Although hand skills continued, science and technology were advancing on all fronts. Pottery and porcelain were soon to prove a field for industrialisation. While British factories could not yet match Meissen and Sevres, attractive and popular pieces were made. Highly decorated soft-paste porcelain figures were still made by Chelsea (for tables, mantelshelves and cabinets), now with coloured and gilded scrolls instead of the earlier mounds forming the base. Tiny figures known as ‘toys’ were made to hold scent, needles and bonbons. Earthenware figures and Toby jugs were made in the Staffordshire potteries to appeal to a mass market.

Chelsea also made vases and teawares with painted panels on richly coloured grounds.

Derby Porcelain Company was making fine figures and tablewares, and around the late 176os it absorbed the ailing Chelsea and Bow factories. The Worcester company excelled in porcelain vases and tableware, using every fashionable style and becoming noted especially for blue fish-scale-patterned grounds. Worcester also made numerous wares with transfer-printed pastoral and Classical scenes in black, red, purple, blue or sepia.

It was with tableware that Josiah Wedgwood made his first impact. Born into a Staffordshire family of potters, Wedgwood had practical experience, but he also had a pioneering spirit and a keen nose for business. Tea had become the regular drink of all classes and Wedgwood’s Queen’s Ware exploited the huge market for inexpensive teawares.

Antique Collector MagazineNext Wedgwood developed a fine, hard, black stoneware — basaltes — and then the Classically inspired jasperware that is most readily associated with his name. He used it for a wide variety of objects, practical and decorative — urns, dishes, pots for the dressing table, buttons, bracelets, furniture plaques, and even souvenir portrait cameos.

Wedgwood adopted industrial methods to produce more goods at lower prices, but he also pursued customers among the rich and powerful (including Queen Charlotte and the Empress of Russia) to gain prestige for his products. By the end of his life, his pottery was being exported worldwide.

Hard Times for Solid Silver

Matthew Boulton was a man with inventive zest to match Wedgwood’s. He started out in Birmingham with a workshop-based company making metal buttons, buckles and the like and, by exploiting new techniques and inventions, ended up with a huge industry.

Boulton developed an industrial process for making ormolu objects and high-quality mounts that the best cabinet-makers used. He also used factory methods to increase the production of Sheffield plate. This had been invented in 1742 by Thomas Bolsover, who fused a thin layer of silver on top of a copper ingot before rolling. Its use grew greatly after 1758 when Joseph Hancock developed a lapped edge, which hid the copper. Many items were made in the plate, those for food being tinned inside until the 176os when the copper was coated with silver on both sides.

Suddenly a huge range of items previously made from solid silver — such as tankards, teapots, coffee pots, snuffboxes, inkwells, candlesticks and cake baskets — could be made in fashionable style and sold at a third of the price of silver. Many silversmiths fell upon hard times, although the best craftsmen still found a market for beautifully produced work.

The style of the day particularly lent itself to factory-production methods. Shapes were symmetrical, based on the circle, oval (often angled into a hexagon or octagon) and square. Teapots were in these shapes, with C-scroll handles and straight spouts. Sugar bowls, tureens and salt cellars were of shallow urn shape, with domed lids and graceful upward sweeps towards the handles. Decoration was regular Classical motifs, mostly in relief but sometimes in the shallow faceted bright-cut engraving that sparkles more than deep cuts.

In cutlery, the fork now had four prongs. Fork and spoon handles, previously curved up at the end, now curved down — the style known as Old English — and the pieces were laid on the table with prongs and bowls face up (not down as before); crests were engraved on the new upper side. Handles were edged with a feathering, bead or thread pattern and decorated with bright-cut engraving.

Cheaper Hardware and Fabric

There were other metal goods that were much cheaper than silver. In 177o James Emerson made a more golden-looking brass that was easy to work and widely used for candlesticks and desk furniture, and for the glasschimneyed oil lamps that gave a light much brighter than candles could give.

Copper was mainly for kitchenware and for warming pans, which from the 1770s held water, not embers. Iron canisters, trays and other small items were japanned to look like Oriental lacquerwork. From about 179o, pewter was used for britannia metal wares. Thinly rolled sheets shaped by being spun (pressed against turning wooden moulds), produced cheaper pewter articles than casting and hand-finishing, and allowed pewter to compete with mass-produced ceramics.

As the century neared its end, lower-cost factory production was dominating textiles, including those for curtains, bedhangings and upholstery. The taste was for plain satin, watered silk, subdued velvet, damask, cotton, and small all-over patterns. Eye-catching designs were out of keeping with the light and delicate style of the walls and furniture. Carpets were more boldly coloured and heavily patterned than fabrics but still harmonised with the room decoration.

Fun and Fashion

With plenty of money to be made in manufacturing, in the colonies or in trading abroad, people were extravagant spenders on amusements: They gambled wildly, not just with cards, dice and gaming but on horses, fighting cocks and prizefighting men. Nor did they stint on clothing.

The lighter look could be said to have spread to clothing with both men’s and women’s fashions narrowing and fitting closer to the body. Men’s coats, woollen for day, rich velvets or silks for evening, were narrow and had a cutaway front below the waist. After 178o they were usually double-breasted and had a high, fold-over collar. They were worn over tight breeches, buckled at the knee.

Men wore powdered wigs, puffed high at the front with sausage-like curls at the ears or hanging in a bunch at the back. Women’s hair styles grew immense with the hair raised over pads to give great height and curled into fat rolls at the back and sides.

Women liked to wear French silks and French styles. Their skirts slimmed down and had a bustle effect at the back, while puffy bodices exaggerated the bust. When the war with France (after the French Revolution of 1789) made imported silks harder to get and dearer, the ladies took to Indian cottons.

The fashionable clothes for men and women looked best on a youthful figure — and high society now had a young set making the pace. Increasingly the limelight fell on the stylish Prince of Wales and his circle, whose tastes were to pervade the Regency period.

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