Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders
Seven Years War; the French regained control in 1779 and held the prize until 1783, when the island was returned to the British for the rest of its colonial history.
*Although it would surely have appalled her, Larpent was precisely articulating the pattern that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels later noted in The German Ideology: ‘The satisfaction of the first need…leads to new needs.’34
*The idea of tea as a luxury persisted—this particular tax was not lifted until 1964.
*This compares interestingly with coffee: in 1821 coffee consumption was less than 1 pound per head per year; in 1909 it was 0.71 pounds, while cocoa consumption was at 1.2 pounds per head per annum. Holland, by comparison, consumed 18 pounds of coffee per head per year.
*In 1787 Wedgwood produced a range of medallions promoting the abolition of slavery. They were blue on yellow jasper, with the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Men wore them as pins or buttons, or had them set on snuffbox lids; women as brooches or hairpins.44 It is good to know that Wedgwood, whose fortune in many ways was predicated directly from the import of sugar from the West Indian plantations, contributed his mite to the destruction of slavery. Slavery and abolition is a subject that fits all too well into a book on commodity, but it is one that I have, regretfully, had to leave out.
*This combination created more than grocery empires: in the 1650s there were 50 sugar refineries in Britain; by 1800 there were 150. These refineries, because of the processing method used, caught fire easily. High insurance premiums made some refiners club together to create their own insurance groups. One of these became the Phoenix Assurance Co. in 1782.46
†The expression, still used, if slightly old-fashioned, ‘I wouldn’t have X if it were given away free with a pound of tea’ comes from offers like these, which continued throughout the nineteenth century.
*Confusingly, in the early eighteenth century Bohea was the best grade of black tea; by the time Gye was advertising, ‘Bohea’ was used for the last, inferior, crop of the season.
*Slops were the leavings in a teacup—the dregs, and any stray tea leaves. They were traditionally emptied into a slop bowl, about the same size as the cup, before a second cup of tea was poured. This letter of Watts’s pre-dates the Oxford English Dictionary’s first cited use of the word by more than half a century.
†Some specialization seems to us today more outré than most: in 1772, women began to bleach their hands with arsenic; Wedgwood immediately began to promote his black basalt teapots by saying that the colour would make the hand holding the pot seem even whiter.53
*There had been pottery works for a couple of centuries in Burslem and four neighbouring villages: Tunstall, Hanley, Stoke and Longton. As they grew, they were collectively known as the Five Towns, and now make up Stoke-on-Trent. (Fenton is sometimes included, in which case they became, of course, the Six Towns.)
†Wedgwood’s spelling remained individual; I will refrain from noting each non-standard spelling, unless the meaning is unclear.
*Bentley’s have unfortunately not survived—perhaps the reason why all the innovation is attributed to Wedgwood.
*Sir William Hamilton was minister plenipotentiary to the court of Spain in Naples. A famous collector, he commissioned the enormously influential Les Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines (4 vols., dated 1766—7, but published 1767—76), which spread the neoclassical style across Europe. A year after publication of the first volume Wedgwood had named his new pottery works ‘Etruria’, after the Etruscans, and on the opening day he had thrown six black basalt ‘first-day vases’ based on engravings from the book.
†This service was for the Chesmenski Palace, built on La Grenouillie`re, or the Frog Marsh. Hence the pieces were decorated with frogs, and the entire service is commonly referred to as ‘the frog service’. Some of it is on display today at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
*One incidental feature of the Bath showroom was that the managers, William and Ann Ward, were the parents of Ann Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist and author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Ann Ward was the niece of Thomas Bentley, and Ann Radcliffe had grown up as a close friend of Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah, known to posterity as the mother of Charles Darwin.
*The government had many reasons to approve these trusts, apart from general improvement to trade: after 1745 it was suggested that the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, had managed to get as far as Derby during his unsuccessful attempt to regain the throne for the Stuarts in part because the poor quality of the roads meant that troops could not be dispatched quickly enough.73
*Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731—1802) was a doctor by profession and a natural philosopher by inclination. He lived in Lichfield, and was an active member of several provincial scientific societies, including the Botanical Society, the Derby Philosophical Society and the Lunar Society. The latter included among its members the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, his partner James Watt and the scientist Joseph Priestley, as well as Wedgwood and Bentley. Darwin was interested both intellectually and financially in the connection between technology and industry, producing plans for a ‘horizontal windmill’ to grind pigment for Wedgwood’s factory, as well as recommending to Wedgwood the acquisition of Boulton and Watt’s steam engine. He was considered expert enough in technical matters to be called as a witness, along with Watt, in one of the many disputes involving the patents of the cotton manufacturer Richard Arkwright’s carding and spinning machines.
*‘Parsley’ was after a parsley-patterned calico he designed early in his career.
*Duffers were people who sold bad-quality goods cheaply, pretending that they had been stolen or smuggled in order to explain their low prices. Dutch ovens were small brick or cast-iron stoves on legs, which were heated by charcoal.
3 The Ladies’ (and Gents’) Paradise: The Nineteenth-Century Shop
GROCERS HAD ORIGINALLY BEEN wholesalers, those who bought ‘in gross’; then they became luxury retailers, purveyors of imported delicacies from abroad—tea, coffee,