For Potters, Read Wedgwood: On Iris Moon’s “Melancholy Wedgwood”

THANKS TO AN ARCANE quirk of British pension law, the Wedgwood Museum in Staffordshire toppled briefly into bankruptcy in 2010. To pay back its £135 million deficit, the museum faced the prospect of liquidating its holdings—auctioning off the pots, plates, and egg-holders designed by Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) at his pottery factory, Etruria, several miles down the road. Stoke-on-Trent’s MP at the time, Tristram Hunt, campaigned fervently on the museum’s behalf: Let’s keep England’s valuables here, where they belong, rather than sending them out across the ocean—God forbid! Backed by a popular public funding campaign, the Wedgwood Museum was saved by an eleventh hour deal and its holdings gifted to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2012.

Soon after his stint as a Labour MP, Hunt’s unlikely—if quintessentially ruling-class—professional path would deliver him to a directorship of the V&A. As an homage to the potter who had helped to pave his way there, Hunt produced a biography, The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood, in 2021. The book cast its central character as the Steve Jobs of his day—entrepreneurial, visionary, and a “civic republican” to boot. Still, there was more to Hunt’s story than a study of Wedgwood’s “business acumen.” The book suggests we treat Wedgwood as a special prism through which to observe phenomena emergent in the long 18th century: globalization, modern capitalism, industrialization, and the “contours of British nationhood.”

Hunt’s introduction illustrates Wedgwood’s connectedness within this nexus with a striking example. At the beginning of Australia’s colonization in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillips sent samples of white clay to botanist and expeditioner Sir Joseph Banks, who then forwarded them to Wedgwood with the hope that the clay from Sydney Cove could become the “basis of a valuable manufacture of our infant colony.” Wedgwood’s response to Banks was the Sydney Cove Medallion, a jasperware piece (later turned series of pieces) made with the clay, depicting a classical scene. Hope, figured as a woman in flowing robes, “encourag[es] Art and Labour under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant colony.”

Nearly 150 years earlier, the writer Eliza Meteyard’s biography The Life of Josiah Wedgwood from His Private Correspondence and Family Papers (1865) opens with a strikingly similar vignette. Meteyard, the most prolific of Wedgwood’s biographers, describes matter-of-factly the process by which Wedgwood came to possess great volumes of porcelain clay from South Carolina, known for its rich alluvial deposits. Wedgwood dispatched a fixer named Mr. Griffiths to the hard-to-reach Cherokee territory, 300 miles away from Charleston, where this clay would supposedly be found in great quantities. With the help of a Cherokee woman who had previously been “stolen from her nation,” Griffiths successfully bargained, collected, and then shipped the clay onward to England.

Wedgwood is known by many today, above all, for his creation of the antislavery medallion, an iconic piece made for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787. It depicts a Black man kneeling in chains with his hands reaching up towards the sky. Inscribed along its outer rim are the words: “Am I not a man and a brother?” One can’t help but wonder if the clay used to make Wedgwood’s most famous series of medallions came from any slave-holding territories—or from stolen land. Hunt’s perspective—Whiggish and wistful—often fails to register the historical irony. Wedgwood: Not simply a star witness to 18th-century Britain’s imperial ambition but also one of its canniest beneficiaries.

Melancholy Wedgwood (2024), Iris Moon’s experimental biography of Wedgwood, looks at its material with more winks, more circumspection. As opposed to the compatriotic views of Hunt and Meteyard, Moon’s stance is decidedly anti-nationalist. The book’s introduction closes with the script of a conversation Moon held with her parents about how her grandmother—who grew up under Japanese rule in Korea—could have learned the word “melancholy.” The word finds its way into the book, crawling in through a trapdoor, via tangential association with “the grandmotherly.” “[T]hose who collect Wedgwood are grandmothers,” Moon remarks, “gray matrons who fill curio cabinets with the pastel tones of jasperware, pairing them with doilies and tea sets.” One day, when Moon is on a phone call with her own grandmother, the latter exclaims, “[A]h, melancolie!” Moon’s mother explains that her grandmother could not have heard it from the English: “For Koreans, there was no romance of England.”

From its association with the grandmotherly, the term becomes the book’s capricious key concept. Moon asks what it might mean to look at Wedgwood’s life and relics in “melancholic alignment” with postcolonial subjects, injecting disillusionment into the hero-worship of his prior profilers, as well as an active, searching first-person vantage point that reflects sardonically on its own presence in a Wedgwood biography. Moon, curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is surprised to find herself here, writing about this man—obsessed with him, even. While other recent pieces of experimental historical or biographical writing have dealt with there being too little material on its chosen subject (as with Saidiya Hartman’s reanimations of archival traces), Moon’s problem is the opposite. There is too much information, a great deal of analysis, and yet—still—none of it seems to speak frankly about Wedgwood, to capture his weirdness.

The task at hand is, accordingly, neither additive nor reparative. Moon is as wary of her predecessors’ researched portraits of Wedgwood as she is of any claim to novelty. Deftly avoiding academic clichés around filling “gaps in the literature,” she suggests that there are not holes to be filled so much as there are variegated vantage points that might be laid atop one another. Association, not innovation, is the name of the game here. While the book finds nothing much new, it’s the rearrangement of fact and the insertion of the author’s personality that reanimate its well-worn subject. A ceramic Frankenstein emerges.

The book is split into four chapters, organized thematically rather than chronologically. The first looks, with a considerable effort to read disability metaphorically, at Wedgwood’s loss of his leg, shortly after the opening of Etruria, and its replacement by a wooden one, alongside an inquiry into the importance of handles, urns, and vessels—things that hold, and things that hold one onto them, ornaments and objects. Wedgwood’s experience of his own body as fragile is what gave way, Moon suggests, to the “durability” of vessels made en masse by means of new industrial techniques developed at Etruria. “If the body could not be trusted to keep in steady motion,” she writes conjecturally of Wedgwood’s rationale, “then other spaces of production would have to compensate for this loss.” While there’s certainly no romance of England, there’s another kind of romance at work in phrases of this kind: the roving romance of association. Are we to understand that the advent of the modern factory system, the development of production lines, and the discipline of workers are partially to do with Josiah Wedgwood’s loss of leg? That’s beside the point. Coquettish open-endedness is the book’s MO.

Moon’s readings in the following chapter are more captivating and convincing. She looks at Wedgwood by looking at his peer, a self-taught painter of horses and landscapes named George Stubbs. Stubbs, at cost to his reputation as a painter of English national heritage, decided to begin painting his scenes on Wedgwood’s porcelain; the Royal Academy dropped him for crudely foraying into the decorative arts. Moon’s goal is to fully estrange his decision (“Stubbs painting on Wedgwood is weird”) so that we might make sense of it. The chapter zigzags from ovals to wombs to eggs featured in Stubbs’s paintings, and then back to ovals—its main refrain. She considers Stubbs’s first career as an anatomical artist at a hospital in York, where he drew babies in wombs, creatively arguing that these illustrations provide context for understanding his turn to ceramics. The oval is a “primal scene” for Stubbs, “a cooked space born from pressure” that he returned to again and again.

The third chapter is governed by a similarly conspiratorial logic: this time, brought to bear on the antislavery medallion itself, of which we know—Moon reminds us—surprisingly little. We do not know who its intended recipients were, or how it was distributed. These unknown variables allow us to prod inquisitively at one of the book’s other main themes—namely, “the politics of melancholy” and Wedgwood’s position “within a transatlantic constellation of events.” “The medallion,” Moon writes, “brings the Black Atlantic to the doorstep of Etruria.” Wedgwood is displaced momentarily here in favor of focus on his contemporary Olaudah Equiano, the writer, abolitionist, adventurer, and formerly enslaved African who penned his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Running throughout the chapter, alongside Wedgwood and Equiano, is a reflection on the color of Wedgwood’s proprietary jasperware, and its blue color—the same blue, Moon tells us later on, as if pointing to red strings on a murder map, that was associated with melancholy by Goethe.

The melancholic is further embodied in the figure of Wedgwood’s youngest son, the primary focus of the final chapter. Tom, a queer depressive, was a promising inventor in his own right, whose experiments contributed to the advent of modern photography. (One of his early experiments involved rubbing two quartz pebbles together to produce light via frottage.) In Tom, Moon finds a proxy. He was a person whose rebellious “fascination with the eccentric detail” flew in the face of his father’s systematicity; if Wedgwood was a man who was extraordinarily in step with the spirit of his times, Tom was his shadowy underbelly. His desires “did not align with the ideals of success, industrial progress, and the sublimation of masculine identity into the idea of empire.” Describing her own method as much as Tom’s, Moon summarizes: “It’s all about the incidentals.”

Sometimes the incidental connections drawn between Moon’s subjects feel jumpy enough that the book’s paragraphs transmogrify into inert curios—the text flashes before us briefly as a collection of oddities, fit for a cabinet. It’s saved, however, from meandering disarray (perhaps the same path Tom paves bouncing across Europe and then to the West Indies just before his death) by the charm and wit of Moon’s voice. Her interest in the subject—genuine and self-effacing—acts as the glue holding these reams of disparate, minute observations together. As with Equiano’s “interesting narrative,” interest here approaches the sense that Sianne Ngai has inspected: a judgment lying somewhere at the way station between affect and desire. Ngai would perhaps say that Wedgwood is the object of Moon’s “inquisitiveness, curiosity, wonder” and that the very indeterminacy of this interest, palpable throughout Moon’s anti-narrative, “alerts us precisely to what we do not have a concept for (yet).”

Moon’s resistance to conceptual capture, insistence on a peripheral position, and embrace of a scattershot approach to historical record are characteristic reverent-irreverences of postcolonial theory. Two of Moon’s main references are Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Ian Baucom’s book on Atlantic modernity and the Zong slave ship, and Anne Anlin Cheng’s Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, both published in the early 2000s. The focus on melancholy in Moon’s book reinvigorates the literary-critical framework in which Baucom and Cheng worked, one that has been somewhat submerged in recent years in favor of a historiographic approach that emphasizes the material collaborations between the slave trade, colonialism, and capitalism. Wedgwood, from the purview of this latter “New Histories of Capitalism” approach, would be drawn as a historical actor whose papers, archives, and pots produce the tangibly real relics of the coordination between colonialism and capitalism. By calling on more literary-minded antecedents as points of reference instead, Moon forces us to look at Wedgwood precisely as a symbol—as one of his own medallions. “Rather than sentiment,” Moon writes, “melancholy […] seems to constitute the more relevant framework for looking at Wedgwood as a symbol not just of capitalist progress but of the splinters of its injustice, and of its potential undoing.”

“The abolitionists were not radicals,” Eric Williams reminds us in his seminal book Capitalism and Slavery (1944). “In their attitude to domestic problems they were reactionary.” In part, this was precisely because they tended to favor sentiment and symbol over concrete action. The Methodists, Williams writes in summary, gave workers “Bibles instead of bread.” Williams describes the English abolitionists—or, as he ironically calls them, “the Saints”—as essentially duplicitous: “Wilberforce was familiar with all that went on in the hold of a slave ship but ignored what went on at the bottom of a mineshaft.” This goes beyond a melancholic disposition, the “disruptive sense of loss” that—as Moon has it—lurks within 18th-century ideas of labor and industry, that circulates via Wedgwood and his set.

Rather, this was a class of Englishmen who lived an absurd contradiction that was experienced as morally admirable. Later in the text, Williams discusses a letter that Wedgwood received from arch-abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1793 with an offer to buy shares of his stake in the Sierra Leone Company, which sought to bolster “legitimate commerce” with Africa. The example underlines the interconnectedness of abolitionism and British entrepreneurial enterprise. These abolitionists were also factory owners, capitalists. There was money to be made.

To remember this fact, basic as it is, is to recall the lives of the factory workers at Etruria and the industrial pottery industry that it occasioned—short-lived and brutal, ruled not by melancholy but by rheum and phlegm. Published only two years after Meteyard’s Wedgwood biography, Karl Marx’s Capital Vol 1. would describe the situation of the potteries of Staffordshire in the same breath as the cotton trade in his analysis of surplus populations: “For slave-trade read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany.” Paying lip service to “the inventor of modern pottery,” Wedgwood, Marx quotes at length the report from a doctor in Staffordshire in 1860, nearly a century after the establishment of Wedgwood’s Etruria:

The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally.They are […] phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and kidneys, and by rheumatism.

Wedgwood’s legacy, his status as the inventor of factory pottery, includes this too. Sometimes physical reality encroaches upon the symbolic, coughs it up.