Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/151

 the ceramic art. Even if he has left us no works which we can call wholly his own, we know that he was a practical thrower, an expert modeller and an ingenious designer of new shapes; and that his sense of beauty, his power of imagination, his shrewdness, skill, foresight, perseverance and knowledge enabled him to attain, in spite of the absence of school learning, an altogether unique position. His companionship and advice were sought by men of the highest cultivation. But his reputation in his own day and in his own neighbourhood was due, not only to appreciation of the work which was the main occupation of his life, but to the generosity, public spirit, and high personal character, which were so conspicuous in Wedgwood. The most attractive products of his kilns were imitated, sometimes with a fair measure of success, by a host of potters during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, but the merit of initiating and carrying out on a very large scale a great technical and artistic development of English earthenware remains with Wedgwood. His productions, with those of his immediate predecessors, his contemporaries, his rivals, imitators and successors, should be compared and contrasted not only in such public collections as those of the South Kensington Museum, the Museum of Practical Geology, and the British Museum, in London, but also by the study of the Tangye Collection at Birmingham, the Mayer Collection at Liverpool, the Hulme Collection at Burslem, and the Joseph Collection in Nottingham Castle.

Wedgwood's contributions to literature (other than private letters) are few. There is sound common-sense in his 'Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery,' published in 1783 on the occasion of bread riots, and in another epistle to workmen relating to their entering the service of foreign manufacturers. His remarks on the bas-reliefs of the Portland vase are not valuable, while his criticism (1775) of Richard Champion's petition for an extension of a patent for making porcelain would have been differently worded had he been acquainted with the real merits of Champion's case (for a review of the matter, see Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, 1873, pp. 149-51).

On 16 Jan. 1783 Wedgwood was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He contributed two papers on chemical subjects to the 'Philosophical Transactions' (1783 and 1790), and three (in 1782, 1784, and 1786) on the construction and use of a pyrometer, an ingenious invention for determining and registering high temperatures by the measurement of the shrinkage suffered by cylinders of prepared clay in the furnace or kiln. This method, though still employed in some potteries, affords irregular results. On 4 May 1786 Wedgwood was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He exhibited to the society on 6 May 1790 an early copy of the Barberini vase and read a paper thereon. In the same year he retired from some of the more arduous duties of his business. During this and the three subsequent years his health gave frequent occasions for anxiety to his friends, but he was able to entertain a succession of congenial visitors at Etruria Hall, to make longer excursions from home than before, and to divert himself by improving his grounds and by collecting books, engravings and objects of natural history. But after a brief illness, the nature of which admitted from the outset of no hope of recovery, Josiah Wedgwood died at Etruria Hall on 3 Jan. 1795, at the age of sixty-four. His grave is in Stoke-on-Trent churchyard; in the chancel there is a monument to his memory by Flaxman, with an inscription, which tells us that he 'converted a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant art and an important part of national commerce.' Wedgwood left more than half a million of money besides his large and flourishing business. His will, made on 2 Nov. 1793, was proved on 2 July 1795 (P. C. C. 484 Newcastle). He divided his substance mainly among his children, but did not forget the assistant who, since 1781, had helped him in his scientific work, leaving to Alexander Chisholm an annuity of 20l., an immediate gift of ten guineas 'as a testimony of regard;' and further desiring his 'son Josiah to make the remainder of his life easy and comfortable.'

On 25 Jan. 1764, at Astbury in Cheshire, Wedgwood married Sarah Wedgwood; daughter of Richard Wedgwood of Spen Green, Cheshire. Mrs. Wedgwood and her husband were cousins in the third degree, their common great-great-grandfather being the Gilbert Wedgwood previously named. She was born on 18 Aug. 1734, and died on 15 Jan. 1815. From the union there sprang seven children, three sons and four daughters. The eldest child, Susannah, married Robert Waring Darwin, son of Dr. Erasmus Darwin [q. v.], and father of Charles Robert Darwin [q. v.] Wedgwood's third son, Thomas, is noticed separately. His second son, Josiah, had nine children. One of these was Hensleigh Wedgwood [q. v.], 