Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and
indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice
of the Queen--Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full
development of that "cream" ware whose first beginnings had dawned on
his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known
the "Queen's Ware," and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might
call himself "Potter to the Queen."
And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered
a "jasper dip," and he invented a special kind of ware of which he
made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for
Wedgwood's vases. "A violent vase mania," he called it himself. The
mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened
showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as
great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself
to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned
beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation
against the curse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro
chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure:
"Am I not a Man and a Brother?"
Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he
had been as a boy--hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand
foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty
study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays
labelled and classified.
Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He
would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing
"scamped." Well did the workmen know the "thud" of his wooden leg on the
floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any
article he did not think perfect.
"That won't do for Josiah Wedgwood!" he would say.
As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds
and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it
taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs,
for he was very particular about having it often renewed. Partial
blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his
perseverance never failed.
As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his
family noted his failing powers--not of mind, but of body. Asthma was
added to his other sufferings.
"I am becoming an old man," he wrote. "Age and infirmity overtake me,
and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than
increase the objects of my attention."
The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his
jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his
sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left
the better for his passage through it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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