When earthenware or salt glaze was enamelled at Hot Lane it required artists to do the work. But the eighteenth century was the age of mechanical invention, and the hand artists were continually being superseded by mechanical processes. Saddler and Green, for instance, invented the method of printing designs on top of the glaze, so that the artist had only to fill in the outline with colours. But there was something hard and crude about the effect of the on-glaze printing, which prevented it ever really competing with the best hand-painted ware. The under-glaze printing, particularly the under-glaze blue printing, was a more difficult competitor for the artist to meet; for the glaze gave a rich soft tone to the colouring matter underneath it which was partly absorbed in the biscuit ware. And if this blue printing, with which the willow pattern will be always associated, drove out the girl artists from their pleasant work on the pot-banks, yet the new decoration caused an enormous expansion in the demand for cream-coloured earthenware. From 1790 onwards “blue printed” seems to have superseded every other sort of earthenware. It was the first opportunity common folk had had of getting a decorative plate to eat off; and it made the fortunes of the Spodes, the Adamses, the Bournes, the Mintons, the Ridgways, and many another master of the good old days. As a mechanical process under-glaze printing was an unqualified success, and in course of time the artists too rediscovered their work in decorating that porcelain which, on the tables of the rich, replaced the now vulgarized earthenware. The last ten years of the eighteenth century were devoted to blue printed, but with the new century came that development of Staffordshire porcelain with which run the names of Spode, Minton and Davenport.

The first Josiah Spode made no porcelain. He set the fashion in “blue printed,” and his blue printed is probably the best of its kind ever made. Born in 1733, Spode was apprenticed to Whieldon, and after leaving him about 1759 he worked for Banks of Stoke.[144] It is said of him that he dearly loved to play the fiddle, and he would go out any evening to play at public-houses for his friends. So that “ready and willing as Spode’s fiddle” became a proverb in the Potteries.

In 1770 he leased Banks’ works in the centre of Stoke, and began making printed cream colour. This was the old “on-glaze,” or “black” printed ware, used to guide the enameller rather than as a decoration by itself. Cobalt was a cheap paint, and the designs were filled in with blue. This was becoming the common ware, and invention was busy to simplify the process. Attempts were made by William Adams of Cobridge and, about 1777, by John Baddeley of Shelton to print in blue upon the biscuit ware before the ware was glazed, but without any commercial success.[145] It was Turner of Worcester who first found a satisfactory way of transferring an oily-coloured pattern from a copper plate to a sheet of transfer paper, and then from the paper to the biscuit ware. He too designed the willow pattern which seems likely to characterize “blue printed” for all time. This was in 1780, and in 1783 Spode got two men from the Caughley china works, near Worcester, and they taught him to print in blue under the glaze on earthenware, as they did on china at Worcester. The invention spread with enormous rapidity and Spode made his fortune. He died in 1797,[146] leaving his son Josiah Spode II to carry on his business.

The second Spode married in 1779 the eldest daughter of John Barker, master potter of the Row Houses, Fenton. He had been a dealer in earthenware, glass and china in London. William Copeland, a native of Stoke, had been his traveller and assistant in London. On his father’s death young Spode made Copeland his partner and put him in charge of the London office. Even in his father’s lifetime Spode had begun decorating their ware with the Japan reds and blues and heavy gilding that was afterwards the distinguishing mark of Spode and Copeland porcelain; and in 1800 they began to make their bone-paste porcelain.[147]

Porcelain is a transparent vitreous body which fuses on being fired, and does not require any glaze. The early porcelain had been made largely of glass; Cookworthy’s porcelain, and that made at Shelton New Hall, relied solely on china clay and china stone from Cornwall. None of these bodies were certain, and they failed to become commercial successes. But when the New Hall Company ceased, the manufacture of their hard-paste porcelain in England ceased too, and an entirely new porcelain body was destined to take its place. It was not until Spode introduced bone into the body that the cheap china we know to-day could be produced.[148]

The modern soft-paste bone porcelain consists of nearly equal portions of china clay, china stone and bone ash, fired to a temperature of about 1250 C. and then glazed with a feldspar and china-clay glaze and refired.[149] The chief porcelain factories at this time were at Worcester and Derby, but they were soon outdistanced and beaten by the better conducted factories of Spode, Minton and Davenport, who managed to centre the china trade in North Staffordshire, just as the earthenware trade had been localized there in the previous century.

To modern taste all the china of the first half of the nineteenth century, with its florid colouring and lavish gilding, seems to warrant little success or praise. In their own day however the success of the Spodes was very great. The second Spode died in 1827; William Copeland had died in the previous year, and in 1833 a third Josiah Spode died also. From the executors of the last Spode the whole factory was bought by William Taylor Copeland, M.P., the second of the name, Alderman of the City of London.

Mintons have long been the historic rivals of Copeland, late Spode. Their factories are almost side by side in Stoke, lying along the Newcastle canal, which was cut in 1795. Just across the Trent, too, lay Whieldon’s old works at Little Fenton. Wedgwood, in his list of the potters of 1715, says that there were then only two factories in Stoke—Ward’s and Poulson’s. He meant probably that the factories carried on when he wrote in 1785 by Ward and Poulson were in existence in 1715. However that may be, in 1793 Thomas Minton, financed by a Mr Pownall, joined Joseph Poulson, a practical potter already at work, and began to make “blue-printed” ware at Stoke.[150] A few years later they began to make porcelain. In 1802 the firm was “Minton, Poulson & Co.,” and by 1817 it had become “Thomas Minton & Sons.” This first Minton died in 1836, and it was his son, Herbert Minton (1793-1858), that brought the Minton china to its highest perfection, and started the manufacture of encaustic and dust tiles.

A word should be said here on the methods of gilding—so marked a feature of both Spode and Minton china. Originally, when gilding was put on the ware, it was laid on in the form of gold-leaf, and attached with printers’ size. This sort of gilding does not usually wear well, and it was only in his very late years that Wedgwood began to burn gold into the ware.[151] About 1790, the method of painting on the gold with mercury, and burnishing it afterwards, was introduced from the Continent, and a new decoration was super-imposed upon the already overladen ware. It is only within the last decade that a form of liquid gold has been discovered which requires no burnishing, and yet is fairly durable.

Another form of decoration in which gold was employed was lustre ware. Mr Burton thinks the application of a gold lustre to Staffordshire pottery was introduced first about 1792 at Etruria, and was used on Wedgwood’s “Pearl” dessert ware, made in the form of shells. If this lustre, or silver lustre, is laid on thickly, it converts the earthenware in appearance into gold or silver plate—an inartistic transformation. When, however, the lustre is thinly applied, the glaze of the ware is stained to a purplish-pink colour, on which the metallic lustre sparkles like shot silk. The newly discovered metal platinum was used to produce the similar silver lustre, and during the period 1792-1810 many fine pieces were produced by the Wedgwoods (and by, among others, John Aynsley of Longton), covered with either the gold or silver plating or lustre.[152]

Other Stoke potters at the end of the eighteenth century were the Booths of Cliff Bank, and Thomas Woolfe. Their factories are both shown on the map of the Potteries in 1802 which is here inserted. Hugh Booth (1732-89)[153] made a considerable fortune, and was succeeded by his brother and nephews, Ephraim, Hugh and Joseph Booth. Thomas Woolfe (died 1818)[154] contests with the elder Spode[155] the credit of being the first to employ steam power in their factories, to drive the flint and glaze mills. Both Aikin and Shaw agree in dating this innovation about 1793. Woolfe’s son-in-law, Robert Hamilton, joined the firm for a time, but before 1817 the factories of both Woolfe and the Booths had passed into the hands of William Adams (1772-1829), the successful progenitor of the present potting family of Adams.