17 December 1874); ‘Incipient Chinamania’(26 December 1874); ‘A Disenchantment’ (29 July 1876); ‘Pet and Hobby’ (26 August 1876); ‘Our Chinamaniacs Abroad’ (13 October 1877); ‘Aptley Quoted from the Advertisement Column’ (15 December 1877); ‘An Apology’(29 December 1877); ‘Chinamania Made Useful at Last’ (12 December 1879); ‘The Six Mark Teapot’(30 November 1880); Edward Linley Sambourne, ‘Let Live Up To It’ (7 May 1881); ‘O, I feel just as happy as a bright sunflower’ (25 June 1881). 100 Max Beerbohm, ‘1880’, The Yellow Book 4 (1895): 275–83 cited in Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993), 202.

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101 For discussion on Cinderella, see Fortunée De Lisle, Burne-Jones (London: Methuen & Co, 1908), 68; Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward BurneJones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 90; Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (New York: Phaidon Press, 2011), 51; Paul Spencer-Longhurst, The Blue Bower: Rossetti in the 1860s (London: Scala Publishers in Association with the Barber Institute Fine Arts, 2000), 15. 102 See Richard Myers and Hilary Myers, William Morris Tiles (London: Richard Dennis, 1996), 14–15, 22–3, 28; Windman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 92. 103 ‘How I Wish’, John Ruskin to Lady Waterford, 8 August 1863, cited in Sublime and Instructive: From John Ruskin, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), 49. Also cited in Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward BurneJones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 155. 104 For children’s books illustrating Cinderella with dishes displayed in a cupboard, see The Pleasing Story of Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper (London: R. Carr, 1804), 3; Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper: A Tale for the Nursery (London: Tabart and Co., 1804), n.p.; The History of Cinderella or the Glass Slipper (London: R. Miller, 1820), 6; Cinderella and the Adventure of the Glass Slipper (London: Dean & Mundy, 1821), n. p.; Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper (London: Otley, 1825), 10; History of Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper (Glasgow: Chapbooks, 1852), 4; Walter Crane, Walter Crane’s New Toy Book (London: George Routledge, 1874), 7. 105 The position of her left arm and the contrapposto stance resemble some of BurneJones’s small notebook sketches of Greek and Roman friezes from the British Museum completed in 1857 (V&A Sketchbook, V&A 91D39 E31955). Her bent elbow and pulling of the ear reference his drawings for the South Kensington Panels and the tile picture The Legend of Goode Wimmen (1861). 106 Burne-Jones also made a small pencil drawing of Cinderella pulling her ear, behind three stacks of plates (pattern indistinguishable) above a metal hinged cabinet (V&A Sketch E2877-1927). 107 Martina Droth, et al., eds, Sculpture Victorious, Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 280; Christine E. Jackson, Peacock (London: Reaktion, 2006), 10. 108 Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. 2, 208. See also David Peters Corbett, Edward Burne-Jones (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 30. 109 Based in Oxford, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90) led the high-church interpretation of Anglicanism known as Tractarianism, until he converted to Catholicism in 1845. Cited in Corbett, Edward Burne-Jones, 12–13; Frances Horner, Time Remembered (London: Heinemann, 1933), 120. 110 Robert de La Sizeranne, Contemporary English Art, trans. H. M. Poynter (London: Archibald Constable and Co, 1898) cited in Corbett, Edward Burne-Jones, 12.

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111 Debra Mancoff, Burne-Jones (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998), 7; Corbett, Edward Burne-Jones, 6. 112 Alan Crawford, ‘Burne-Jones as Decorative Artist’, in Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 5–24; Caroline Ascott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones Interlacings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 209; Frederic George Stephens, ‘Mr. E. Burne-Jones, A. R. A., as a Decorative Artist’, Portfolio 20 (November 1889): 214–19; Henry Wilson, ‘The Work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones: More Especially in Decoration and Design’, parts 1–3. 113 Andrea Korda, ‘Learning from “Good Pictures”: Walter Crane’s Picture Books and Visual Literacy’, Word & Image 32, no. 4 (2016): 328–9. 114 Walter Crane’s well-known frontispiece ‘My Lady’s Chamber’ for Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful (1878) emphasized the taste for blue and white with his depiction of blue-and-white tiles in the fireplace surround and pottery on the mantel, table and cabinets. None of it was willow, instead Crane invented a flower basket with handle design to unite the decorative composition. Crane’s portrait of his wife, in At Home: Portrait (1872, Leeds Art Gallery), presents a similar interior. See Isobel Spencer, Walter Crane (London: Studio Vista, 1975), 39–46, 56–7. Walter Crane, Walter Crane’s New Toy Book (London: George Routledge, 1874), 7. 115 Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Paintings and Politics, 1875–1890 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 2–7. 116 Morna O’Neill, ‘On Walter Crane and the Aims of Decorative Art’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (August 2012). Available online: www​.branchcollective​.org/​?ps​_articles​=morna​-oneill​-on​-walter​-crane​-and​ -the​-aims​-of​-decorative​-art (accessed 1 November 2021). 117 See Myers and Myers, William Morris Tiles. 118 Richard O’Neill, The Life and Works of Dante Rossetti (Bristol: Parragon Books, 1996), 42; Spencer-Longhurst, The Blue Bower, 40. 119 Boyce bought the work in 1862, the same year the painting was finished and identified the subject in a letter, Boyce to Rossetti, 7 May 1862. Boyce noted, ‘Liking a head of a girl at a lattice which he had painted at Madox Brown’s, being the latter’s maidservant, he tendered it to me for 30 pounds. I accepted.’ Reprinted in Virginia Surtees, ed., Diaries of George Price Boyce (Norwich: Real World, 1980), 34–5. According to Boyce’s diary (28 July 1862), he brought a gift ‘2 old blue and white wedgwood [sic] dishes and a very fine Chinese plate or dish’ to Swinburne when he hosted an evening in the summer of 1862 where Burne-Jones, Sandys, Rossetti and Val Princep attended’. See also Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 166. 120 Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn and Edwin Baker, eds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 2003), 186.

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121 William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: The Macmillan and Co., 1882), 180; Laing Art Gallery, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–1882 (Newcastle Upon-Tyne: R. Ward & Sons Limited, 1971), 26. 122 Henry Currie Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Life and Art (1899; repr., London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), 124. 123 Spencer-Longhurst, The Blue Bower, 40; Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), plate 220. 124 The jug is identified as willow in The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Allen Lane/Tate Gallery Publications, 1984), 196; and by Pamela Todd, The Pre-Raphaelites at Home (New York: Watson-Giptill Publications, 2001), 71. Allen Staley described it as Delftware, 68. Anne Anderson, in a personal exchange with the author, makes a strong case that it is an eighteenth-century Worcester sparrow beaker porcelain jug (so-called because of the beaker-shaped spout). However, Worcester jugs are considerably smaller. Dante typically increased the size of the ceramics he portrayed, which I discuss in Chapter 2. 125 Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1884), 53. 126 Spencer-Longhurst observes that Rossetti depicted the same coral necklace in Monna Vanna (1866, Tate Britain) and Fair Rosamund (1861, Cardiff) and that Frederick Sandys borrowed it for Medea, 40. 127 See Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (London: André Deutsch, 2004), and Trehuerz and Preetjohn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 186. 128 Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 191; Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 175. 129 Gere, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, 493. 130 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; repr., Boston: James Good and Company, 1872), 224, 229. 131 Gilding was often applied to English and Chinese blue-and-white porcelain and also on occasion earthenware. 132 Jewitt, Art Journal, 68. 133 Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle and William Haughton, Patient Grissil (London: Shakespeare Society, 1841), Scene I, 9. According to Bronkhurst, Holman Hunt used this expression several times in his private letters in June 1891 and November 1898, Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 191. 134 Hunt designed his own frames (typically made by Joseph Green); the locking mechanism is found on four other frames and is believed to be Hunt’s conception, vol. 2, 331. The frame was not available for photographic reproduction but is visible in Bronkhurst’s catalogue raisonné. 135 Henrietta-Barclay Paist, Design and the Decoration of Porcelain (Syracuse: Keramic Studio Publishing Company, 1916), 5.

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136 Myers and Myers, William Morris Tiles, 14–15, 22–3, 28. In 1863 and 1864 BurneJones completed the designs for Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast for the Hill, now housed at the Walker Art Museum and painted by Lucy Faulkner. William Morris Gallery, https://www​.wmgallery​.org​.uk​/collection​/search​-the​ -collection​-65​/cinderella​-tile​-c202​-3​-c​-1863​-64​/search​/cinderella​-11106​/page/1 (accessed 15 August 2022). 137 Emma Ferry, ‘“The Other Miss Faulkner”: Lucy Orrinsmith and the “Art at Home Series”’, The Journal of William Morris Studies (Summer 2011): 48. 138 Myers and Myers, William Morris Tiles, 14. 139 Ferry, ‘“The Other Miss Faulkner”’, 48. 140 Aymer Vallance, The Art of William Morris (London: George Bell, 1897), 58; Ferry, ‘“The Other Miss Faulkner”’, 25. 141 Lucy Orrinsmith, The Drawing Room: Its Decoration and Furniture (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877), 43, 60. 142 William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts of Life’, 1882, cited in Vallance, The Art of William Morris, 58. 143 In addition to the Huntington, one set is found at each of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Two-Roses Foundation in Palm Harbor, Florida, and two sets are located at the William Morris Gallery. 144 Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts of Life’, cited in Myers and Myers, William Morris Tiles, 11. 145 MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 155.

Chapter 3 1 The History of the Tea-Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1878), 146. 2 Ibid., 145, 146. 3 See Markman Ellis, et al. eds, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, vol. 2 (Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2010), 81. 4 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, in Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 153; Stacey Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelez (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 162–72; Karen Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teacup? Punch, Domesticity and Gender in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 205–21. 5 W. C. Ward, ed., The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: William Wycherley, 1893. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/55426​/55426​-h​/55426​-h​.htm​

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#THE​_COUNTRY​_WIFE (accessed 20 October 2020); Jane Hwang Degenhardt, ‘Cracking the Mysteries of “China”: China(ware) in the Early Modern Imagination’, Studies in Philology 110, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 132–67; Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’; Deborah Cohen; ‘Reading the Signs in The Country Wife’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 403–19; Aiden Tait, ‘“Is This Your Buying China?”: Luxury Consumerism and Superficiality in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife’, ESA (6 March 2020). Available online: http://www​.ubcenglish​ .com​/is​-this​-your​-buying​-china​-luxury​-consumerism​-and​-superficiality​-in​ -william​-wycherleys​-the​-country​-wife/ (accessed 15 September 2020). 6 For William Hogarth’s use of ceramics in his paintings, see Lars Tharp, Hogarth’s China: Hogarth’s Paintings and Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997); Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies’, and Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teacup?’. 7 Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, 66. 8 A sensation novel refers to Victorian genre fiction in which the plot turns on a secret. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, ‘Retrograde Investigation’, chap. XXV, in Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/8954​/8954​ -h​/8954​-h​.htm (accessed 20 October 2020). 9 Wedgwood, The History of the Tea Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art, 146. 10 George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, chap. 1, in Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857–8. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/17780 (accessed 20 October 2020). 11 William Cowper, ‘The Task: A Poem’, 1785. Available online: https://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/3698​/3698​-h​/3698​-h​.htm (accessed 29 October 2020). 12 A Cottage Interior: An Old Woman Preparing Tea | Bigg, William Redmore (RA) | V&A Explore The Collections (vam​.ac​​.uk); Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 180. 13 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 58. Emalee Beddoes discusses Barthes identification of tea being a totemic drink of the British in ‘The Art of Tea: Late Victorian Visual Culture and the Normalization of an International National Icon’ (M.A. diss., University of Birmingham, 2014). Available online: http://etheses​.bham​.ac​.uk​ /4915​/2​/Beddoes14MPhil​.pdf, 9 (accessed 1 July 2016). Julie Codell, ‘Exotic, Fetish, Virtual: Virtual Excesses in Victorian Painting’, in The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010, ed. Julia Skelly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 125. 14 For further reading on the collection and reproduction of Dutch and Flemish genre painting during this period in Britain, see Christiana Payne, Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art (London: Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham Arts Centre in association with Lund Publishers, 1998); Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene (London: Andreas, 2000); David H. Solkin,

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Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 2008). 15 Payne, Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art, 5. 16 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 17 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18 Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 31. 19 Kate Redford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture, and Representation in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 20 Romita Ray, ‘Storm in a Teacup? Visualising Tea Consumption in the British Empire’, in Art and the British Empire, ed. Tim Barringer et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 205–22. 21 The Gascoigne Family – Works – The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 140. 22 Other well-known documented examples of tea-drinking conversation portraits are Joseph Van Aken, An English Family at Tea (1720); Richard Collins, The TeaParty (c. 1727, Goldsmith’s Hall); Charles Philips, Tea Party at Lord Harrington’s House, Saint James’s (1730, Yale Center for British Art); Arthur Devis, Mr. and Mrs. Hill (1751, Yale Center for British Art); Johan Zoffany, The Auriol and Dashwood Families (1783–7, The Holburne Museum). See https://huntington​.emuseum​.com​ /objects​/497​/the​-gascoigne​-family​?ctx​=8l718b532​-0859​-4c2f​-b9ee​-cdb8e7ab54d7​ &idx​=1; Ching-Jung Chen, ‘Tea Parties in Early Georgian Conversation Pieces’, British Art Journal 10, no. 1 (2009): 30–9. 23 Antony Clayton, ‘The Character of the Coffee-House’, in Tea and Coffee in the Age of Dr Johnson, ed. Stephanie Pickford (London: Dr. Johnson Trust, 2008), 16. 24 Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teacup?’, 206; Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in EighteenthCentury England, 73. 25 A major reason for lowering retailing and consumption taxes was to curtail illegal smuggling. Nonetheless, some suppliers continued such illicit practices as repackaging used tea leaves. Government made up the loss of income from tea (5 per cent excise tax and 7 per cent consumption) by taxing candles and windows. Beatrice Hohenegger, Liquid Jade, The Story of Tea from East to West (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 96, 103; Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 73, 113, 176. 26 François de La Rochefoucauld, A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk 1784 (Woodbridge Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1988), 18. Beddoes, ‘The Art of Tea’, 13. 27 The East India Company benefited from the Commutation Act, but its monopoly on the tea trade ended in 1833 under the Government India Act. British India

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nationalized the trade in 1858. See Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993), 21; Romita Ray, ‘Ornamental Exotica Transplanting the Aesthetics of Tea Consumption and The Birth of a British Exotic’, in The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Yota Batsaki et al. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016), 259–82. 28 Julie Fromer, ‘“Deeply Indebted to the Tea-Plant”: Representations of English National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea’, Victorian Literature and Culture 36, no. 2 (2008): 538. 29 Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 221, 227. 30 Ibid., 223. 31 Jane Pettigrew, Social History of Tea (London: National Trust, 2001), 102; Robin Emmerson, British Teapots & Tea Drinking (London: HMSO, 1992), 26. 32 Judith Flanders, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childhood to Deathbed (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 231; Arnold Palmer, Moveable Feasts Changes in English Eating Habits: A Reconnaissance of the Origins and Consequences of Fluctuations in Meal-Times, with Special Attention to the Introduction of Luncheon and Afternoon Tea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). 33 Emmanuel Cooper, 10,000 Years of Pottery Craft into Industry, Britain 1750-1950 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), 226–50. 34 Markman Ellis, ed., Empire of Tea, the Asian Tea that Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 14. 35 Catharine Pagani, ‘Chinese Material Culture and British Perceptions of China in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Timothy Barringer and Tom Flynn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 28. 36 Ibid. 37 See Stephen Gertz, ‘You Are the Objects of Your Trade, Personification Prints’, Booktryst, 11 September 2013, http://www​.booktryst​.com​/2013​/09​/you​-are​-objects​ -of​-your​-trade​.html (accessed 10 January 2021). 38 Ibid., 29–30. 39 John Haddad, ‘Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics 1780–1920’, Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 1 (2007): 53–80. 40 lllustrated London News, March 1843, 2/45: 174, cited in Pagani, ‘Chinese Material Culture’, 34. 41 No author, A Cup of Tea and Other Stories (Boston, MA: D. Lothrop and Company, 1869), n.p.; Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Aunt Martha’s Cupboard Stories about Tea, Coffee, Sugar and Honey, A Story for Little boys and Girls (London: T Nelson and Sons, 1875). 42 Julie Fromer, A Necessary Luxury (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 55. Ray, ‘Ornamental Exotica’, 272. 43 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 17, 21.

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44 Julie Codell, Transculturation in British Art, 1771–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate 2012), 2, 4; Barthes, Mythologies, 65; Beddoes, ‘The Art of Tea’, 9. 45 Clive Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes: A History of the Retailing and Consumptions of Domestic Furnishings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 144–8. 46 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (June 1863): 110. 47 Austen’s novels, though written in the Regency period, were in print in the 1840s and 1850s, and they reached a far wider audience after 1869 when her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, published her autobiography, which resulted in a wave of inexpensive popular editions. See Deidre Lynch, ‘Cult of Jane Austen’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111–20. 48 Jane Austen, chap. 38, in Mansfield Park (London: Penguin Books, [1814] 1989), 334–6; Linda Slothouber, ‘Elegance and Simplicity: Jane Austen and Wedgwood’, Persuasions 31 (2009): 168. 49 Jane Austen, chap 2, in Sense and Sensibility, 1811. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/161​/161​-h​/161​-h​.htm (accessed 8 January 2016). 50 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 83. 51 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 34–5. 52 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘A Manchester Tea-Party’, chap. 2, in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/2153 (accessed 3 February 2016). 53 Faed also used the same brown crock with metal ring handles for a stew pot in House and the Homeless (National Galleries of Scotland, 1856) and a dairy bowl in Freedom of the Press (date unknown, Paisley Museum Art Galleries), but it is the teapot that he returns to most often in his paintings. 54 Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1870. Interestingly, Faed used the same shape of teapot but rendered it in gleaming metal rather than ceramic in the earlier and similar From to Dawn to Sunset (1861). 55 In 1789 Lord George Gordon led the riots in protest against the Papist Act passed the year prior to end the discrimination of British Catholics. The Chartist Movement begun in 1838 and remained active until 1858; it advocated for political reform and for the enfranchisement of working class, among other things, spurring petitions and tumults across the country. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Did Dickens Have a Philosophy of History?’, Dickens Studies Annual 30 (2001): 67. 56 Charles Dickens, chap. 4, in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, 1841. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/917​/917​-h​/917​-h​.htm (accessed 5 September 2020). 57 Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, 34–5. 58 Dickens, chap. 33. 59 Ibid., chap. 2.

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60 Ibid., chap. 8. 61 Ibid., chap. 80. 62 Hilditch & Son, based in Longton in Staffordshire, was active between 1795 and 1830 and produced a wide range of poor-quality bone china and earthenware. See Hildyard, European Ceramics, 144. I would like to thank Dr Peter Kaellgren, curator emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum, for help with this attribution. 63 See Kowaleski-Wallace and Ann Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures, Public Beneficence, Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 125–45. 64 E. Rimbault Dibdin, ‘Mr. Brocklebank’s Collection at Childwall Hall’, Magazine of Art (1891): 88–9. The painting is based upon the song ‘Logan Water’ by eighteenthcentury Scottish poet Robert Burns. 65 Marion Hepworth Dixon, ‘Thomas Faed R. A.’, The Magazine of Art (1893): 268, 272. 66 Marion Harry Spielmann, ‘The Late Thomas Faed, R. A. in Memoriam’, The Magazine of Art (January 1900): 564. 67 ‘Exhibition of the Works of Thomas Faed’, The Critic (24 May 1860): 646. 68 ‘Illustrated Tour in the Manufacturing Districts’, Art-Union (December 1846): 317. 69 Samuel Day’s Tea: Its Mystery and History (1878), 71. Cited in Ellis, Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 227. 70 Art Journal (June 1863): 110. 71 Holl later in his career moved away from social realism and switched to more lucrative portrait commissions. 72 In 1875, Holl vacationed in North Wales and met a mother and her two young children living in a primitive cottage in the fishing village Criccieth and proceeded to sketch the family over several summers. Ada Holl Reynolds, The Life and Work of Frank Holl (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1912), 133, 186. 73 John Ruskin, Lectures on Art Delivered Before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 1870 (London: George Allen, 1892), 139. 74 Hushed the sequel to Hush (also in Tate Britain), the baby is sick but alive, an older child watches by the empty cupboard. See Mark Bills, Frank Holl Emerging from the Shadows (London: Watts Gallery, 2013), 174–5. 75 An engraving is reproduced in Wilfrid Meynell, ed., Some Modern Artists and Their Work- (London: Cassell & Company, 1883), 171. 76 In addition to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, there is a version of Peeling Potatoes in the William Morris Gallery collection, London. 77 Bills, Frank Holl Emerging from the Shadows, 143. 78 Luke Fildes is also part of the realist school. See Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism 1869–1891 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 94; Richard Redgrave and Richard Samuel, A Century of

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Painters of the English School: With Critical Notices of Their Works, And an Account of the Progress of Art in England (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1866), 360–4; Gertrude E. Campbell, ‘Frank Holl and His Works’, Art Journal (February 1889): 53–9. 79 Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London, 360–4; Ruth Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 80 Richardson, Dickens and the Workhouse. 81 Michael William Sharp’s oil painting The Chelsea Pensioner (Royal Chelsea Hospitable) dating from the early nineteenth century also published as a popular print shows that drinking tea from a saucer was a sign of lower class. Fromer, chap. 4; Emmerson, British Teapots & Tea Drinking, 21. 82 Kathryn Moore Heleniak, ‘Webster, Thomas (1800–1886)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Available online: http://www​.oxforddnb​.com​.proxy​.queensu​.ca​/view​/article​/28947 (accessed 22 February 2021); Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene, 43–4. 83 George Bernard O’Neill, The Tête-à-Tête Tea, n.d., Wolverhampton Art Gallery is another well-known example. 84 George L. Miller, ‘Common Staffordshire Cup and Bowl Shapes’, 12 July 2011. Available online: https://www​.google​.ca/​#q​=George​+Miller +common+Staffordshire+cup&gws_rd=cr (accessed 24 October 2019). 85 Anthony Trollope, ‘The Eustace Necklace’, chap. 5, in The Eustace Diamonds, 1872. Available online: http //www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/7381​/7381​-h​/7381​-h​.htm (accessed 1 November 2021). 86 The Art Journal (June 1863): 110. For a discussion on the English school of painting, see Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 18; Julie Codell, ‘From English School to British School: Modernism, Revisionism, and National Culture in the Writings of Marion Harry Spielmann’, NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide 14 (Summer 2015). Available online: http://www.19thc artwo​​rldwi​​de​.or​​g​/sum​​mer15​​/code​​ll​-on​​-mode​​rnism​​-revi​​sioni​​sm​-an​​d​-nat​​ional​​-cult​​ ure​-i​​n​-the​​-​writ​​ings-​​of​-sp​​ielma​​nn (accessed 3 May 2016). 87 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1843), 52. 88 Rendering mirrored reflections in painting was popular especially among Pre-Raphaelite artists who referenced Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) acquired by the London National Gallery in 1842.William Homan Hunt’s The Awakening is a well-known example, see Alison Smith et al., Reflections Van Eyk and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: National Gallery Company, 2018), 43. 89 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 11.

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90 Ibid. 91 J. E. Panton, From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for Young Householders, Hints for Young Householders (London: Ward and Downey, 1888), 34. 92 ‘The Brown Betty Teapot’. Available online: http://thebrownbettyteapot​.com/ (accessed 30 October 2020). 93 See Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, chap. 3. 94 The locket held Rosalind’s lock of her hair and engraved ‘Georgie Jones from RH’. Cited from Virginia Surtees, The Artist and the Autocrat: George and Rosalind Howard, Earl and Countess of Carlisle (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1988), 75–6. Poynter also painted the portrait of Georgina’s two sisters, Edith, Poynter’s wife, and the eldest sister, Agnes, married to Louis Baldwin (1866). They feature blueand-white accents to emphasize the Aesthetic style. Other portraits of women displayed in Aesthetic interiors by Poynter are Mary Constance Wyndham (Lady Elcho) (1886, private collection) and Mrs. J. P. Heseltine (1870). See Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes and Louisa Baldwin (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 124; Fiona McCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 290. 95 Cynthia Volk, vice president, Senior Specialist Chinese Works of Art Sotheby’s email to author, 18 June 2015. 96 European manufacturers introduced handles in the early eighteenth century. However, British potteries continued to produce tea bowls without handles in the early nineteenth century. See Steven Goss, British Tea and Coffee Cups: 1740–1949 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). 97 Codell, ‘Exotic, Fetish, Virtual’, 103. 98 Carol Jacobi, William Holman Hunt: Painter, Painting, Paint (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 162; Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 3; Codell, ‘Exotic, Fetish, Virtual’, 92–3. 99 Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 226; Tim Barringer, Reading the PreRaphaelites (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 134; Caroline Arscott, ‘Employer, Husband, Spectator: Thomas Fairbairn’s Commission of the Awakening Conscience’, in The Culture of Capital: Art Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class, ed. Janet Wolff and John Seed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 162; Tim Barringer et al., Pre-Raphaelite’s Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 148–9. 100 ‘A determinedly Grecian’ and a ‘rather heartless building’, according to Ian Nairn and Nicholas Pevsner in Sussex: The Buildings of England (London: Penguin, 1965), 123–4. 101 Thomas Fairbairn administrated the international exhibitions of 1851, 1862 and 1871. The silver teapot and jewellery are identified by Judith Bronkhurst in ‘Fruits

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of a Connoisseur’s Friendship: Sir Thomas Fairbairn and William Holman Hunt’, Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 594; Charlotte Gere, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (London: The British Museum Press, 2010), 186. 102 Bronkhurst, ‘Fruits of a Connoisseur’s Friendship’, 594. 103 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 25. 104 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Wrought Iron and Gold’, chap. X, in North and South, 1854. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/4276​/4276​-h​/4276​-h​.htm (accessed 3 November 2020). 105 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 140, 638. https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/4276​/4276​ -h​/4276​-h​.htm​.9. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid., x, 3. 108 Miller, ‘Common Staffordshire Cup and Bowl Shapes’. 109 Robert Bloor operated the Derby Factory from 1811 to 1848. Michael Berthoud, An Anthology of British Cups (Wingham, Kent: Micawber Publications, 1982), plate 750, 125. See also John Twitchett, Derby Porcelain (1748–1848): An Illustrated Guide (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1980). For help with the identification of the china service, I would like to thank Dr Peter Kaellgren, curator emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum, email to author, 15 May 2015. 110 Fromer, A Necessary Luxury, 25. 111 Some ten years later Thomas Fairbairn commissioned William Holman Hunt to paint his portrait with a public ceramic collection. Completed in 1873–4, this large portrait depicts Fairbairn in the North Court of the South Kensington Museum in front of rows of vitrines displaying Italian Renaissance ceramics from the prestigious Soulages Collection. A lustre drug jar with two looped handles from Gubbio and other pottery from the collection are easily identifiable. Fairbairn, therefore, is displayed with ceramics, not his own personal collection, but a more formidable institutional collection that he helped to secure for public viewing and which Hunt refrained from altering marking their distinction. The portrait is a testament to Fairbairn’s role as chairman of the Manchester Arts Treasures Exhibition in 1857. See Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 234–5; Bronkhurst, ‘Fruits of a Connoisseur’s Friendship’, 595. 112 Illustrated London News (27 May 1865): 510, cited in Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, 202. 113 Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, 20, 68–9. 114 For discussion of the Pre-Raphaelite painting in Lady Audley’s Secret, see Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 1–32. 115 Ibid. Braddon, ‘Retrograde Investigation’, chap. XXV. 116 Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 108. See also Lynette Felber, ‘The Literary Portrait as

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Centerfold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 2 (2007): 471–88. Priyanka Anne Jacob, ‘The PocketBook and the Pigeon-Hole: Lady Audley’s Secret and the Files of Victorian Fiction’, Victorian Studies 61, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 371–94. 117 Braddon, ‘Retrograde Investigation’, chap. XXV. 118 Codell, Transculturation, 2. 119 Barringer, et al., Pre-Raphaelite’s Victorian Avant-Garde, 148; Arscott, ‘Employer, Husband, Spectator’, 162. 120 S. A., ‘Wanderings in the Crystal Palace No. 2’, Art Journal (1851): 198, 230–1. 121 Elizabeth Aslin and Paul Atterbury, Minton 1798–1910 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1976), 63. To see examples of the Sèvres albums go to: https:// www​.themintonarchive​.org​.uk​/collections​/getrecord​/GB1857​_G272​_1​_5​_12​_ 1​_1​_119. 122 Cup and Saucer | V&A Explore The Collections (vam​.ac​​.uk) (accessed 29 August 2022).

Chapter 4 1 Anthony Trollope, ‘Coddling the Prime Minister’, chap. 51 in The Prime Minister (1876; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 100. 2 Glencora may have been referencing soft-paste porcelain since it does not withstand heat as well British earthenware. Earthenware is fired at a lower temperature than hard-paste porcelain and has a much more porous and fragile body. 3 See Elizabeth Collard, The Potters’ View of Canada: Canadian Scenes on Nineteenth-Century Earthenware (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). 4 Argus (pseudonym), ‘A Mild Remonstrance Against the Taste-Censorship at Marlborough House, in Reference to Manufacturing Ornamentation and Decorative Design, to Manufacturers, Decorators, Designers, and the Public Generally’, Part 1 (London: Houlston & Stoneham, 1853), 12, 18; Part 2, 2, 26. 5 Department of Practical Art, Marlborough House, A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art, in the Museum of the Department, vol. 2 (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1852), 39. 6 Anthony Burton, ‘Richard Redgrave as Art Educator, Museum Official, and Design Theorist’, in Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), ed. Susan Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 48. 7 Gilbert Redgrave, ed., Manual of Design Compiled from the Writings and Addresses of the Richard Redgrave (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876), 40, 41, 113.

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8 ‘The Potteries Introductory’, Art-Union (April 1844): 83; ‘Illustrated Tour in the Manufacturing District’, Art-Union (1 December 1846): 317. 9 R. J. C. Hildyard, English Pottery 1620–1840 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2005), 204. 10 Erika Rappaport, ‘Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response’, Victorian Studies Journal 50, no. 2 (2008): 294. 11 For more discussion on nation-building, mythologies and legends, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Publications, 1981); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 12 Reverend John Wesley, Sermon 88, ‘On Dress’, in John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions. Available online: https://jacobjuncker​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2010​/03​/ wesley​-sermons​-on​-several​-occasions​.pdf (accessed 4 February 2021), 734; Henry D. Rack, ‘John Wesley’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Available online: https://www​-oxforddnb​-com​.libezproxy​.concordia​.ca​/view​/10​.1093​/ ref​:odnb​/9780198614128​.001​.0001​/odnb​-9780198614128​-e​-29069 (accessed 1 November 2020). 13 ‘The Potteries Introductory’, 83. 14 See note 91 in Chapter 2. 15 R. J. C. Hildyard, European Ceramics (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 99. 16 Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, ‘Isabella, or the Morning’, in Joseph Marryat, Collections Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain (London: John Murray, 1850), 63. 17 Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1987), 24. 18 Chinese porcelain entered the European market in large quantities in the early eighteenth century, controlled by the East India Company sparking chinamania. However, by the early 1790s the East India Company ceased bulk importing and its monopoly ended in 1833 – a further boon to British potteries. See Chapter 2. 19 Meissen’s royal patron, Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), thanked his inventors for finding the formula of true porcelain by imprisoning them to keep it a secret from the rest of Europe (to no avail). See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, ed., Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Glenn Adamson, ‘Rethinking the Arcanum: Porcelain, Secrecy, and the Eighteenth-Century Culture of Invention’, in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, ed. Alden Cavanagh and Michael Yonan (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 19–38. 20 Hildyard, European Ceramics, 94. 21 Patricia F. Ferguson, Ceramics 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2016), 18. 22 The poem in addition to being republished in Marryat, it is also printed in William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain from the Renaissance

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and Modern Periods (London: Bickers & Son, 1874), 627; Annie Trumbull Slosson, The China Hunters Club (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1878), 51; and J. F. Blacker, Nineteenth-Century English Ceramic Art (Toronto: The Copp, Clark Co. Limited, 1912), 46. 23 Jane Austen, chap. 22, in Northanger Abbey (London: Blackie and Son, [1817]1895), 153–4. 24 Ibid. 25 The table is set in traditional English style, which most households followed where all the food is placed and served at the table at once rather than brought in course by course. The latter becoming fashionable at this time was known as à la russe, the Franco-Russian style which required domestic labour to serve the meal. Annelise Madsen, ‘Recipes for Refinement: Art and Sociability in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Art and Appetite, American Painting Culture and Cuisine (Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 88–7. Hildyard, European Ceramics, 91. 26 Edward Knight’s service is in the Jane Austen House Museum. Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 6 June 1811, in Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 187, 202. Linda Slothouber, ‘Elegance and Simplicity: Jane Austen and Wedgwood’, Persuasions 31 (2009): 162–72. Available online: http://www​.jasna​.org​/info​/austen​-reading​.html (accessed 5 January 2015). 27 The titular factory opened in Vincennes in 1740 before it moved in 1759 to Sèvres. It was famously patronized by Madame de Pompadour and owned by the crown until the French Revolution when it was nationalized by the state. Initially the manufacturer was known for soft-paste porcelain, not considered a true porcelain since it was fired at lower temperatures which allowed for brilliant, saturated colours in its glazes, but made it less heat resistant than hard-paste porcelain. The company discovered the formula for hard-paste porcelain in 1769 and by 1804 manufactured it exclusively. See the French Porcelain Society, ‘Paste’. Available online: https://www​.the​fren​chpo​rcel​ains​ociety​.com​/about​-us​/paste/ (accessed 20 November 2020). 28 Anthony Trollope, ‘Diamonds Are Diamonds’, chap. 79, in Can You Forgive Her? (1864; repr., London: Penguin Classic, 1975), 823. 29 Ibid., ‘Three Politicians’, chap. 24, 267. 30 In 1763, the French ambassador presented a Sèvres punch bowl to the Second Earl of Egremont of Petworth and a second service to the Duke of Bedford of Woburn Abbey. The Duke of Bedford was his counterpart serving as British ambassador to the court of Louis XV. Popular among the English elite were Sèvres patterns with bouquets of flowers on a white ground with blue edging (fleurs filet bleu) developed in 1752 and was an adaptation of the Meissen porcelain pattern, naturlich Blumen. Sèvres continued to enter British collections of the nobility and upper classes

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during the Regency period when clients visited the factory or ordered from a marchand mercier in Paris or a dealer in London. Ferguson, Ceramics 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces, 10, 81. 31 Thomas Hood, ‘The China-Mender’, c. 1832, republished in Chaffers, Marks and Monograms, 630; and Slosson, The China Hunters Club, 52. 32 Chaffers, Marks and Monograms, 707, 716. Geoffrey Godden, Godden’s Guide to Mason China (Suffolk: Antique Collector’s Club, 1984). 33 Benjamin Disraeli, chap. 2, in Coningsby, or The New Generation, 1844. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/7412 (accessed 20 November 2020). 34 Some sixteen years later, Disraeli’s fictional support of free trade in Coningsby was used against him in a parliamentary debate, when he was accused of preventing a free trade agreement with France. See ‘HC Adjourned Debate: Second Night’, February 1860, vol. 156. Available online: http://hansard​.millbanksystems​.com​/commons​/1860​ /feb​/23​/adjourned​-debate​-second​-night​#S3V0 (accessed 10 July 2015). 35 ‘Illustrated Tour’, Art-Union, 317. 36 ‘The Potteries Introductory’, Art-Union, 83. 37 William Evans, Art and History of the Potting Business (Shelton: Examiner’s Office, Miles Bank, 1846), 372. 38 Léon Arnoux, ‘On Ceramic Manufacturers’, Reports on the Universal Exhibition; Part II (George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode: London 1856), 363. 39 Ibid., 369–70. 40 S. A., ‘Wanderings in the Crystal Palace No. 2’, Art Journal (1851): 198. 41 Ibid., 230–1. 42 Apsley Pellatt, M.P., ‘Essay on Pottery and the Fictile Art, Historically, Chemically, and Practically Considered’, Art Journal (1 February 1854): 33. 43 For example, William Tattton Egerton bought a Victoria Service for Tatton Park in 1861, Ferguson, Ceramics 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces, 194. ‘A Dessert Service, Decorated in the Victorian Pattern, 1850–2’. Available online: https://www​.rct​.uk​/collection​/5000041​/a​-dessert​-service​-decorated​-in​-the​-victoria​ -pattern (accessed 15 November 2020). 44 Anna Somers Cocks, ‘The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House During the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in the History of Art 25 (1989): 206. 45 Evans, Art and History of the Potting Business, 372. 46 Art Journal, 1856, cited in Claire Blakey, ‘Minton Majolica: A Visual Feast of Victorian Opulence’. Available online: Minton Archive, https://www​ .themintonarchive​.org​.uk​/in​-depth​-minton majol​ica/#​:~:te​xt=Th​e%20A​rt%20​ Journ​al%20​in%20​1856,​decor​ation​%2C%2​0a%20​very%​20mar​ked%2​0and (accessed 20 November 2020). 47 Jason Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 135; Susan Weber et al., eds, Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 (New York: Bard Graduate Centre, Walters Art Museum, 2021).

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48 Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Works of Sir Henry Cole Accounted for in His Deeds, Speeches and Writings, vol. 1 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884), 106. 49 Michael Mason, ‘The Way We Look Now: Millais’s Illustrations to Trollope’, Art History 1, no. 3 (1978): 309–40. The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art (London: Christies, 2003), 124–7. 50 Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers (London: George Routledge and Sons), n.p. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/31591​/31591​-h​/31591​-h​.htm (accessed 5 September 2020). 51 ‘Ceramic Court at the Palace, Under the Direction of T. Battam, Esq., F. S. A.’, Art Journal (February 1856): 47–8; Saturday Review (June 1871): 766–7. 52 Henry Doulton’s father, John Doulton, founded Doulton & Watts in Lambeth, South London, in 1815. See Desmond Eyles, The Doulton Lambeth Wares (London: Richard Dennis, 2002); Desmond Eyles, The Doulton Burslem Wares (London: Barrie & Jenkins, Royal Doulton, 1980). 53 ‘English Pottery during the Last Fifty Years’, British Architect (24 February 1888): 148. 54 Ibid., 149. 55 As a young girl, Best learned drawing and sketching at boarding school and received more formal instruction from George Haugh, a Royal Academy exhibitor. She ceased painting in 1850. Later in life, Best selected and assembled her watercolours into edited albums. Her work was rediscovered when family descendants sold individual sheets from the album at Sotheby’s New York in 1983 and 1984. See Caroline Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985), 7–9; Temma Balducci, ‘Negotiating Identity: Mary Ellen Best and the Status of Female Victorian Artists’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2002). Available online: http://www​.19thc​-artworldwide​.org​/ autumn02​/82​-autumn02​/autumn02article​/261​-negotiating​-identity​-mary​-ellen​ -best​-and​-the​-status​-of​-female​-victorian​-artists (accessed 24 March 2016). 56 ‘Rosso antico’ was mass-produced after 1790 and evidences one of the pioneering techniques of Josiah Wedgwood. 57 Still Life with Bread and Oranges is reproduced in Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best, 157. The style of the tavern jug originated with the Elers brothers of Dutch and German extraction in the late seventeenth century who operated a pottery in Staffordshire. Hildyard, English Pottery, 56. 58 Ibid., Still Life with Coffee Pot and Cake, Frankfurt is reproduced in Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best, 158. 59 Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best, 121, 158. 60 Collard, The Potters’ View of Canada: Canadian Scenes on Nineteenth-Century Earthenware. 61 Susanna Moodie, ‘A Journey to the Woods’, chap. XIV, in Roughing It in the Bush, 1853. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/4389​/4389​-h​/4389​-h​.htm (accessed 14 August 2019).

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62 Carl Ballstatd, ‘Strickland, Susanna (Moodie)’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Available online: http://www​.biographi​.ca​/en​/bio​/strickland​_susanna​ _11E​.html (accessed 14 August 2019). 63 Barbara Williams, ‘Anne Langton’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Available online: http://www​.biographi​.ca​/en​/bio​/langton​_anne​_12E​.html (accessed 20 August 2019); Barbara Williams, ed., A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada: The Journals, Letters, and Art of Anne Langton (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2008), n.p. 64 Hariot Georgina Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin & Ava, My Canadian Journal, 1872–1878, Extracts from My Letters Home (London: John Murray, 1891), 19, 24, 320. Available online: https://open​.library​.ubc​.ca​/collections​ /chung​/chungpub​/items​/1​.0056319 (accessed 5 January 2020). 65 Ibid., 5, 13. 66 Ibid., 13, 14. 67 John Sandon, The Dictionary of Worcester Porcelain 1751–1851, vol. 1 (Suffolk: The Antique Collectors’ Club, 1993), 381; Chaffers, Marks and Monograms, 707. Ferguson, Ceramics 400 Years of British Collecting in 100 Masterpieces, 168. 68 Frances Margaret Redgrave, ‘October 21, 1853’, in Richard Redgrave, A Memoir C.B., R.A.: A Memoir Compiled from His Diary (London: Cassel & Company, 1891), 93. 69 Redgrave, Manual of Design, 157. 70 Montague Guest, ed., Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals: Confidences of a Collector of Ceramics and Antiques throughout Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Austria, and Germany, from the year 1869–1885, vol. 1 (London: Ballantyne and Co., 1911), 61. 71 Anonymous, The China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story (London: The Religious Tract Society, c. 1865), 16. 72 Email Philippa Tinsley, ‘Curatorial Consultant, Museum of Royal Worcester’, 17 February 2017. 73 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19. 74 ‘A Day at the Staffordshire Potteries’, Penny Magazine (26 February 1843): 73–80; ‘A Day at the Porcelain-Works Factory, Worcester’, Penny Magazine (28 May 1873): 201–8. 75 Penny Magazine was founded by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK); the short-lived magazine was among the first generation of penny periodicals intended for instruction and did not include fiction. Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 43–6. 76 Art-Union (1 January 1846): 1; ‘Copeland and Chapter 1’, Art-Union (1 November 1846): 287; Art-Union (1 December 1846): 317; ‘Worcester’, Art-Union (1 March 1846): 89.

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77 ‘Punch’s Tour! In the Manufacturing Districts’, Punch 10 (1846): 123, 144; ‘Punch to His Manufacturing Friends’, Punch 10 (1846): 199. 78 Charles Dickens and William Henry Wills, ‘A Plated Article’, Household Words 5, no. 109 (1852): 120. 79 John Henry Walsh, Manual of Domestic Economy, Suited to Families Spending 100£ to 1000£ a Year (London: Routledge, 1856). In the 1874 edition, the ceramic factories description is condensed, suggesting that the novelty of factory tourism had worn off. 80 ‘Ceramic Court’, 47–8. Jewitt’s articles include ‘Old Derby China’, Art Journal (January 1862): 1–4; ‘A History of the Worcester Porcelain Works’, Art Journal (February 1862): 41–5; ‘Salopian China: The Coalport Porcelain Works’, Art Journal (March 1862): 65–9; ‘“Lowestoft China,” A Notice of the Porcelain Works at Lowestoft’, Art Journal (July 1863): 129–32; ‘Plymouth China’, Art Journal (September 1863): 169–73; ‘Bristol China’, Art Journal (November 1863): 213–17; ‘Chelsea China’, Art Journal (April 1863): 61–4; ‘New Hall China’, Art Journal (January 1864): 23–4; ‘Wedgwood and Etruria’, Art Journal (August 1864): 225–31; ‘The Early Potteries of Staffordshire’, Art Journal (December 1864): 363–6; ‘Liverpool Pottery and China’, Art Journal (September 1865): 269–74; ‘Leeds Pottery’, Art Journal (October 1865): 305–9; ‘Rockingham China and the Yorkshire Potteries’, Art Journal (November 1865): 348–53; ‘William Billingsley and the China Works Founded by Him’, Art Journal (September 1868): 186–7. 81 Geoffrey Godden, Jewitt’s Ceramic Art of Great Britain 1800–1900 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), xi. 82 For more on British imperialism and objects, see John M. MacKenzie, ed., The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain (London: V&A Publications, 2001). 83 Engraved by her Huguenot architect, Daniel Marot circa 1700, Queen Mary’s cabinet was, in point of fact, a small room panelled with shelves, mantels, cornices and overdoors, to house her collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain and imitation Dutch delft. Michael Snodin and Maurice Howard, Ornament: A Social History Since 1450 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 205. Somers Cocks, ‘The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House During the Eighteenth Century’, 195, 203. 84 Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 248; Hildyard, European Ceramics, 92. 85 ‘Illustrated Tour’, 317. 86 John Ruskin, ‘The Cottage, The Poetry of Architecture’, in Architectural Magazine 46 (December 1837): 555; The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. I (1885; repr., New York: John B. Alden), 9, 11. 87 Ibid. 88 John Ruskin, Lectures on Art Delivered Before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 1870 (London: George Allen, 1892), 139.

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89 Mrs Bowles of Bremhill Rectory, Characters and Incidents of Village Life, Mostly Founded on Fact: Intended for the Religious and Moral Instruction of the Poor (London: C. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1831), 118–19. 90 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘A Manchester Tea-Party’, chap. 2; ‘Alice’s History’, chap. 4, in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848. Available online: 2016, http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/2153 (accessed 3 February 2016). 91 Ibid. 92 Tamara Ketabgian, ‘Foreign Tastes and “Manchester Tea- Parties”: Eating and Drinking with the Victorian Lower Orders’, in Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption 1700–1900, ed. Tamara Wagner and Narin Hassan (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007), 125–40. 93 Gaskell, ‘Old Alice’s History’. 94 Evans, Art and History of the Potting Business, 372. 95 Hildyard, English Pottery, 32, 33. 96 Charles Dickens, ‘Still Wandering’, chap. 15, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1; repr., Boston, MA: Tiknor and Fields, 1868), 72. 97 Ibid. 98 Charlotte Brontë, chap. 31, in Jane Eyre, 1847. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/1260​/1260​-h​/1260​-h​.htm (accessed 3 February 2016). 99 George Eliot, chap. 24, in Middlemarch, 1870. Available online: http://www​. gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/145 (accessed 15 September 2014). 100 George Eliot, ‘Enter the Aunts and Uncle’, chap. 7, in Mill on the Floss, 1860. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/6688​/6688​-h​/6688​-h​.htm (accessed 10 November 2020); John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8. 101 Davidson, The World of Mary Ellen Best, 23, 155. 102 Plates 571 and 572 in John D. Griffin, The Leeds Pottery 1780–1881, vol. 2 (Leeds: The Leeds Art Collections Funds, 2005), 408–9. Original pattern books located in the Print Room Library at the V&A. 103 Moira Vincentelli, ‘The Welsh Dresser: A Case Study’, Interpreting Ceramics, I (2001). Available online: http://www​.int​erpr​etin​gceramics​.com​/issue001​/welsh​ /welsh3​.htm (accessed 10 May 2019); Moira Vincentelli, ‘Welsh Dressers and Ceramic Display’, Planet, The Welsh Internationalist 100 (August/September 1993): 32–7. 104 Elizabeth Pearson Dalby painted watercolours in the late 1840s. The daughter of William Dalby, rector of Compton Abbas, she married Spencer Robert Wigram in 1867. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts (1500–1900) (London: V&A Publications, 2001), 408; Margaret Ponsonby, ‘Ideals, Reality and Meaning: Homemaking in England in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 16, no. 3 (2003): 201–14. 105 Vincentelli, ‘The Welsh Dresser’, 32–7.

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106 Ponsonby, ‘Ideals, Reality and Meaning’, 204. 107 In addition to scenes of modest country life, Hunt typically portrayed birds’ nests and hence nicknamed ‘Bird’s Nest Hunt’. Sir John Witt argues that Hunt’s watercolours are linked with the Pre-Raphaelite artists because of his technique of employing a white undercoat to enhance colour and detail. 108 Snodin and Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts (1500–1900), 205. 109 Henry Willett, Introductory Catalogue, Pottery & Porcelain in the Brighton Museum, Lent by Henry Willett (Brighton: South of England Printing Works, 1879), 7. 110 Willett also collected pottery that expressed the themes of Characters – Officials, Costume – Murders, Sports-Sporting – and Agriculture, Clubs and Guilds – Seafaring, Bacchanalian and Domestic Incidents. 111 Willett, Introductory Catalogue, 7. 112 The History of the Tea-Cup with a Description of the Potter’s Art (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1878), 123. 113 Ibid., 51. 114 Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 5. 115 The RTS was founded in 1799 and supported by the Church of England. By the 1840s, they were printing 5,300 different publications in the hundreds of millions. Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 29. 116 Sara Maurer, ‘Reading Others Who Read: The Early-Century Print Environment of the Religious Tract Society’, Victorian Studies 61, no. 2 (2019): 223, 224, 225. Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 6. 117 Anonymous, The China Cup, 16. 118 Ibid., 33. 119 Ibid., 46. Another strong religious reference from the same source: ‘Or to borrow a simile from our chief employment in this place, . . . the clay that most often passes through the furnace is the best porcelain’, 23. 120 Tinsley, ‘Curatorial Consultant, Museum of Royal Worcester’. 121 In the King James Bible, the clay references are Gen. 2.7: ‘And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’; Isa. 64.8: ‘But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand’, Official King James Bible, Authorized King James Version (KJV). Available online: http://www​.kin​gjam​esbi​bleonline​.org/ (accessed 28 December 2015). 122 Jer. 18.6 from KJV quoted in ‘The Potteries’, Art-Union 65 (1844): 107. 123 Dickens and Wills, ‘A Plated Article’, 118. 124 ‘Lord Carlisle at Burslem’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (26 February 1853): 144. 125 The anonymous poem was published in Chaffers, Marks and Monograms, 609 and Slosson, The China Hunters Club, 51. 126 George Henry Lewes, ‘Dickens in Relation to Criticism’, The Fortnightly Review 11, no. 62 (1872): 150.

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127 See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘China’, in Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 153; Stacey Sloboda, ‘Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelez (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 162–72; Karen Harvey, ‘Barbarity in a Teacup? Punch, Domesticity and Gender in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 205–21. 128 John Gay, ‘To a Lady, on Her Passion for Old China’, (1725) in ‘Poets Corner’. Available online: https://www​.theotherpages​.org​/poems​/2000​/g​/gay51​.html (accessed 10 January 2020). 129 The poem was republished in Chaffers, Marks and Monograms, 629 and Slosson, The China Hunters Club, 51. 130 Emily Blair, ‘“The Wrong Side of the Tapestry”, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 2 (2005): 585–97. 131 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Molly Gibson’s New Friends’, chap. 23, in Wives and Daughters. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/4274 (accessed 18 September 2020). 132 Alden Cavanaugh and Michael Yonan, ‘Introduction’, in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain 1–17, 2; J. T. Laird, ‘Cracks in Precious Objects: Aestheticism and Humanity in Portrait of a Lady’, American Literature 52, no. 4 (January 1981): 643–8; Sara Stambaugh, ‘The Aesthetic Movement and The Portrait of a Lady’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30, no. 4 (1976): 495–510. 133 Henry James, chaps 35 and 36, from vol. 2, and chaps 10 and 19, from vol. 1 in The Portrait of Lady, 1881. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/2834 (accessed 1 May 2015). 134 Ibid., chap. 40. 135 Ibid., preface. Here James is referencing George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, chap. 2. 136 Ibid., chap. 49. 137 Ibid., chap. 19. 138 Ibid., chap. 49. 139 Cavanaugh and Yonan, ‘Introduction’, 2–3. 140 Hunt made two versions of this painting, the smaller near replica was de-accessioned by Delaware Art Museum in 2014 and is now in the Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Interestingly, while Hunt altered the pattern of the inlay decoration of the prie-dieu from a trefoil to a circular design in the second version, the splendid pot remained the same. The Pall Mall dealer, Jean Joseph Ernest Theodore Gambart (1814–1902) purchased Isabella before it was completed and reproduced it as an engraving. 141 See Weber et al., eds, Majolica Mania. 142 Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 30–5.

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143 Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), 175, 254–61. 144 Ibid., 250. 145 Bernard Cracroft, ‘Mr. Hunt’s, “Isabel”’, Fortnightly Review 9 (June 1868): 657. 146 Spencer Stanhope (John Roddam) letter to Miss Forbes, ‘Old Years Day’, n.d. Sold at Bonham’s, 29 July 2015. I thank Judith Bronkhurst for sharing this letter with me. 147 Diana Holman Hunt, My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves, 250. 148 Hildyard, European Ceramics, 91. 149 At least six other Staffordshire potteries printed Bartlett views on table- and toiletware, including William Ridgeway, Podmore Walker, Thomas Godwin and Edge, and Malkin & Co. Morley’s successor George L. Ashworth & Bros produced new copperplates in the 1880s, making it the longest of the potteries to produce the Lake pattern. See Elizabeth Collard, Nineteenth Century Pottery and Porcelain in Canada (Montreal, QC: McGill University Press, 1967); Elizabeth Collard, The Canadiana Connection: 19th Century Pottery Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery; Collard, The Potters’ View of Canada: Canadian Scenes on Nineteenth Century Earthenware. 150 John Rennie Short, Imagined Country, Environment, Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1991), 6. 151 Mary Ellen Earl, William H. Bartlett and His Imitators (Elmira, NY: Arnot Art Gallery, 1966), 12. 152 W. H. Bartlett to Henry Richard Vizetelly, 3 February, Winterthur Museum and Garden and Library, archives, Col 361. 153 T. R. Preston, Three Years’ Residence in Canada from 1837 to 1839 (London: Richard Bentley, 1840) cited in ‘Reviews’, The Athenaeum 658 (6 June 1840): 452. 154 ‘Catalogue of the choice collections of pictures drawings and objects of art of the late Mr. Wyatt, Oxford’. Christie and Manson, 4 July 1853, item 19. 155 Charlotte Brontë, ‘Briarmains’, chap. 9, in Shirley, a Tale, 1849. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/30486​/30486​-h​/30486​-h​.htm (accessed 20 July 2015). 156 Collard, Nineteenth Century Pottery and Porcelain in Canada, 211. 157 Ibid., 4. 158 Gillian Neale, Miller’s Collecting Blue & White Pottery (London: Octopus Publishing Group, 2004), 116–17. Neale recommends that collectors use the perforations to suspend the drainer on the wall rather than a wire plate hanger.

Chapter 5 1 George Eliot, chap. 2, in Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, 1861. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/550​/550​-h​/550​-h​.htmp (accessed 26 November 2020).

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2 Ibid., chaps. 2 and 4. 3 Ibid. 4 The anthropomorphism of the vessel form and the application of the terminology foot, neck and mouth for example crossed many cultures since pre-history. See Heiner Schwarzberg and Valeska Becker, eds, Bodies of Clay: Prehistoric Humanised Pottery (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017). 5 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6 Eliot., chap. 14, in Silas Marner. 7 For discussion on Eliot collapsing the gender binaries, see Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 25. 8 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language Thoughts (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 163–70. For discussions on Heidegger’s ‘The Thing’ in material cultural studies, anthropology and craft history, see the following articles: Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 8; Christopher McHugh, ‘Crinson jug from Clay to the Grave (and Beyond): Exploring the Ceramic Object as a Gathering Point’, in Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture, Ceramics in the Expanded Field, eds Christie Brown et al. (London: Routledge, 2016), 123–4; In Ileanna Baird, ‘Introduction: Peregrine Things’, in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in Global Context, eds Ileanna Baird and Christina Ionescu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 5. 9 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, 165, 169. 10 Art-Union (May 1844): 109. 11 R. K. Henrywood, Illustrated Guide to British Jugs (London: Swan Hill Press, 1997), 7. 12 Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 96. 13 ‘Illustrated Tour in the Manufacturing Districts: The Staffordshire Potteries’, The Art-Union (December 1846): 269. 14 Oxford English Dictionary. Available online: http://www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.queensu​ .ca​/view​/Entry​/101930​?isAdvanced​=false​&result​=2rskey​=wst6DS& (accessed 1 November 2019). 15 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University, 1997), 159, 167. 16 For a feminist reading of Greuze’s La cruche cassée and other works, see Emma Barker, ‘Reading the Greuze Girl, The Daughter of Seduction’, Representations 117, no. 1 (2012): 86–119. Bernadette Fort, ‘The Greuze Girl: The Invention of the Pictorial Paradigm’, Studies in the History of Art 72 (2008): 129–51.

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17 John Smith, A Catalogue Raisonneé’ of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters: Nicholas Poussin, Claude Lorraine and John Baptiste Greuze (London: Smith and Son, 1838), 412–13. 18 Ann Bermingham, Sensation & Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 19 Lynda Nead, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Women in Pre-Raphaelite Painting’, Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 1 (1984): 26. 20 Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Publishing, 1993), 2. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Florence Maly-Schlatter, The Puritan Element Victorian Fiction (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1968), 56. According to the Bastardy Clause of the New Poor Law (1834), unwed mothers would receive no financial support from the father or the parish for illegitimate children. 21 Nead, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times’, 26. 22 Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ was first published in Punch (16 December 1843): 260. 23 Redgrave’s Sempstress was widely discussed in its day, as well as in recent scholarship: The Times (8 May 1844): 7; Literary Gazette (1844): 339; ‘Royal Academy’, Athenaeum (1844): 39; William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Picture Gossip’, Fraser’s Magazine (June 1845): 713–21. For more recent scholarship, see Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle (1848–1871) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 249–50; Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), 27; Judith Stoddart, ‘Pleasures Incarnate’, in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. P. R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 85–9; Lynn Mae Alexander, Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewoman in Victorian Art and Literature (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 54–60; Judith Stoddart, ‘Tracking the Sentimental Eye’, in Knowing the Past: Victorian Culture and Literature, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 200–11; Susan Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Rutherford, NJ: Fairley Dickinson University Press, 1987), 112; Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), ed. Susan Casteras and Ronald Parkinson (New Haven, CT: V&A Publications, 1988), 118–21; Helene Roberts, ‘Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter’s View of Women in the First Twenty-Five Years of Victoria’s Reign’, in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 56–7. 24 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art-Union (June 1844): 158. 25 Interestingly, the social realist painter Frank Holl rendered a damaged basin (the jug is absent) in Far Away Thoughts, depicting a young mother in a garret with

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her sleeping children. She daydreams as she darns and the cracked basin, sitting precariously on a stack of mending, prompts the viewer to think that her virtue may be at issue, not unlike Redgrave’s Sempstress. 26 House of Commons, Reports from Commissioners: Children’s Employment, Trade and Manufactures, Sessional Papers XIV (1843): 555; The Times (6 May 1844): 8, 13. The Times (6 Jul 1844): 5. See Jade Halbert, ‘Liberating the Slaves of the Needle: The Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dressmakers and Milliners 1843–1863’, Retrospectives 3 (Spring 2014): 44–58; Stoddart, ‘Pleasures Incarnate’, 87. 27 Oxford English Dictionary. Available online: http://www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.queensu​.ca​ /view​/Entry​/101929​?rskey​=QhGyv6​&result​=1​#eid (accessed 5 November 2019). 28 J. S. Farmer with W. S. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary, Historical and Comparative, of the Heterodox Speech of All Classes of Society for More than Three Hundred Years, vol. 5 (1891; repr., London: Harrison and Sons, 1902), 219. 29 George Eliot, ‘Hetty’s World’, chap. 9, in Adam Bede, 1859. Available online: http:// www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/507​/507​.txt (accessed 30 June 2019). 30 Ibid., ‘Adam Visits Hall Farm’, chap. 20. 31 Ibid., ‘The Two Bed-Chambers’, chap. 15, and ‘Links’, chap. 16. 32 Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29. 33 See Ann Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, in Victorian Scandals Representations of Gender and Class, ed. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992), 257–88; Rosemary Gould, ‘The History of an Unnatural Act: Infanticide and ‘Adam Bede’, Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 2 (1997): 263–77. 34 A. Herbert Safford cited in Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 32. See also George Watt, The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Gretchen Huey Barhill, ‘Fallen Angels, Female Wrongdoing in Victorian Novels’ (master’s thesis, University of Lethbridge, 2003). Available online: mhttps://www​.uleth​.ca​/dspace​/bitstream​/handle​/10133​/241​/MR17382​.pdf​ ?sequence=3 (accessed 20 June 2019). 35 Gould, ‘The History of an Unnatural Act’, 267. 36 Royal Collection Trust. Available online: https://www​.rct​.uk​/collection​/451113​ /hetty​-sorrel​-and​-captain​-donnithorne​-in​-mrs​-poysers​-dairy (accessed 1 November 2020). 37 Edward Corbould’s second picture depicted Dinah Morris preaching. 38 George Eliot, ‘The Dairy’, chap. 7, Adam Bede. 39 Yet another contemporary visual example is William Henry Hunt’s portrait of his daughter, Emma, age thirteen, on the verge of maidenhood, holding an undamaged brown jug (c. 1845). Its swelled belly resembles that of Stone and Redgrave’s jugs and suggests that the rounded form was particularly appropriate

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for personifying women’s virtue. The Artist’s Daughter Holding a Jug (c. 1845) in John Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) Life and Work (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1982), cat. 518. 40 Francis Broun, The Seven Ages of Man: Inaugural Exhibition (London, ON: London Regional Art Gallery , 1980), 58–9.​ 41 Art-Union (June 1843): 173. 42 Stephens also served as associate editor of the journal Ladies’ Companion and later launched her own magazine, Mrs Stephens’ Illustrated New Monthly. ‘From the Periodical Archives: Ann S. Stephens’s “The Jockey Cap”’’ – The First Version of “Malaeska”’, American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 18, no. 1 (2008): 101–6. Available online: Project MUSE. https://muse​.jhu​.edu​/article​/235196 (accessed 10 June 2019). 43 Ann S. Stephens, ‘The Last Appeal’, Peterson’s Ladies’ National Magazine 10, no. 1 (July 1846): 1–10. Another example of a painting inspiring literature is PhilibertLouis Debucourt’s Le juge: ou la cruche cassé (The Judge or the Broken Jug). German writer Heinrich Zschokke challenged himself and two friends to write separate stories based on the scene. Zschokke wrote ‘The Broken Jug’, which was published in numerous British and American journals between 1836 and 1893, while his friend Heinrich von Kleist wrote a satirical play about the judicial system and human frailty. See Theodore Ziolkowski, The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 82. 44 Lynn Festa, ‘The Moral Ends of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Object Narratives’, in The Secret Life Things, Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 309–13. 45 Eglanton Thorne (Elizabeth Emily Charlton), The Old Worcester Jug; or John Griffin’s Little Maid (London: The Religious Tract Society, c. 1882). I am grateful to ceramic expert John Sandon, who alerted me to this text and its reference to Worcester eighteenth-century cabbage-shaped jugs. 46 Ibid., 10, 14–15. Henry Sandon, The Illustrated Guide to Worcester Porcelain 1751–1793 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), 78. 47 For a discussion on collecting porcelain in the nineteenth century, see Ann Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasures, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 129. 48 Thorne, The Old Worcester Jug, 112. 49 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; repr., Boston, MA: James Good and Company, 1872), 224, 229. 50 For example, The Art Journal catalogue of the 1862 Exhibition illustrated matching toilet sets, washstands and toilet tables that take up little room. Larger basins were inset into rather than on top of the surface. It stated, ‘[t]he “novelty”’, is a

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washstand, combining the largest capacity with the smallest requirement of space’. Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of International Exhibition 1862 (London: James Virtue, 1862), 175, 162. 51 Ward and Lock, Home Book: A Domestic Encyclopeædia Forming a Companion Volume to ‘Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management’ (London: Ward, Lock and Company, c. 1881), 304. 52 In Hicks’s second panel, Companion of Man, the breakfast table set is ironstone or bone china, which was widely produced in Britain by Mason, Minton, Derby, Coalport and other potteries and exported around the world. The design resembles the ‘Japan pattern’ (also branded as ‘Oriental Japan’ and ‘Mandalay’), one of the many designs British industry appropriated and reinvented from Asia. Combined with overglazed enamels, especially Imari red (named for the port in Arita), these polychrome asymmetrical floral patterns featured some hand-painting and thus were more desirable than regular earthenware and transfer printing but still less expensive than hand-painted porcelain. Popular after 1800, the ‘Japan pattern’ had lost much of its exotic qualities and became part of mainstream breakfast and dinner sets. Since they followed an asymmetrical design that could be matched if broken and thus another sensible reason to own the pattern. 53 Kendall Smaling Wood, ‘George Elgar Hicks’s Woman’s Mission and the Apotheosis of the Domestic’, Tate Papers, no. 22 (Autumn 2014). Available online: http://www​ .tate​.org​.uk​/research​/publications​/tate​-papers​/22​/george​-elgar​-hicks​-womans​ -mission​-and​-the​-apotheosis​-of​-the​-domestic (accessed 14 April 2018); Rosamond Allwood and Rosemary Treble, George Elgar Hicks: Painter of Victorian Life (London: The Geffrye Museum, 1983); Lynda Nead, ‘The Magdalen in Modern Times’, 12–19, 23, 43; Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103–5, 108; Frances Fowle, ‘George Elgar Hicks Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood ’. Available online: http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/art​/artworks​/hicks​-womans​-mission​-companion​-of​ -manhood​-t00397 (accessed 1 September 2019). 54 R. J. C. Hildyard, English Pottery 1620–1840 (London: V&A Publications, 2005), 176. 55 Taylor, ‘The Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Times (27 May 1863): 6. 56 Nead argues that the crowds of middle and upper class were a diverse and heterogeneous group, 16. 57 As discussed in chap. 2, Clare wants to buy a set of dishes to welcome her daughter’s homecoming in Elizabeth Gaskell, chap. 60, ‘Roger Hamley’s Confession’, in Wives and Daughters, 1864. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​ .org​/ebooks​/4274 (accessed 1 February 2018). 58 Thomas Hardy, ‘Should Old Acquaintances Be Forgot?’, chap. 10, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1875. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/224​/224​-h​/224​-h​.htm (accessed 10 May 2018).

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59 Anthony Trollope, ‘A Morning Visit’, chap. 5, in Barchester Towers, 1857. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/3409​/3409​-h​/3409​-h​.htm (accessed 10 February 2018). 60 David Lubin, ‘Lilly Martin Spencer’s Domestic Genre Painting in Antebellum America’, in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale Publishing, 1983), 135–62. See also Robin Bolton Smith, ‘The Sentimental Paintings of Lilly Martin Spencer’, Antiques, no. 1 (July 1973): 108–15; National Collection of Fine Arts, Lilly Martin Spencer: The Joys of Sentiment (Washington, DC: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1973), 148–9. 61 The Cosmopolitan Art Association distributed by lottery engravings of the painting to its readers. Helen S. Langa, ‘Lilly Martin Spencer: Genre, Aesthetics and Gender in the Mid-Nineteenth Century American Woman Artist’, in American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum Artists Born by 1876, vol. 2, eds Teresa A. Carbone, Barbara Dayer Gallati and Linda S. Ferber (New York: Giles with Brooklyn Museum, 2006), 966–8. 62 Lilly Martin Spencer to Gilles and Angelique Martin, 10 September 1856, reel 131, frames 160–61, Spencer Papers, cited in Annelise K. Madsen, ‘Recipes for Refinement: Art and Sociability in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Art and Appetite in American Painting: Culture, and Cuisine, ed. Judith A. Barter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 93. 63 John Norton established a pottery in Bennington, Vermont, in 1793. In the nineteenth century the grandsons split the pottery. In 1849 a new factory was opened and became known as United States Pottery Company. John Fleming and Hugh Honour, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts (London: Penguin, 1979), 77; Richard Carter Barret, Bennington (New York: Crown Publishers, 1958), 22; ‘The Potters of Bennington’, Available online: http://www​.kellscraft​.com​/Ear​lyAm​ eric​anCr​aftsmen​/Ear​lyAm​eric​anCr​afts​menCh12​.html (accessed 1 January 2021). 64 Wedgwood produced it under the Roman name ‘Carrara’ and many other potteries copied the formula. John P. Cushion and Margaret Cushion, A Collector’s History of British Porcelain (Suffolk: Antique Collectors Club, 1992), 318–19. Fleming and Honour, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts, 587. 65 Diana Straddling, The Modeller and Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century America (Richmond, VA: University of Richmond Museum, 2005), 30–1. 66 ‘The Vintage Jug’, Art-Union (November 1846): 332. For contemporary discussion on Victorian design reform and surface patterns, see Kriegel, Grand Designs, and David Raizman and Carma R. Gorman, eds, Objects, Audiences, and Literatures: Alternative Narratives in the History of Design (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 67 Rachel Gotlieb, ‘The “Minster Jug” as “Pet Agent” of Victorian Design Reform’, Journal of Design History 32, no. 2 (May 2019): 123–45.

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68 Deborah Cohen credits Ernst Gombrich for identifying the anonymous Argus, in Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 25; Argus (pseudonym) ‘A Mild Remonstrance Against the Taste-Censorship at Marlborough House, in Reference to Manufacturing Ornamentation and Decorative Design, to Manufacturers, Decorators, Designers, and the Public Generally’, Part 1 (London: Houlston & Stoneham, 1853), 12, 18; Part 2, 2, 26. Argus referenced the name of the multi-eyed mythological giant, hence all-seeing. 69 Another jab at Redgrave: ‘You stoop to censure the piracy of a picture on a TeaTray; but forget that the idea for the only picture you ever painted was a most poor plagiarism from Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’.’ Argus, ‘A Mild Remonstrance Against the Taste-Censorship at Marlborough House’, Part 1, 22, 28. 70 Punch 14 (1848): 238. Punch the previous year criticized Summerly’s designs, displaying a collection of six whimsical products, including a ewer shaped as a jester. Punch (1847): 13. 71 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 11. 72 Ibid., 209. 73 Ibid. Grès de Flandres became widely collected by the artistic set. See Desmond Eyles, The Doulton Lambeth Wares (London: Richard Dennis), 2002. 74 For lively discussions on what constitutes good design and relief-moulded jugs, see ‘The Vintage Jug’, 332; Art-Union (December 1846): 319 and Journal of Design and Manufactures (March–August 1849): 85. See also Gotlieb, ‘The “Minster Jug” as “Pet Agent”’, R. K. Henrywood, Relief-Moulded Jugs 1820–1900 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Barron Publishing, 1984). 75 Acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 2017, it is a companion piece to Young Husband: Marketing. 76 Wendy Jean Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002). Jochen Wierich, ‘War Spirit at Home: Lilly Martin Spencer, Domestic Painting, and Artistic Hierarchy’, Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 23–42. 77 Ibid. 78 Christiana Payne, Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art (London: Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham Arts Centre in association with Lund Publishers, 1998), 5; See also Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene (London: Andreas Papadakis, 2000), 11. 79 Peter Wagner, ‘A (De) constructive View of Hogarth’s Beer Street’, in The Dumb Show: Image and Society in the Works of William Hogarth, ed. Frederic Ogee (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997); David Bindman, Hogarth And His Times: Serious Comedy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Brian Howard

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Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 18151872 (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). 80 Nicholas Mason, ‘“The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State”: The Beer Act of 1830 and Victorian Discourse on Working-Class Drunkenness’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (2000): 109–27. 81 ‘The British Lion in 1850; or, the Effects of Free Trade’, Punch 10 (1846): 69. 82 The UK Corn Laws, instituted between 1815 and 1846, imposed tariffs on grains and blocked imports to protect English farmers, thus increasing the price of bread and cost of living for the working classes. The Conservative prime minister Robert Peel repealed the laws which marked the beginning of free trade economics. See Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 83 For other descriptions of men drinking ale in jugs, see Eliot, ‘Hetty’s World’, chap. 9, in Adam Bede; Charles Dickens, chap. 2, in The Battle of Life. A Love Story. Available online: guten​​berg.​​org​/f​​i les/​​40723​​/4072​​3​-h​/4​​​0723-​​h​.htm​ (accessed 10 July 2018); Charles Dickens, ‘Mr. Weller’s Watch’, chap. 5, in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1840. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/588​/588​-h​/588​-h​.htm (accessed 11 July 2018). 84 Desmond Eyles, ‘Good Sir Toby’: The Story Toby and other Character Jugs Through the Ages (London: Doulton & Co., 1955). 85 Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘“Character Resolved into Clay”: The Toby Jug, Eighteenth-Century English Ceramics’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 1 (2018): 29. 86 Charles Dickens, chaps. 19, 22, 42, 80, in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, 1841. Available online: https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/917​/917​-h​/917​h​.htmC (accessed 8 August 2020). 87 Ibid., chap. 4. 88 Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Character Resolved into Clay’, 29. 89 Dickens, chap. 41, in Barnaby Rudge. 90 Thomas Carlyle, ‘Labour’, chap. xi, in Past and Present, 1843. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/26159​/26159​-h​/26159​-h​.htm (accessed 26 November 2020). 91 Dickens, chap. 80, in Barnaby Rudge. 92 See chapter 3, note 83. 93 Payne, Rustic Simplicity, 82–3; Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting, Domestic Life and the Contemporary Social Scene, 13; James Dafforne, ‘Thomas Webster’, Art Journal (November 1855): 295. 94 Kathryn Moore Heleniak, ‘Webster, Thomas (1800–1886)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Available online: http://www​ .oxforddnb​.com​.proxy​.queensu​.ca​/view​/article​/28947 (accessed 4 March 2018).

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95 Frederick George Cotman based in East Anglia, trained at Ipswich and the Royal Academy Schools. He was the nephew of the better-known watercolourist John Sell (1782–1842). See Alfred Lys Baldry, ‘An East-Anglian Painter: Frederick George Cotman’, International Studio (14 August 1909): 167–75; Norma Watt, ‘F. G. Cotman, “A Man of More than Ordinary Strength of Character”’, Norfolk Fair (May 1984): 56–9, 110. 96 Illustrated London News (29 May 1880): 531; The Times (28 June 1880): 5b. 97 According to Cotman’s wife, Mr Street, an innkeeper and a miller, modelled for the scene at his own Black Boys Inn, Hurley-on-Thames in Berkshire. Walker Art Gallery Object Files, ‘Thomas Cotman’. 98 Christopher Newall, ‘The Liverpool School’, in Pre-Raphaelites, Beauty and Rebellion (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and National Liverpool Museums, 2016), 121. 99 Unfortunately, the oil on panel is in poor condition and is cracked and peeling at the centre of the jug, making it difficult to determine the exact pattern. I would like to thank the Walker Art Gallery for allowing me to review its object file and see the oil panel while it was being conserved. 100 See Lilian Lewis Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 101 Mason, ‘“The Sovereign People Are in a Beastly State”’, 115. Some of the tracts included Reverend W. R. Baker, ‘The Curse of Britain: An Essay on the Evil Causes and Cure of Intemperance’ (London: Thomas Ward, 1838); Henry Dunckley, The Glory and Shame of Britain: An Essay on the Conditions and Claims of the Working Classes Together with Their Means of Securing Their Elevation (London: Religious Tract Society, 1847). 102 ‘Liverpool’, Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica. Available online: acade​​ mic​-e​​b​-com​​.lib-​​ezpro​​xy​.co​​ncord​​ia​.ca​​/leve​​ls​/co​​llegi​​ate​/a​​rticl​​​e​/Liv​​erpoo​​l​/485​​82 (accessed 11 December 2020). 103 Campbell’s portrait dramatically contrasts with N. Stephen’s 1895 photograph of a Liverpool child, dirty and barefoot, carrying an empty jug to the pub. A temperance activist, Stephen left no ambiguity in his photo about the perils of drink. See Colin Wilkinson, The Streets of Liverpool, vol. 2 (Liverpool: Blue Coat Press, 2012), 85. 104 Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde (London, Tate Publishing, 2012). A failed engagement with Christina Rossetti and his conversion to Catholicism were reasons he left the PRB in 1850 and remained estranged. Ronald Parkinson, ‘James Collinson’, in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. Leslie Parris (London: Tate Publishing, 1984), 61, 75. 105 See Pat Hardy, ‘The Idea of Immigration: Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England’, British Art Journal 13, no. 1 (2012): 7–17. Redgrave also painted this subject: The Emigrant’s Last Letter Home (1858, private collection) an exterior scene with no ceramics.

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106 Andrea Korda identifies a labourer at home as a sub-genre in Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London: The Graphic and Social Realism 1869–1891 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 94. The size of the canvas is 70 × 90 cm, similar to Redgrave’s paintings and typical of genre painting. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 280; Thomas Bodkin, ‘James Collinson’, Apollo 31 (1940): 128–33; Valerie A. Cox, ‘The Works of James Collinson: 1825–1881’, The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society 4, no. 3 (1996): 1–17. 107 Collinson depicted the baluster jug (without the spots) in The Writing Lesson (1855), indicating that it was likely a studio prop. It is similarly placed on the brick floor near the male subject, its spout faces out and serves to invite the viewer into the scene. Geraniums in terracotta pots on the windowsill are present . For more on The Writing Lesson, see Payne, Rustic Simplicity, 61. William Mulready also painted glazing flaws on pottery in, for example, The Last Inn (1834–5, Tate Britain). 108 Jonathan Rickard, Mocha and Related Dipped Wares (1770–1790) (East Nassau, NY: University Press of New England, 2006). 109 Collinson examines the same topic in The Emigration Scheme (1852), but their humble one-room interior appears marginally improved, tidier, with a carpet on the wood floor, and a proper chimney mantel. Tellingly, there is no pottery on the ground (only a basket and watering can), the beer mug (creamware rather than mocha) is beside the potted plant on the windowsill, the jug of flowers on the mantel further distinguishes their elevated status. Susan Casteras, ‘Painted Fictions: Commemorating the Everyday in Victorian Art’, in Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters, The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2003), 205–28. 110 When the painting was first exhibited the accompanying caption read that the soldier had been honourably discharged due to blindness caused by an accident, and the family now confronts a bleak future since his disability will drastically reduce his pension. ‘Art and Artists: James Collinson’, Tate website, July 2007, Available online: http://www​.tate​.org​.uk​/art​/artworks​/collinson​-home​-again​ -t04105 (accessed 11 July 2018). 111 The brown glaze is solid and closer to nineteenth-century pottery than eighteenth century, and Collinson may have acquired the pottery from Fulham or Doulton and Watts in Lambeth, which was manufacturing jugs since 1818. In 1873, Doulton and Watts sold them for 3s.6d per dozen. Jack Howarth and Robin Hildyard, Joseph Kishere and the Mortlake Potteries (Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2004), 61, 69, 75. 112 R. J. C. Hildyard, ‘The Earliest Mortlake Hunting Jug?’, This Blessed Plot, This Earth: English Pottery Studies in Honour of Jonathan Horne, ed. Amanda Dunsmore (London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 51. 113 Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design, 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 2.

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114 Howarth and Hildyard, Joseph Kishere and the Mortlake Potteries, 61, 69, 75; Hildyard, Browne Muggs: English Brown Stoneware (London: V&A Publications, 1985); Hildyard, ‘The Earliest Mortlake Hunting Jug?’, 51. 115 Since the late eighteenth century, Staffordshire produced earthenware figures of political, literary and religious imagery in colourful enamels, employing moulds which were inexpensively mass-produced. The origins are in dispute between Enoch Wood (1784–1840), ‘father of the Potteries’, Ralph Wood II (1748–95) and Ralph Wood III (1782–1801). See Pat Halfpenny, English Earthenware Figures: 1740–1890 (London: Antique Collectors Club, 1995); and Wynne Hamilton-Foyn, ‘“Ralph Wood” Figures: Who Modelled and Made Them?’, in This Blessed Plot, This Earth: English Pottery Studies in Honour of Jonathan Horne, ed. Amanda Dunsmore (London: Paul Holberton, 2011), 120–8. 116 Louis Gordon Rylands, Crime: Its Causes and Its Remedy (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889). 117 ‘Dreadful Murder in Dublin’, The Limerick Reporter (8 December 1840): n.p. 118 ‘City Court’, Oxford Chronicle and Reading Gazette (2 December 1843): n.p.; ‘An Old Offender’, Kentish Mercury (16 June 1849): n.p.; ‘The Serious Assault with a Jug’, The Derby Mercury (6 March 1878): n.p.; ‘Killed by a Jug in Whitechapel’, The North-Eastern Daily Gazette (11 November 1889): I; ‘Fatal Jug-Throwing Case’, Birmingham Daily Post (5 July 1894): n.p.; ‘The Assault with a Jug’, Birmingham Daily Post (23 August 1894): n.p.; ‘Wounded with a Jug’, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (10 April 1897): n.p. 119 Westmorland Gazette (1 April 1848): n.p.; ‘A Child Found in a Jug’, Leicester Chronicle and the Leicestershire Mercury (23 September 1882): n.p. 120 Staffordshire Advertiser (12 May 1849): 5. 121 Charlotte Brontë, chap. 16, in Jane Eyre, 1847. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/1260​/1260​-h​/1260​-h​.htm (accessed 3 February 2018). The Brontës owned a white ceramic water jug with a scrolling fern relief pattern, Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet:Three Lives in Nine Objects (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 214. 122 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Requiescat in Pace’, chap. 33, in Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, 1848. Available online: http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/ebooks​/2153 (accessed 3 February 2018). 123 Anne Smart Martin, ‘Magical, Mythical, Practical and Sublime: The Meanings and Use of Ceramics in America’, in Ceramics in America, ed. Robert Hunter (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2001), 29–46. 124 Marion Harry Spielmann, Millais and His Works: (London: W. Blackwood, 1898), 116. Julian Treuherz convincingly argues that Millais was aware of Lawrence AlmaTadema’s The Inundation of the Biesbosch, 1421 (1856) in which he depicted a jug for the same symbolic purpose. Julian Treuherz, ‘The Cat and the Cradle’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 240–2.

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125 Martin, ‘Magical, Mythical, Practical and Sublime’. 126 For discussions on material culture and how users change the function of objects, see Daniel Miller, Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Ian Woodward, Understanding Material Culture (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2007). 127 Tipperary Free Press (8 April 1843): n.p. ‘Notes amounting to six hundred pounds were found neatly doubled up the inside of an old teapot. In the stable the Captain found jugs full of old dollars and shillings’, see ‘the Golden Dustman Falls into Worse Company’, chap. 39, in Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend, 1864–5. Available online: (http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/883​/883​-h​/883​-h​.htm, (accessed 1 July 2019). 128 Northampton Mercury (2 October 1847): n.p. 129 ‘Copyright in Bulrushes’, Journal of Design and Manufacturers, no. 7 (September 1849): 47. 130 See ‘Well Spring’, V&A collection. Available online: http://collections​.vam​.ac​.uk​/ item​/O1089​/well​-spring​-carafe​-redgrave​-richard​-cb/ (accessed 1 April 2020). 131 R. J. C. Hildyard, English Pottery 1620–1840 (London: V&A Publications), 25. 132 Eliot, chaps. 2 and 4, in Silas Marner; Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘“Character Resolved into Clay”’, 31. 133 Cushion and Cushion, A Collector’s History of British Porcelain, 318–19. Fleming and Honour, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts, 587. 134 Henrywood, Relief-moulded Jugs 1820-1900, 162. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 50, 233. 135 Because of the brown spotting, the Gardiner Museum relegated the Alcock Portland vase jug to its study collection. Rosemary Knox email message to Peter Kaellgren, interim chief curator at the Gardiner Museum, 2 April 2012. 136 Rosemary Knox email message to Peter Kaellgren, interim chief curator at the Gardiner Museum, 2 April 2012. 137 Ibid.

Conclusion 1 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 1. 2 See, for example, an advertisement for Worcester porcelain in Art Journal Advertiser (March 1862): n.p. 3 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning, Studies in Industry and Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Frances Hannah, Ceramics: Twentieth-Century Design (New York: EP Dutton, 1986), 41.

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4 The Leisure Hour – A Journal of Instruction and Recreation, 2 June 1853, cited in Geoffrey Godden, Jewitt’s Ceramic Art of Great Britain 1800-1900 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), 5. For more on the demise of the Potteries, see R. F. Imrie, ‘Industrial Restructuring, Labour, and Locality: The Case of the British Pottery Industry’, Environment and Planning A 2, no. 21 (January 1989): 3–26; Neil Ewins, ‘Globalization and the UK Pottery Industry c. 1990–2010’, Parson’s Lecture, 23 April 2013. Available online: sure​.sunderland​.ac​.uk​/372​0​/31/ (accessed 4 April 2019), Parsons Lecture​.pdf​. ‘All Fired Up, The Future of Pottery’, The Telegraph, 20 January 2011. 5 Ibid., 37. 6 Oscar Wilde, cited in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 43. 7 See Miranda Goodby, ‘“The Fearful Malady of the Clay” Working Conditions in the Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire Potteries’, in Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915, ed. Susan Weber et al. (New York: Bard Graduate Centre, Walters Art Museum: 2021), 97. Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry, 1870–1955 (London: Women’s Press, 1990); Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 2000. 8 Charlotte Brontë, chap. 34, in Jane Eyre, 1847. Available online: http://www​ .gutenberg​.org​/files​/1260​/1260​-h​/1260​-h​.htm (accessed 3 February 2018).

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Index actor-network theory (ANT)  3, 150 Adam Bede (Eliot)  1, 19, 155–8 Adolphus Frederick IV Mecklenburg (Duke)  125 Aesop  70 Aesthetic artists  24, 44 Aestheticism  12, 13, 15, 23, 24, 42–54, 60, 81–4, 89 Aesthetic Movement  15, 23, 42, 77, 109 Aesthetic painting  12, 44, 49, 50, 88 Afternoon Tea (The Gossips, Millais, 1889)  67, 106 à la russe  34, 226 n.25 Alcock, Samuel  181 alcoholic drinking  88, 167, 172, 173, 176 Anderson, Amanda  153 Anderson, Anne  12 Andres, Sophia  113 ‘The Angel in the House’ (Patmore, poem)  161 Anglo-imperialism  13, 15 Answering the Emigrant’s Letter (Collinson, 1850)  172–5 anthropomorphism  57, 72, 93, 150, 168, 169, 184 antique ceramics  37, 39, 44 anti-Semitism  21, 22 ‘anti-teaists’  92 Appadurai, Arjun  9 Apples (Moore, 1875)  51 applied arts  25, 81 aristocracy  12, 29, 122, 123, 125 Armstrong, Isobel  130 Arnolfini Portrait (van Eyck, 1434)  222 n.88 Arnoux, Léon  29, 116, 124–6, 201 n.80 Arscott, Carolyn  114 Art and History of the Potting Business (Evans)  27 Art Journal  6, 26, 27, 36, 42, 43, 49, 58, 74, 101, 107, 118, 124, 125, 131, 151 Art of Decoration, The (Haweis)  38 Art of the Old English Potter, The (Solon)  7

Arts and Crafts Movement  4, 5, 81 Art Treasures of Great Britain  37 Art-Union  27, 30, 31, 33, 57, 63, 64, 118, 124, 130, 131, 138, 150, 155, 157, 163, 165 art ware  126 Ascott, Caroline  203 n.119 As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (Sparke)  13 Athenaeum  30 Attfield, Judith  20 Augustus the Strong  121, 128, 226 n.19 Austen, Cassandra  122 Austen, Jane  17, 96, 97, 119, 121–3, 129, 219 n.47 Awakening Conscience, The (Hunt, 1853)  114 Ayrton, Acton  66 Azaleas (Moore, 1868)  51, 52 Balducci, Tamara  134 ‘Ballade of Blue China’ (Lang, poem)  77 ball clay  31 Bank, Dorothea  10 Barchester Towers (Trollope)  161 Barlow, Francis  70 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens)  19, 98–9, 118, 168, 170 Barringer, Tim  74, 114 Barthes, Roland  88 Bartlett, William Henry  146–7 Basil: A Story of Modern Life (Collins)  39–40 Bassett, Henry  110 Baxandall, Michael  189 n.4 Beads (Moore, 1875)  51 Beauty and the Beast (Burne-Jones, 1864)  78 Beckett, Jane  75 beer  167, 168 Beerhouse Act (1830)  172 Beerbohm, Max  78 Beer Street (Hogarth, 1751)  167, 170

Index Bennington  162 Bentley, Thomas  38 Bentley’s Miscellany  57 Best, Mary Ellen  17, 18, 119, 122, 127, 128, 134–6, 229 n.55 Bible  145 Bigg, William Redmore  88 Binns, Richard William  129 Blacker, J. F.  7 Blackwell, Mark  60 ‘The Blue-and White China Mania’ (Thompson)  77 blue-and-white jug and basin  81, 82 blue-and-white tiles  79, 81 Blue Bower (Rossetti, 1865)  79 Blue Closet (Rossetti, 1857)  79 blue feather-rimmed plate  127 Bolter, Jay David  2, 24 Boote, Richard  181 Bourdieu, Pierre  3 Bowles, Magdalene  132 Bow Porcelain Factory  120 Boyce, G. P.  81, 214 n.120 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth  88, 112, 113 Brighton Art Museum  137 Brighton Museum  19 Britain/British  1, 24, 42, 44, 49, 59–61, 67, 68, 86, 91, 117, 118, 123, 183 ceramic manufacturing  18, 97, 130, 131 ceramics industry  18, 119, 122, 125, 129–31 commercial ceramics  5–8, 24 identity  118, 127 British Architect, The  127 British East India Company  90, 218 n.27, 226 n.18 British Empire  67, 95, 113 British/English pottery  1, 6, 9–10, 23–9, 31, 34–7, 54, 62, 67, 68, 89, 91, 107, 108, 115, 163 displaying ceramic dishes on cottage mantel/in cupboard  131–6 intimations of morality and mortality  137–45 pride and patriotism  120–7 travel, colonialism and factory tourism  127–31 ‘The British Lion in 1850; or, the Effects of Free Trade’ (Leech, 1846)  168 British Museum  7, 44, 181

273

Britishness  118 British Raj  95 Brogniart, Alexandre  116 ‘The Broken Dish’ (Hood, poem)  73 Broken Pitcher, The (Greuze, 1771)  152 Bronkhurst, Judith  83, 110 Brontë, Charlotte  16, 19, 30, 66, 70, 71, 75, 133, 147, 177 Brontë Cabinet, The (Lutz)  70 Brown, Bill  3 Brown, Ford Madox  81, 82 Brown Betty  108 brown earthenware pot  149 brown glaze  245 n.111 brown jugs  42, 169 Buckley, Cheryl  11 ‘Bulrush’ design  178 Burlington Fine Arts Club  38 Burnand, F. C.  59 Burne-Jones, Edward Coley  16, 60, 77–85, 109 Burne-Jones, Georgiana  77–9, 89, 109, 110 Burslem Studio  126 ‘Bute’ cup  108, 111 Campbell, Colin Minton  56, 126 Campbell, James  19, 172, 176 Campbell, Thomas  151 Canada  58 Canadian Scenery Illustrated from Drawings (Bartlett, 1842)  146–7 Canton  68, 92 Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope)  122 Carlton House Terrace  43 Carlyle, Thomas  74, 170 Catalogue Raisonné (Bronkhurst)  83 Catherine (Queen of Braganza)  90 Caughley Factory  58, 63, 83, 206 n.7 Cavanaugh, Alden  10, 142 Century of British Painters, A (Redgrave and Redgrave)  25 Ceramic Art of Great Britain: From Prehistoric Times Down to the Present Day, The (Jewitt)  6, 131 ceramic dishes  4, 17, 22, 73, 106 ceramics scholarship  8–13 Chaffers, William  7, 38, 58 Chang, Elizabeth Hope  11, 59, 60, 71 Charles II (King)  90 Charles Meigh & Sons  27

274

Index

Charleston, Robert  8 Charlotte (Queen)  31, 125, 129 Chartist Movement  220 n.55 Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory  5–7, 37, 38, 41–4, 70, 120, 121, 125, 159, 210 n.69 Children’s Holiday, The (Lady Fairbairn with her Children), (Hunt, 1864–5)  17, 110 china  34–6, 44, 65, 70, 97, 99, 108, 113, 160. See also porcelain bone  5, 36, 37, 99, 116, 120, 185 in cottage  131–6 cups  16, 87, 89, 91, 97, 109, 114 dishes and price  36–7, 93, 99, 161, 201 n.76 high-end  37 ironstone  36, 123, 174 old vs. new  37–42 oriental  42, 43 painting  29, 30, 47, 48 pattern  33 plain white  39 plate  39, 70, 71 stone  36, 37, 160 China  15, 23, 24, 42, 44, 49, 50, 60, 63, 68, 69, 92, 95 China (Spratt and Madeley, 1831)  93 China Collecting in America (Earle)  7 China Cup; or Ellen’s Trial: A Worcestershire Story, The  129, 130, 138, 158 China Hunters Club, The (Slosson)  7 chinamania  7, 12, 37–42, 68, 78, 93, 119, 121, 139–41, 181, 226 n.18 Chinese exhibition (1843)  92 chinoiserie  22, 58, 60, 62, 68, 70, 91, 95 Christian values  14, 31, 54, 159, 186 Christ in the House of His Parents (Millais, 1849–50)  77 Christy, A. J. F.  55 chromolithographic wood-block technology  80 Chronicles of Barsetshire series  40, 99 Cinderella (Burne-Jones, 1863)  16, 78–80, 82–3, 85–6 Clark, Joseph  89, 107, 172 class  61 differentiation  33, 150 divide/hierarchies  34, 42, 71

classicism  81 Coalport  44, 71 Cocks, Anna Somers  12 Codell, Julie  12, 24, 60, 110, 205 n.135 Cohen, Deborah  13 Cole, Henry  6, 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 39, 55–6, 68, 69, 116, 118, 126, 129, 151, 163, 164, 178, 201 n.80 Coleman, William Stephen  126, 203 n.106 Collard, Frances  34 Collections Towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain (Marryat)  38 Collins, Wilkie  23, 39 Collinson, James  19, 151, 172, 173, 176, 245 nn.107, 109 colonialism  10, 17, 127–31, 147 commercial arts  25–6 Commutation Act (1784)  91, 218 n.27 Congreve, William  87 Coningsby (Disraeli)  123 connoisseurship  4, 8, 37–9, 137 continental painting  107 conventionalized designs  22, 27 conversation portraits  90, 91 Cook, Clarence  35, 36, 38, 214 n.115 Cook, Eliza  22, 99, 184 Copeland, Robert  63 Copeland factory  29, 130, 138 Copeland & Garrett  162 copyright  147, 150, 163, 178 Corbould, Edward  156–7 Cornforth, Fanny  205 n.135 Corn Laws  168 Cosmopolitan Art Association  162, 241 n.61 Cotman, Frederick George  151, 171 Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (Gainsborough, 1785)  152–3 Cottage Interior, An Old Woman Preparing Tea, A (Bigg, 1793)  88 cottage teapot. See Brown Betty Country Cousins (Redgrave, 1847)  33 Country Wife, The (Wycherley)  87 Coutts, Howard  8, 175 Cowling, Mary  74 Cowper, William  88 Crane, Walter  80, 81, 214 n.115 crass materialism  22

Index Crawford, Alan  80 creamware  9, 23, 26, 31, 32, 34, 54, 101, 107, 120, 122, 125, 170, 186 Crime: Its Causes and Remedy (Rylands)  176 crockery  26, 30, 33–5, 42, 45, 67, 74, 75, 102, 105, 106, 115, 119, 122, 131, 133, 145, 185 Crockery (Spratt and Madeley, 1831)  93 Crockery and Glass Journal  77 crossed class structures  16, 17, 108, 114, 186 Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, The (Cavanaugh and Yonan)  10 culture  13, 67, 88–9 Chinese  13, 67, 95, 96 exotic  24 transformation  80 Victorian  2, 3 Dalby, Elizabeth Pearson  18, 119, 135, 136, 232 n.104 Dawson, William  147 Day, Samuel Phillips  101 d’Azeglio, Marquis  49 decoration  3, 25, 27, 32, 39, 61, 70, 71, 125, 158, 163, 165, 175, 176, 180, 184 flat  45, 52, 77 pictorial  23 polychrome  86, 99 Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (Edis)  35 decorative arts  4, 8, 43, 44, 80 decorative pattern  4, 32, 45, 79, 97 decor journals/magazines  2, 34, 35, 54, 81 de la Rochefoucauld, François  91 delft  38, 46, 133, 140 delftware  77, 132 De Morgan, William  38 Derby  111 Deserter’s Home (Redgrave, 1847)  32–3, 175 design reform  19, 24–9, 35, 39, 43, 54, 151, 163, 164, 184 design reformers  22, 27, 30, 34, 35, 55, 58, 86, 181 Despair (Holl, 1883)  102

275

Dickens, Charles  15, 19, 23, 29, 56–8, 61, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 89, 98, 99, 130, 133, 138, 151, 168, 170 Dilnot, Clive  20 Dining Room at Langton, Family at Breakfast (Best, 1830s)  122 dinnerware  36, 37 Disraeli, Benjamin  119, 123 Dixon, Marion Hepworth  100–1 domesticity  59, 60, 74, 83, 89, 96, 97, 113, 114, 150, 167, 174, 176 Double Dealer, The (Congreve)  87 Doulton, Henry  126, 127 Doulton Pottery and Porcelain Company  38, 119, 126, 165 dragon cups  40, 99, 109 Dresden porcelain  43, 44, 121, 123 Dresser, Christopher  203 n.106 dry clay powder press  86 Duchess of Bedford  92 Dufferin, Frederick Hamilton-TempleBlackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava  129 Dufferin, Hariot Georgina HamiltonTemple-Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava  17, 119, 129 du Maurier, George  78, 119 Dunn, Nathan  93 Dutch painting  33 Earle, Alice Morse  58 earthenware  9, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 62, 63, 117, 124, 140, 141, 170, 173, 185, 186, 225 n.2 blue-and-white tin-glaze  120 Staffordshire  37 earth-toned glazes  102 East Asia  23 Eastlake, Charles  14, 34, 35, 38, 41, 83, 160, 164, 165, 181 Eatwell, Ann  11, 12, 99 Edis, R. W.  35 educational curriculum  64–5 Edwards, Clive  96 Egoist, The (Meredith)  59 Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (Richards)  9 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ (Gray)  140

276 Eliot, George  1, 18–20, 40, 65, 66, 71, 88, 110, 111, 119, 133, 140, 141, 149–51, 155–8 Eliza Cook’s Journal  14, 21, 75, 138 Ellis, Sarah Stickney  107 Emigration Scheme, The (Collinson, 1852)  245 n.107 English Ceramic Circle  8 English India Company  68 English Porcelain (Honey)  7 English Porcelain 1745-95 (Young)  9 English Pottery 1620-1841 (Hildyard)  8 Europe  5, 9, 68, 91 European Ceramic Design 1500-1830 (Coutts)  8 Eustace Diamonds (Trollope)  107 Evans, William  27, 124, 132, 198 n.28 Eventide: A Scene at the Westminster Union (Herkomer, 1878)  104 Ewins, Neil  9, 10 Fables (Aesop)  70 factory tourism  127–31, 186 Faed, Thomas  17, 89, 97–104, 106 Fairbairn, Allison Callaway  89, 109–14 Fairbairn, Thomas  110, 113, 114, 201 n.80, 223 n.101, 224 n.111 Family Friend, The  69 Farm Kitchen at Clifton, York, A (Best, 1834)  134–5 Faulkner, Charles  85 Faulkner, Kate  85 Faulkner (Orrinsmith), Lucy  85, 86 Feldman, Jessica  50 Felix Summerly’s Art Manufactures  22, 55, 178 femininity  10, 16, 52, 88, 91, 95, 99, 108, 111, 113, 114, 117, 134, 136, 150, 152, 153 Fenton, Christopher Webber  162 Ferguson, Patricia  12 fine arts  25, 26, 37, 197 n.22 Finlay, Robert  9 fitness for purpose  22, 24, 27, 55, 56 flatness  45–7, 50, 52, 77, 79, 80, 127 Flaxman, John  27 Flood, The (Millais, 1870)  151, 177–8 Fortnightly Review  144 Foster, Myles Birket  78

Index Frackelton, Susan S.  62, 71 France  123 Franco-Russian style  34 Fraser Magazine  67, 71 Freegood, Elaine  2 free trade  168 French Revolution  115 Fromer, Julie  13, 91, 96, 107, 110, 111 Gainsborough, Thomas  152–3 Gambart, Ernest  234 n.140 Gardiner Museum  181 Gascoigne Family, The (Hayman, 1740)  91 Gaskell, Elizabeth  15, 17, 18, 23, 40, 68, 75, 89, 96, 97, 110, 119, 120, 129, 132, 141, 142, 177 Gay, John  140, 141 gender  10–12, 61, 75, 88, 90, 93, 99, 108, 150, 175, 185, 186 General Strike (1842)  198 n.28 genre painting  13, 23, 33, 34, 52, 55, 80, 89, 97, 98, 101, 106, 107, 131, 134, 151, 152, 158, 170, 173, 199 n.40 gentility  23, 97, 114, 119, 128, 131 George III (King)  129 Georgian style  33 Gere, Charlotte  12, 13, 34, 83 Giles, James  72–3 Giller, William  199 n.43 gin  167 Gin Act (1751)  167 ginger jar  48, 49 Gin Lane (Hogarth, 1751)  167 Girl at Lattice (Rossetti, 1862)  16, 81–3 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The (Rossetti, 1849)  158 Girl with Jug of Ale and Pipes (Campbell, 1856)  19, 172, 173 Gladstone, William Ewart  7, 42–4, 92 Godden, Geoffrey  8 godliness  18, 118, 119, 145, 159, 185 Godwin, E. W.  203 n.106 Gohmann, Joanna M.  10 Good Night (Webster, 1846)  170 Gordon, George  220 n.55 Governess, The (Redgrave, 1844)  30, 31, 55 government-funded design schools  26 Gow, Mary  71

Index Graphic, The  80, 104 gravy drainer  146, 147 Gray, Thomas  140 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (1851)  6, 17, 25, 27, 29, 30, 83, 115, 118, 125, 126 Great Sheffield Flood (1864)  177 Grès de Flandres  165 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste  152 Guest, Montague  39 Gustin, Richard  2, 24 Haddad, John  11, 59 Hadley, James  203 n.106 Hall, Henry  162 Hall, Samuel Carter  107 Handbook of Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain (Chaffers)  7, 38 hand-painted patterns  23, 62, 70 hand-pressed tiles  86 Hard Times (Dickens)  29 Hardy, Thomas  19, 151, 161 Harlot’s Progress II, A (Hogarth, 1733)  87 Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room (Whistler, 1861)  204 n.123 Harrison, John  162 Hartley, L. P.  183 Harvey, Karen  10 Haugh, George  229 n.55 Haweis, Mary  38, 41 hawthorn jar  49–51, 77 Hayman, Francis  91 Hearing Lessons (Hunt, 1842)  136 Heidegger, Martin  150, 179 ‘The Height of Commercial Morality’ (cartoon, Punch)  41–2 Herkomer, Hubert von  17, 89, 104–106, 109 Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser’s Dairy (Corbould, 1861)  157 Hicks, George Elgar  16, 74, 75, 151, 159–61 Hifferman, Joanna  46, 47 Hilditch & Son  99 Hildyard, R. J. C.  8, 12, 31, 179 Hints on Household Taste (Eastlake)  34–5, 164

277

History of the Staffordshire Potteries (Shaw)  6 Hogarth, William  18, 87, 89, 119, 167, 170 Holl, Frank  17, 89, 102, 104, 106, 237 n.25 Home Again (Collinson, 1856)  19, 172, 175–6 Home Book: A Domestic Encyclopeædia (Ward and Lock)  35 Honest Labour Has a Comely Face (Hunt, 1861)  16, 83 Honey, W. B.  5, 7 Hood, Thomas  73, 119, 123, 154 Hope (Holl, 1883)  102 House Beautiful, The (Cook)  35, 214 n.115 Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Cohen)  13 Household Words  57, 77, 130 House of Commons debate (1862)  66 Howard, Rosalind  109 Hughes, Arthur  74 Hunt, Diana Holman  143 Hunt, Fanny (née Waugh)  143, 144 Hunt, William Henry  18, 119, 136, 238 n.39 Hunt, William Holman  12, 16–18, 25, 34, 42–4, 60, 83, 84, 89, 109–13, 120, 142–5, 224 n.111, 234 n.140 Hushed (Holl, 1877)  102 hyperrealism  12, 110, 145 Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations  7 Illustrated London News  80, 95, 112, 171 Imari  15, 24, 49, 54, 135 imperialism  17, 44, 50, 61, 66–9, 74, 114, 117, 118, 145, 175, 185 India  95 industrial art  38 industrialization  24 industrial revolution  150 International Exhibition  38 1862  110 1867  126 Isabella (Millais, 1849)  142 ‘Isabella’ (Williams, poem)  120

278 Isabella and the Pot of Basil (Hunt, 1866–8)  18, 120, 142–4 Islamic ware  44 istoriato style  143 Italian Renaissance maiolica. See Roman earthen ware it-objects (‘talking objects’)  60 ivory ware  31 Jacobi, Carol  110 James, Henry  10, 18, 120, 141, 142 James, John Angell  161 ‘Janet’s Repentance’ (Eliot)  40, 88 Japan  15, 23, 42, 44, 49, 68 Japanese prints  81 ‘Japan pattern’ (‘Oriental Japan’/‘Mandalay’)  240 n.52 Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (Gere)  13 Jewitt, Llewellynn  6, 58, 59, 83, 131 Jocelyn, Viscount  95 Jones, Christine  10 Jones, Owen  23, 28, 54, 56, 79, 118, 163 Journal of Design and Manufactures (Cole)  68, 118, 178 jugs and pitchers, in Victorian painting and literature  179–81, 185 as agent in nefarious acts  176–8 as female signifier  151–67 as male signifier  167–76 Jules Soulages Collection  37, 144, 224 n.111 Kangxi  42, 46, 60, 84, 109 Kenway Antiques  198 n.33 ‘Kéramos’ (Longfellow, poem)  69 Ketabgian, Tamara  132 Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses (Spencer, 1856)  161, 165, 166 Kitchen to Garret (Panton)  36 Knight, Edward  122 Knox, Rosemary (née Savary)  181 Korda, Andrea  74, 80 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth  10, 15, 99, 109, 110, 112, 152, 170 Kriegel, Lara  150 Labourer’s Welcome, The (Clark, n.d.)  107, 172 Ladies’ National Magazine  158

Index Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon)  88, 89, 112–13 Lady’s Newspaper, The  30 Lamb, Charles  69, 73 Lambeth Studio  126 Lambourne, Lionel  49 Lang, Andrew  77 Langton, Anne  119, 128 La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (Whistler, 1864–5)  46–7 la Sizeranne, Robert de  80 Last Appeal, The (Stone, 1843)  157 Latour, Bruno  3, 150 Lawrence, Thomas  25 Lawrence-Archer, J. H.  42 Leech, John  151, 168 Leighton, Frederic  38 Lemon, Mark  57, 59 Lewes, George Henry  18, 119, 140 Leyland, Frances  50 Leyland, Frederick Richards  50 Life of Josiah Wedgwood, The (Meteyard)  7 Limerick Reporter  176 Liu, Helena  68 Liverpool Museum  43 Loan Exhibition (1862)  38 Logan, Thad  1, 89 London National Gallery  222 n.88 Long Elizas  48, 49 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  69 Lord Carlisle  139 Lorrain, Claude  25 Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (Newman)  67 Louisa (marchioness of Waterford)  78 Lowestoft  7, 38 Lubbock, Jules  26 Lubin, David  162 Lutz, Deborah  70 Lyman and Fenton Pottery  162 McKendrick, Neil  9 Madame de Pompadour  227 n.27 Madeley, George E.  93 Magazine of Art, The  71 maiolica  37, 38, 142–5 majolica  12, 125–6, 142 Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850-1915 (Weber et al.)  12

Index Manchester Art Gallery  37 Mandarin porcelain  123 Mansfield Park (Austen)  17, 96 Manual of Design (Redgrave)  118 Manual of Domestic Economy: From a 100£ to 1000£ a Year (Walsh)  36–7, 74, 131, 160 Mariana (Millais, 1851)  76 Marillier, Henry Currie  82 Marks, Murray  45, 49 Marryat, Joseph  6, 38 Martin, Ann Smart  178 Martin, John  25 Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (Gaskell)  15, 17, 68–9, 75, 96–7, 132, 177 Mary Jane’s Memoirs Compiled from Her Original Manuscript (Sims)  75–6 masculinity  16, 95, 108, 114, 117, 150 Mason, Charles James  123 material culture  4, 8, 10, 11, 24, 54, 82, 84, 90, 110, 118, 177, 178, 185, 186 materiality/materialism  4, 32, 112, 128, 133, 145, 170, 179 Maule, Fox  33 Maurer, Sara  138 Maw & Company  81 mazarine. See gravy drainer Meigh, Charles  43, 198 n.33 Meissen  5, 37, 38, 42, 43, 71, 90, 121, 122, 124, 226 n.19 Meredith, George  59 Merode Altarpiece (Robert Campin Workshop, c. 1427)  158 Merrill, Linda  12 metamorphosis  59, 77–9, 81 Meteyard, Eliza  7 Methodism  137, 139 middle class  29, 30, 63, 90, 91, 96, 106, 110, 114, 119, 160, 161 Middle Eastern ceramics  44 Middlemarch (Eliot)  16, 65–6, 99, 110, 133, 149, 150 Millais, John Everett  19, 67, 74, 76, 106, 126, 142, 143, 151, 177, 178 Miller, Annie  114 Miller, George  10, 107 Mill on the Floss (Eliot)  133 Milton, John  147

279

Minton, Herbert  56, 116, 125, 126, 201 n.80 Minton, Thomas  63 Minton & Co  7, 29, 34, 38, 39, 47, 55, 56, 71, 78, 81, 115, 116, 119, 124–7, 142, 162, 203 n.106 Monkhouse, William Cosmo  44, 51 Monna Rosa (Rossetti, 1867)  49, 50 monochrome creamware  23 monochrome glazes  30, 88 Moodie, Susanna  17, 119, 128 Moore, Albert Joseph  15, 23, 45, 50–3 Moore, N. Hudson  58 morality  11, 14, 26, 30, 45, 66, 90, 114, 119, 137–45 Morley, Francis  146 Morris, May  85 Morris, William  38, 43, 77, 78, 85, 86 Morris Firm  78, 85 mortality  73, 119, 137–45 Mortlock  35–7, 39, 54 ‘muggs’  175 Mulready, William  89 Museum of Practical Geology  118 ‘My Lady’s Chamber’ (Crane)  214 n.115 Nankin  42, 44, 50, 63, 97 national English school  107 National Gallery of Ireland  152 nationalism  3, 13, 18, 61, 73, 118, 138 national pride  67–8, 107, 118, 120–7, 186 naturalism  4, 22, 163, 165, 185 naturlich Blumen  227 n.30 Nead, Lynda  74, 153 neoclassical styles  27, 91 neo-rococo style  116 new china  37–42 New Crockery Shop, The (Silverpen)  21– 2, 26, 31, 75, 138 Newman, Cardinal  67 Newport, Emma  10 New Testament  138, 145 non-pictorial narratives  23, 24, 54 Northampton Mercury  178 North and South (Gaskell)  110 Northanger Abbey (Austen)  121, 122 Norton, John  241 n.63 Norton, Julius  162

280 Norton and Fenton  162 nostalgia  69, 72, 78 Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (McMahon)  13 ‘object tales’/‘it-narratives’  60 Observer  48 ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (Ruskin)  161 O’Hara, Patricia  11, 59, 71 old china  37–42, 54, 69, 141 ‘Old China’ (Lamb)  69 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens)  133 Old Testament  138 Old Worcester Jug; or John Griffin’s Little Maid, The (Thorne, 1882)  158–60 O’Neal, Jeffrey Hamet  70 O’Neill, Morna  81 O’Neill, Richard  81 One of the Family (Cotman, 1880)  171 Opium Wars  49 First (1839–42)  59, 92 Second (1856–60)  59, 92, 93 Oranges (Moore, 1866)  51–3 ‘the Orient’  11 orientalism  15, 44, 46, 50, 69 ornamental ware  123–6 ornamentation  3, 29, 34, 45, 89, 159 ‘other’/‘otherness’  59, 60 Oxford English Dictionary  152 Paganini, Catherine  92 Pair of Blue Eyes, A (Hardy)  161 Paist, Henrietta-Barclay  85 Panton, Jane Ellen  36, 108 Papist Act  220 n.55 Parian press-moulded jugs  162, 165, 166, 178 Parian ware  115, 125, 162 Parkes, Harry  75 Patent Design Registry Office  8 Pater, Walter  81 Patience (Gilbert and Sullivan)  78 Patmore, Coventry  161 patriotism  18, 120–7, 176, 185, 186 Payne, Christiana  89 pearlware  9, 31, 32, 34, 42, 54, 83, 101, 120, 135, 176 Peel, Robert  243 n.82 Peeling Potatoes (Holl, 1880)  102 Pellatt, Apsley  26, 125

Index Penny Magazine  57, 63, 130, 230 n.75 ‘period eye’  2, 183, 189 n.4 Persian ceramics  38 personifications  40, 57, 88, 93 pictorial  22, 23, 30, 42–5, 62, 77 picturesque  146, 147 Pierson, Stacey  42 piety  21, 117, 118, 145, 186 Pilkington Glass company  81, 125 plain ceramics  23, 30, 32, 105 ‘A Plated Article’ (Dickens and Wills)  15, 57, 58, 71, 72, 76, 130 Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissil, The (Dekker, Chettle and Haughton)  83–4 Plotz, John  13, 61, 133 Pointer, Edward John  89 polychromes  60, 62, 77, 86, 99, 172 Pomegranates (Moore, 1866)  51 Ponsonby, Margaret  135 Poor Teacher, The (1845, Redgrave)  14, 30, 31, 154 Pope, Alexander  87 porcelain  29, 30, 32, 37, 70, 72, 120. See also china as agent of Aestheticism  42–54 antique  38, 141 blue-and-white  9, 12, 15, 23, 25, 42, 45, 47–9, 51, 58–60, 74, 78, 84, 90, 109, 115, 184, 204 n.132, 226 n.18 continental  123 cups  87, 106, 109, 115 decorative  33 dishes  91 European  44 hard-paste  5, 6, 121 Parian  162, 180 soft-paste  5, 83, 111, 116, 186 Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Plotz)  13 Portland vase  180, 185 Portrait of a Lady, The (James)  141 portrait vases  27, 29, 30, 43 Potteries  26, 27 pottery  22, 30, 52, 82 blue-and-white  81 British (see British/English pottery) Chinese  44, 51 Greek  44 Japanese  51

Index Middle Eastern  23 models  23 painting  86 Redgrave’s representations of  29–34 Staffordshire  63, 67, 183, 185, 186 strikes (1836–7)  27 women and  24 Pottery and Glass Trades Review, The  49, 77 Pottery Gazette  50, 63, 69 Pottery Riots (1842)  27 pouncing  61 Poynter, Edward John, Sir  109 Pratt, Mary  13 Pre-Perspective Brotherhood (P. P. B.)  77 Pre-Raphaelite blue  76, 79 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)  2, 13, 42, 60, 61, 66, 73–84, 88, 142, 173 Preston, T. R.  147 Prime Minister, The (Trollope)  117, 122–3 Principal Teapots to the Celestial Court (1843)  93, 95 pronkstilleven  90 Prosser, Richard  86 Prouting, F. J. (Argus)  56, 163, 164 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore  47, 116, 126 Punch  18, 41, 56, 64, 78, 130, 164, 168, 170 Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (Whistler, 1864)  46 Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (Whistler, 1864)  46–9 Qing period (1725–35)  51, 60, 84 Quartet, a Painters Tribute to Music, The (Moore, 1868)  52 Queensware  31, 101, 125 racism  92, 93, 114 ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (Pope, poem)  87 Rappaport, Erika  13, 16, 118 realism  29, 80, 86, 89, 106, 112 Redgrave, Richard  6, 14, 18, 22, 23, 27–35, 43, 45, 46, 55–6, 76, 118, 129, 151–5, 163, 173, 175, 178, 199 n.40

281

Redgrave, Samuel  25, 33 relief-moulded jugs  19, 108, 162–4, 178, 180 religious metaphors  139 Religious Tract Society (RTS)  137, 138, 158 remediated ceramics  24 remediation  2, 24 Renaissance  83, 152, 154 Rhead, Frederick Hurten  7, 63 Rhead, George Wolliscroft  7, 63 Richards, Sarah  9 Richardson, Charles James  64 Richter, Henry James  25 Ridgway & Abington  178 rococo  70, 110, 112 Roestraten, Pieter Gerritsz van  90 Roman earthen ware  37, 38, 121, 125 Rossetti, Christina  30 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  12, 15, 16, 23, 42, 45, 49–51, 60, 77–9, 81–4, 93, 158 Rossetti, William  204 n.132 rosso antico (old red) Wedgwood jug  127, 128 Rothschild, Alfred Charles de  43 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie)  128 Royal Academy of Arts  34, 197 n.22, 199 n.43, 220 n.54 Royal Dairy  126 royal patronage  31, 119, 121, 125, 126 Royal Vauxhall Gardens  178 Ruskin, John  14, 18, 22–5, 27, 35, 38, 43, 76, 78, 86, 102, 119, 131, 132, 136, 137, 161 Ruskin’s principle  43 Rylands, Louis Gordon  176 Safford, A. Herbert  156 Said, Edward  11, 59 Sambourne, Edward Linley  78, 119 Sandler, John  61 saucers  21, 31, 74, 89. See also teacups (and saucers and teapots) Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot)  40, 88 schematized design  23, 185 schematized ornament  29, 55, 86 Schreiber, Charlotte  11, 39, 129 Scribner’s Monthly  35 self-orientalism  68

282 Sempstress, The (Redgrave, 1846)  55, 154, 155, 173 Sense and Sensibility (Austen)  96 Seven Years’ War  122 Sèvres Manufactory  7, 29, 37, 38, 42–4, 71, 90, 115–17, 121, 122, 124, 125, 159, 185, 227 n.30 Shakespeare, William  147 Sharp, William  82 Shaw, Simeon  6, 7 shawls  112, 114 Shirley (Brontë)  16, 66, 75, 147 Siddal, Elizabeth  77, 78, 82 Silas Marner (Eliot)  149–51, 155, 179 silver ‘Camellia’ pear-shaped teapot  22 Sims, George R.  75 Sinews of Old England, The (Hick, 1857)  16, 74 slavery  24 Sleeping Beauty (Burne-Jones, 1863)  78 Sloboda, Stacey  10, 99 Smart Martin, Ann  11 social realism  1, 13, 88, 104 social reform  24, 30 Social Science Association  156 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK)  230 n.75 Sofa, A (Moore, 1875)  51 Solon, Marc-Louis  7, 126 ‘The Song of the Shirt’ (Hood, poem)  154 Soulages, Jules  37, 201 n.80 South Kensington Museum. See Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Sparke, Penny  12, 34 Spencer, Lilly Martin  19, 151, 161, 162, 165–7 Spencer-Longhurst, Paul  81, 82 Spero, Simon  8, 9 Spielmann, Marion Harry  101, 178 Spode, Josiah  63, 119, 120 Spode factory  72, 78, 123, 129 Spratt, George  93 sprigging  175, 180 Sprimont, Nicholas  41 Staffordshire Pots and Potters (Rhead and Rhead)  7 Staley, Allen  51 Stangate Glass Works  55 Stanhope, John Roddam Spencer  144

Index Stephens, Ann S.  158 Stephens, F. G.  203 n.119 Still-life with Blue and White Coffee Pot and Cake, Frankfurt (Best, 1843)  128 Still-life with Bread and Oranges (Best, 1830s)  127 Stoke  99, 101, 174, 179 Stoke-on-Trent  19, 63, 131 Stone, Frank  18, 151, 152, 157, 158 Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin)  24 stoneware  1, 3, 5–7, 9, 18, 35, 38, 91, 95, 120, 141, 170–1, 174, 186 jug  127 traditional  38 vases  28 Story of the Willow Pattern, The (Gow, 1886)  71–2 Summerly, Felix  164 Summer Palace  15, 42 ‘Supplying the Present Wants of Our Yankee Cousins . . .’: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775-1880 (Ewins)  9 Surtees, Virginia  82 Swinburne, Algernon Charles  52, 81 Sylvia’s Home Journal  37 Syme, Alison  59, 69 Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Whistler, 1864)  47 tableware  27, 35–7, 61, 62, 64, 80, 89, 117, 128, 136, 171, 176, 184, 186 British  123 ceramic  54, 68, 145, 150 functional  123, 126 patterns  29, 34, 60, 76, 82, 95, 184, 185 plain  32 willow  63 Tale of Old China, A (Burnand)  59 Task, The (Cowper, poem)  88 tastes  12, 22, 25–7, 30, 34–9, 42, 54, 56, 61, 66, 81, 84, 110, 121, 181 Tate Britain  158 Taylor, Tom  161 teacups (and saucers and teapots)  16, 26, 27, 31, 49, 74, 87, 88, 184, 185 affluence and  109–14 as agents of cheer and seduction  106–9

Index as agents of poor and working class  96–106 humble  26, 90 origins of tea-drinking  90–5 tea-drinking  88, 90–7, 99, 101, 137 tea-parties  16, 17, 67, 87, 96, 106, 111 Tea Party, A (Webster)  106 teapots  16, 21–2, 34, 54, 83, 89, 91, 184, 185. See also teacups (and saucers and teapots) blue-and-white  97, 102 china  99 tea-table  16, 17, 88, 91, 107, 108, 113, 114 tea tax  91, 92, 218 n.25 temperance movement  88, 137, 164, 172 Tête à Tête, The (Hogarth, 1743)  87 Theis, Stephen  162 ‘The Thing’ (Heidegger)  150 thing theory  3 Thompson, Sir Henry  49, 77 tiles  47, 77–81, 85, 86, 126 Time of War (Faed, 1876)  97, 100 Times, The  33, 38, 76, 155, 161, 171 ‘To a Lady, on her Passion for Old China’ (Gay)  140 Toby Jug  10, 19, 168–70 Toy Books  80 Tractarianism (Anglo-Catholicism)  79 transculturation  13, 24, 60, 67, 88, 95 transfer printing  27, 37, 61, 62, 83, 131 transferware  27, 58, 62, 72, 74, 117, 173 blue  127 blue-and-white  119 patterns  62, 71, 203 n.106 transparency  44 Treaty of Nanking  92 Treaty of Paris (1763)  122 Treuherz, Julian  82 Trollope, Anthony  19, 23, 40, 89, 107, 117, 122, 126, 151, 161 ‘A True History of the Celebrated Wedgewood [sic] Hieroglyph, Commonly Called the Willow Pattern’ (Lemon)  57 Trust Me (Millais, 1862)  126 ‘Tulip and Sunflower’ design  162, 165 Turkish ceramics  23 Turner, Thomas  58, 63 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)  169

283

Twining, Thomas  91 Tyranny of Taste, The (Lubbock)  26 UK Alliance Party  173 UK Corn Laws (1815 and 1846)  242 n.82 United Branches of the Potters’ Society  198 n.28 United States  12, 58, 68, 124–5 van Eyck, Jan  222 n.88 Venus, A (Moore, 1869)  51 Victoria (Queen)  28, 67, 92, 125, 156 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)  5, 7, 8, 11, 25, 37–8, 43, 44, 48, 56, 88, 116, 126, 144, 155, 224 n.111 Victorian literature  17, 23, 54, 59, 98, 117, 131, 134, 136, 145, 177, 184, 186 Victorian paintings  17, 54, 117, 186 Victorian Pottery (Wakefield)  8 Vincentelli, Moira  11, 135 Virtue, George  147 visual culture  2, 23, 79, 90 vulgar  24, 36, 38, 39, 83 Wakefield, Hugh  8, 198 n.33 Walker Art Gallery  171 Wallace Gimson & Co.  203 n.106 Walsh, John  36, 74, 131 ‘Wandering in the Crystal Palace’ (Art Journal)  124 Ward and Lock  35, 36 Warden, The (Trollope)  40 Weatherill, Lorna  9 Weber, Susan  12 Webster, Thomas  89, 106, 109, 151, 170, 171 Wedgwood  37, 43, 78, 81, 122, 123, 127, 180 Wedgwood, G. R.  16, 87, 88, 95, 137 Wedgwood, Josiah  7, 9, 25, 27, 31, 38, 91, 101, 107, 108, 119, 120, 124, 125, 180 Wee Bit Fractious, A (Faed, 1874)  97, 100 Weichel, Eric  10 ‘Well Spring’ vase (Redgrave, 1847–65)  55–6, 178 Wesley, John  118, 137 Wesleyan Conference Office  137

284

Index

When the Day Is Done (Faed, 1870)  97–8 Where’s My Good Little Girl? (Faed, 1882)  97, 100 Whistler, Anna McNeill  45 Whistler, James McNeil  15, 23, 42, 45, 46, 49–51, 77, 93, 204 n.123 Widowed (Holl, 1879)  102 Wilde, Oscar  78, 184 Wilkie, David  89 Willett, Henry  19, 20, 137 Williams, Charles Hanbury  120, 121, 123 willow pattern  16, 54, 57–60 as agent of bad taste and working class  63–6 as agent of national pride  67–8 as agent of Pre-Raphaelites  73–84 as ‘metonymic commodity’  61 objects lessons with  68–73 origins  61–3 ‘The Willow Pattern (A Plate Soliloquy)’ (Giles)  72–3 willow plates  57, 58, 61, 71–5, 78–80 Wills, William Henry  15, 57, 58, 71, 76, 130, 138 Wilson, Charles Heath  64 Winterhalter Royal Portraits  198 n.33 Witt, John  136 Wives and Daughters (Gaskell)  40–1, 141–2 Wives of England, The (Ellis)  107 Woman’s Mission: Comfort of Old Age (Hicks, 1862)  160

women. See also femininity and china  15, 109, 136, 152 jug as signifier  151–67 representation in ceramics  24, 45–7, 83 virtue  19, 152, 153 in Whistler's painting  46–7 working-class  132, 133 ‘Women’s Mission’ (James)  160–1 Worcester Factory  7, 38, 44, 58, 67, 70, 127, 129, 158 Worcester jugs  1, 158 working class  63–6, 96–106 World Ceramics (Charleston)  8 Wright, Fannie  71 Writing Lesson (Collinson, 1855)  245 n.107 Wyatt, James  147 Wycherley, William  87 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard  89 Yixing teapot  91 Yonan, Michael  10, 142 Young, Hilary  5, 8, 9 Young Hussey Charging Old Toothless with an Impossibility, or the Cracked Pitcher, A (Sayer and Bennet, 1778)  153 Young Wife: First Stew (Spencer, 1854)  165 Zedner, Lucia  156 Zuroski, Eugenia  10

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Plate 1a–b  Richard Redgrave, The Governess, 1844, oil on canvas, 71.1 × 91.5 cm. Photo: The Maas Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images, V&A.

Plate 2a–b  Richard Redgrave, Country Cousins, 1847, oil paint on paper mounted on canvas, 82.5 × 107.3 cm. Presented by Robert Vernon 1847, Tate. Photo: Tate.

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Plate 3  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Rosa, 1867, watercolour, pencil and bodycolour on paper, 57 × 40.7 cm. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 4 Albert Joseph Moore, Apples, 1875. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 5  Albert Joseph Moore, Beads, 1875, oil on canvas, 29.2 × 50.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1982.10.

Plate 6 Albert Joseph Moore, A Sofa, 1875, oil on canvas, 28 × 50.8 cm. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 7  Dinner plate, willow pattern, attributed to Minton & Co., 1875–6, hard-paste porcelain, gilded, 2 × 26 cm. Gift of Daniel Morris and Denis Gallion, 1993-134-24, Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Plate 8  Sir John Everett Millais, Afternoon Tea (The Gossips), 1889, oil on canvas, 104 × 133.3 cm. Collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery. Gift of the Everett Family from the Everett Collection, in memory of Patricia Everett, 2009-334. Photo: Ernest Mayer of the Wag-Qaumajuq.

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Plate 9a–b Elgar Hicks, The Sinews of Old England, 1857, watercolour, graphite, gouache, gum arabic, 74.9 x 53 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Friends of British Art Fund, B2003.14.

Plate 10  Sir Edward Colby Burne-Jones, Cinderella, 1863, Transparent and opaque watercolour on paper, 66.7 × 30.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Anonymous gift in memory of Charlotte Beebe Wilbour (1833–1914), 32.409.

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Plate 11  Walter Crane’s New Toy Book, George Routledge and Sons: London, p. 7. Osbourne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library.

Plate 12  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Girl at Lattice, 1862, oil on canvas, 29.2 × 26.3 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Photo: © Fitzwilliam Museum.

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Plate 13  William Holman Hunt, Honest Labour Has a Comely Face, c. 1861, oil on panel, 30.4 × 20.3 cm. Private collection. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

Plate 14  Thomas Faed, A Time of War, 1876, oil on canvas, 136 × 174 cm. Gift of the Brockelback Family, 1893. © Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool.

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Plate 15  Frank Holl, Hushed, 1877, oil on canvas, 67 × 77 × 14 cm. Presented by Sir Henry Tate, 1894, Tate. Photo: Tate.

Plate 16  Frank Holl, Hope, 1883, oil on canvas, 84 × 112 cm. Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK. Photo: Southampton City Art Gallery/Bridgman Images.

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Plate 17  Hubert von Herkomer, Eventide: A Scene at the Westminster Union, 1878, oil on canvas, 110.5 × 1985 cm. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool. Photo: © National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 18a–b  Thomas Webster, A Tea Party, 1862, oil on panel, 50.8 × 61 cm. Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire, UK. Photo: © Harris Museum and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 19a–b  Joseph Clark, The Labourer’s Welcome, n.d., oil on canvas, 75 × 53.75 cm. Sheffield Galleries and Museum Trust, UK. Photo: Sheffield Museums Trust/ Bridgeman Images.

Plate 20  Sir Edward John Poynter, Portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones, 1870, oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 21a–b  William Holman Hunt, Lady Fairbairn with Her Children, 1864–5, oil on canvas, 214 × 147 cm. Torre Abbey, Torque, Devon. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

Plate 22  Mary Ellen Best, Dining Room at Langton, Family at Breakfast, c. 1832–3, watercolour, 20.7 cm × 33 cm. Private collection. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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Plate 23a  Minton, ‘Water Lily’ flowerpot, c. 1860, majolica, Brunk Auctions, 24.8 cm diameter.

Plate 23b Sir John Everett Millais, Trust Me, 1862, oil on canvas, 111.8 × 80 cm. Photo: © The Fine Art Society, London, UK/ Bridgeman Images.

Plate 24 Elizabeth Pearson Dalby, Interior of House Compton Basset, c. 1849, watercolour, 25 × 35 cm. Salisbury Museum, Salibury UK. Photo: Salisbury Museum/ Bridgman Images.

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Plate 25  William Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 1868, oil on canvas, 187 × 116.5 cm. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Photo: Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images.

Plate 26  Richard Redgrave, The Sempstress, 1846, oil paint on canvas, 63.9 × 766.9 cm. Presented by John Schaeffer, 2014. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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Plate 27  Edward Henry Corbould, Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser’s Dairy, 1861, watercolour, 76 × 56 cm. Royal Trust Collection. Photo: Royal Collection Trust/© His Majesty King Charles III, 2022.

Plate 28a–b  George Elgar Hicks, Woman’s Mission: Comfort of Old Age, 1862, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.8 cm. Purchased 2014. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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Plate 29a–b  Lilly Martin Spencer, Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses, 1856, oil on canvas, 76 × 63.3 cm. Brooklyn Museum, A. Augustus Healy Fund, 20.76.

Plate 30  Frederick George Cotman, One of the Family, 1880, oil on canvas, 274 × 172.72 cm. Purchased by the Walker Art Gallery from the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in 1880. © National Museums of Liverpool.

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Plate 31  James Campbell, Girl with Jug of Ale and Pipes, 1856, oil on panel, 30.7 × 30.5 cm. Purchased by the Walker Art Gallery in 1967. © National Museums of Liverpool.

Plate 32a–b  James Collinson, Home Again, 1856, oil paint on canvas, 82.7 × 11.55. Purchased 1985. Tate. Photo: Tate.

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