Book review: The Potter’s Hand By AN Wilson

Published on 25/08/2012 04:20

The Potter’s Hand is a rich and rather wonderful novel. It is a family saga and the story of the great Wedgwood pottery.

The Potter’s Hand By AN Wilson

Atlantic Books, 505pp, 
£17.99

It is a social novel, about the transformation of England in the second half of the 18th century as canals were dug to revolutionise transport, and mills and factories blackened the landscape. But it is also intellectual history; Wilson is concerned to show how the ideas of the Enlightenment changed man’s relationship to the natural world and to religion.

The central figure is Josiah Wedgwood, known to his Staffordshire workers as “Owd Wooden Leg”. The novel begins with a scene recounting the amputation of his leg by Dr Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles of The Origin of Species. The doctor’s son will later marry Josiah’s daughter, Sukey. From the loins of Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin would spring a great intellectual dynasty. Josiah’s son, Tom, a friend of Coleridge, would be a pioneer of photography. Other descendants included the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, the historian C V Wedgwood, and innumerable Cambridge dons.

Wilson ranges widely, revelling in the amplitude of his story. We meet Voltaire and the Tsarina of Russia, Catherine the Great, who commissioned a magnificent, 1,000-piece dinner service from Wedgwood. We spend time in America as the 13 colonists break out in rebellion. Josiah’s nephew Tom Byerley, trying to make a career as an actor in New York, is commissioned by his uncle to buy the white clay he needs for the Tsarina’s commission from the Cherokee Indians. He travels there, falls in love with a Cherokee girl, witnesses a massacre of Indians by the American colonists, finds himself briefly in the rebel army, then returns home, by which time Josiah has found another source for the clay. Great stuff.

Though Wilson has taken the liberty of making a few adjustments in chronology – one or two perhaps not deliberate – he is very good on the politics of the time. Josiah and his progressive friends are pro-American, unlike the old Tory Dr Johnson who asked why it was we heard “the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes”. For Josiah, a self-made man who, despite his wealth and renown, doesn’t have the vote, the leaders of the rebellion express the rational spirit of the Enlightenment. The decay of superstition and the march of science are together reforming the world and ushering in a new age of expanding prosperity. Naturally they will also welcome the French Revolution when it breaks out in 1789, and are at one with the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, who hailed that event as the best and greatest thing in the history of the world.

One might dwell long on the felicities of Wilson’s treatment of his public themes – he is, of course, a notable biographer and good popular historian as well as a novelist. One might linger also on the admirable way in which he describes the potter’s craft or art, and the excitement of the work. He was brought up in Staffordshire and his father was managing director of Wedgwood, retiring from the firm before gross mismanagement destroyed it. Yet, while he is interested in ideas, and quite rightly uses the story of Sir Josiah Wedgwood to explain and dramatise the intellectual and economic revolution of the second half of the 18th century, he’s also a novelist whose best work has explored the difficulties of relationships, the nature of marriage, the incompatibilities that exist, or develop, between people who love each other. And this is the case here. There is nothing better in the novel than his treatment of Josiah’s marriage with his cousin Sally.

It was an arranged marriage (as most marriages were then). There is affection there from the start, but Sally dislikes the physical side – Josiah is demanding but unsatisfying, and eventually repulsive, in bed. Sally is neurasthenic and complicated while he is straightforward. She is an intellectual, while Josiah, despite his intellectual interests, is essentially a man of action. Yet Wilson shows, with acute understanding, how over the years, they come to depend on each other, more than they might have supposed possible, and thus friendship deepens.

The Potter’s Hand is Wilson’s first novel for five years. In the interval he has written a history of modern times, and a study of the Elizabethans, a book about Dante and a short biography of Hitler.

Yet I would suppose that he has been brooding on this novel for a long time. It is one of these books which gives the impression of having matured in the imagination for years. One can’t, in a short review, do justice to its abundance. It is a cornucopia of a novel, and surely the best thing Wilson has done in fiction since the Lampitt Chronicles he wrote in the Nineties. It’s a novel wide in scope, rich in detail, and deep in understanding.

ALLAN MASSIE