Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (10 page)

Barely pausing for breath, he had suggested in just a few lines many of the major new selling techniques of the century: advertising in the press—by paid advertisements, by auction announcements and by getting friends to insert ‘puff ‘ pieces; delivering trade cards to customers and potential customers; various forms of exhibition—by displaying a service he had made for the King, with its concommitant ‘royal’ publicity, and more conventionally by auction and in his showrooms; highlighting new goods to attract the fashionable; and redesigning his showrooms, again to attract the fashionable by novelty. And this is a single letter from the hundreds that poured out over the decades.
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Wedgwood understood the benefits of publicity in all its varied forms. His most tried and trusted method was to get nobility (if royalty
were not available) to promote his wares for him. In 1776 he had some new bas-relief vases to sell. He fired off yet another missive to Bentley: ‘Sir William Hambleton,
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our very good Friend is in Town—Suppose you shew him some of the Vases, & a few other Connoisieurs not only to have their advice, but to have the advantage of their puffing them off against the next Spring, as they will, by being consulted, and flatter’d agreeably, as you know how, consider themselves as a sort of parties in the affair, & act accordingly.’
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To make sure of success, before the vases went on sale Wedgwood and Bentley had private viewings for Mrs Chetwynd (their conduit to Queen Charlotte), the dukes of Northumberland and Marlborough, the earls of Stamford and Dartmouth, Lords Bessborough, Percy, Clanbrazil, Carlisle and Torrington, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and, by comparison, the rather humble-sounding MP Mr Harbord Harbord (who was, however, later to become the 1st Baron Suffield).
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‘Fashion,’ as Wedgwood recognized, ‘is infinitely superior to
merit
in many respects…It is plain from a thousand instances that if you have a favourite child you wish the public to fondle & take notice of, you have only to make a choice of proper sponcers. If you are lucky in them no matter what the brat is, black, brown or fair, its fortune is made.’
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And with his ‘sponcers’ Wedgwood started at the top, believing that the greatest in the land would influence the lesser: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile ‘till authoris’d by their betters—by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’
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Queen Charlotte had started him on his way with Queensware; after a queen, who but an empress? In 1770 Catherine the Great had commissioned a Queensware service decorated with wheat husks. Three years later came a greater challenge: she wanted a service for state occasions: a 680-piece dinner service and a 264-piece dessert service, plus tureens, salvers, fruit baskets, ‘glaciers’ (ice-cream bowls) etc. to accompany them.
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Each piece was to have on it an image of an actual country house, or a park or garden, or a palace, or even industrial ‘sights’ such as the Plymouth
docks or the Bridgewater Canal. The cost was fantastic—not for the manufacture, but for an artist to be sent around the country to make drawings, and then for the 1,200 drawings to be worked up so they could be transferred to the dishes. But Wedgwood was a born publicist, and he had planned a
coup de théâtre
—he would show the entire service before it was shipped off to Russia, and, whatever he had lost on the manufacture, ‘it would bring an immense number of people of fashion into our Rooms—would fully complete our notoriety to the whole Island, & help us greatly, no doubt, in the sale of our goods, both useful & ornamental. It would confirm the consequence we have attain’d, & increase it, by showing that we are employ’d in a much higher scale than other Manufacturers.’
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His one anxiety was that some of his noble patrons would be offended that their houses were not included, or were put ‘upon a small piece, or not flattering it sufficiently’. To make the event even more exclusive, admission to the showroom would be by ticket. It was all a great success, with the King and Queen of Sweden paying a special visit, as well as Queen Charlotte, Prince Ernst of Mecklenberg, and hordes of the aristocracy. No one was aggrieved to find their great houses represented on some of the smaller dishes; on the contrary they came time and again to point their lasting fame out to friends.
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The difference between Wedgwood and earlier craftsmen who had relied on the nobility and gentry for their livings was that, as far as Wedgwood and Bentley were concerned, the nobility were a means to an end:

The Great People have had these Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the
Middling Class
of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior, in number to the great, and though a
great price
was, I believe, at first necessary to make the vases esteemed
Ornament for Palaces
, that reason no longer exists. Their character is established and the middling People would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced price.
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Once that principle was established, it was not surprising that Wedgwood thought he could sell anything to anyone. In the 1780s his works could not keep up with the retail demand, and he bought in ware that other manufacturers had been unable to sell. He slapped a higher price on it, together with his name, and everything was snatched off the shelves in
a fashionable frenzy. It was the ultimate marketing triumph: to sell goods no one else could shift—and at a higher price.

Wedgwood used every possible route to reach the ‘middling People’. There had long been a reluctance for luxury trades in general to advertise in the newspapers, because there was no control over how their advertisements would appear: auctions—of houses, pictures or just household goods—cockfights, draper’s shops, patent medicines, bug-killers, carefully worded advertisements for the ‘removal of obstructions’ (abortifacients), all appeared pell-mell, one after the other, in column after column. The newspapers, meanwhile, were doing their best to make advertisers believe that their pages were the haunts of none but the very finest manufacturers and retailers. In 1757 the
Liverpool Chronicle
, in its first edition, suggested,

It is not many years since it was thought mean and disreputable, in any tradesmen of worth and credit, to advertise the sales of his commodities in a public Newspaper, but as those apprehensions were founded only on custom, and not on reason, it is become now fashionable for very eminent tradesmen to publish their business, and the peculiar goods wherein they deal, in the News Papers, by way of Advertisement; nor can any one make appear what disgrace there can be in this, for do not the great trading corporations apprize the public of their sales in the public News Papers?
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Naturally, the newspapers would say that: they had a vested interest in advertisers believing them. But many manufacturers could not be swayed. For years Wedgwood and Bentley preferred to use ‘puffs’, articles ostensibly written by the newspaper’s own journalists, but in reality supplied to it by the subject of the piece or his friends. Wedgwood complained to Bentley, ‘There is a most famous puff for Boulton & Fothergill in the St James’s Chronicle of the 9th & for Mr Cox likewise, How the Author could have the assurance to leave us out I cannot conceive. Pray get another article in the next paper to complete the Triumvirate.’
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Wedgwood constantly came up with new marketing and publicity ploys. When he was given permission to copy the early-first-century Barberini vase, recently acquired by the Duchess of Portland (and more commonly known today as the Portland Vase), he took orders for a small run of expensive reproductions, promising his customers that if
the results were not satisfactory the purchasers would not be required to pay. This was a good marketing ploy, rather than an attack of nerves—the Great Publicist was saying, ‘The original is almost unreproducible; when I create a good reproduction, therefore, it makes me a great manufacturer, and the vases more valuable.’ This was one small example of his endless marketing ingenuity. He also sent his London agent to collect outstanding payments while carrying new samples, to show rich but dilatory customers what they could have once they had paid up. He made perfectly standard goods seem like limited lines: he warned that his ‘serpent handled antique vases’ should not ‘be seen till the others are all sold, & then raise the price of them 1/ each’; then he countermanded that—instead of just making the price higher, the London showroom should raise the price even further, and ‘never mind their being thought dear, [but] do not keep them open in the rooms, shew them only to the People of Fashion’.
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He pioneered inertia selling, by sending parcels of his goods—some worth as much as £70—to aristocratic families across Europe, spending £20,000 (altogether the equivalent of several million today), and following up each parcel with a request for payment or the return of the goods. Within a couple of years he had received payment from all but three families.
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He was an endless fountain of ideas—boxes of samples for distance orders; special terms for a first order; French-, German-, Italian- and Dutch-speaking clerks to deal with export correspondence. By 1777 he had travelling salesmen, and by 1790 he had drawn up a ‘Travellers’ Book’ for them, complete with rules of behaviour and commercial systems.
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He foresaw selfservice, telling his London staff to put the inferior pieces ‘in one of the best places of your lower Shop, where people can come at them, & serve themselves’.
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He had trade cards printed up saying that Wedgwood ‘delivers his goods safe and carriage free…as he sells for ready money only’: he offered free London delivery for goods paid in cash, and promised those outside London that if their orders arrived damaged he would pay for the replacements. Some of this was genuine; much more was perception. The middle classes could buy his goods only for ready money, although the upper classes still received long credit. He had advertised as a novelty that his customers were ‘at liberty to return the whole, or any part of the goods they order (paying the carriage back) if they do not find them agreeable to their wishes’, but most customers had routinely returned goods to their suppliers if they didn’t like them,
and they complained vociferously if things arrived broken. Still, the advertisements stood, and drew in new customers by their perceived innovation.

Wedgwood’s showrooms, too, were something new. Small producer/retailers had combined workshops and selling areas, but it was unusual for a manufacturer of Wedgwood’s size to sell directly to the public. He opened a London showroom in 1768, and he had showrooms in Bath from 1772, and Dublin from 1773.
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He saw his showrooms as places of exciting novelty and display, where dinner services were laid out on tables, and

a much greater variety of setts of vases should decorate the Walls, and both these articles may, every few days, be so alter’d, revers’d & transform’d as to render the whole a new scene, even to the same Company, every time they shall bring their friends to visit us.

I need not tell you the many good effects this must produce, when business & amusement can be made to go hand in hand. Every new show, Exhibition or rarity soon grows stale in London, & is no longer regarded, after the first sight, unless utility, or some such variety as I have hinted at above continues to recommend it to their notice…
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But perhaps Wedgwood’s most astute move had nothing to do with selling goods at all. When Wedgwood first set up in business in Burslem, there were three ways for him to send his goods to market: by road for twenty miles, then along the River Weaver to Liverpool; by road for forty miles, to Bridgnorth, then by the River Severn to Bristol; or by road for forty miles, then via the River Trent to Hull. To get one ton of goods from Burslem to the Weaver cost 18
s.
; from Burslem to the Trent, 34
s.
Whatever route was chosen, the goods had to make the initial journey by road—and a ‘road’ in the eighteenth century was not what we would call a road. The main road out of Burslem was in such poor condition that it was permanently impassable to wheeled vehicles of any kind; everything had to be carried in and out by packhorse. This was not an unusual state for roads across the country. A contemporary described
the road from Knutsford, in Cheshire, to Newcastle under Lyme: ‘In general [it was] a paved causeway, as narrow as can be conceived, and cut into perpetual holes, some of them two feet deep measured on the level…and wherever the country is the least sandy, the pavement [that is, the road surface] is discontinued, and the ruts and holes most execrable.’
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And that was a good road: the road between Newcastle and Burslem was worse, partly because until 1720 the freeholders of Burslem had been entitled to dig clay from any unenclosed land, which included the main roads. In the early nineteenth century much of this had still not been filled in.
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John Ogilby, in his
The Traveller’s Guide, or, a Most Exact Description of the Roads of England
(1711), had called Burslem one of the most inaccessible places in England. It was hardly surprising that nearly 30 per cent of Wedgwood’s goods were broken in transit.

Wedgwood, as so often, was apparently lucky in being in the right place at the right time. When the novelist and critic Tobias Smollett first travelled to England from Scotland, in 1739, there were no wagons on the roads anywhere between Edinburgh and Newcastle upon Tyne, because there were no roads that were good enough. The roads across the islands were in such a terrible state because their maintenance was still governed by the Highways Act of 1555. This act gave control over the roads to each individual parish, but it did not give parishes the right to levy a rate on residents to pay for professional survey or repair. Instead, those whose land was valued above £50 were required to lend a horse or an ox and a wagon for four days annually, while those householders whose land was rated at a lesser level were required to give four days’ labour on the roads a year, unpaid, to be supervised by an unpaid surveyor. It was unrealistic to expect good work or good materials from those supplying them unrecompensed, and now there was the added unfairness that these locally maintained roads were increasingly used for trans-parish transport between towns and cities. The matter of unpaid labour and co-opted transport was not addressed until the Highways Act of 1835, when finally parishes were permitted to use local rates to pay for professional surveyors and paid labourers. In the meantime, turnpike trusts were created, often formed by groups of manufacturers and local merchants who would most benefit from better-maintained roads. From 1706 individual Turnpike Acts were granted by Parliament: in exchange for improvements and maintenance on the roads for a period of (initially) twenty-one years, each trust could set up toll gates and charge
for road usage. The tolls in turn were used to pay for the surveyor, treasurer, clerk and labourers to build the road. Between 1750 and 1800, more than 1,600 trusts were formed;
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by the mid-1830s, 1,116 turnpike trusts in England and Wales supervised 22,000 miles of roads, out of a total of 126,770 miles of parish highways. Turnpikes now made up nearly 20 per cent of the road system of England and Wales.
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