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Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries: 1840-1880. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1997 by David Levine

Talk about deferred gratification - Dupree began this study in the 1970s, received her doctorate from Oxford in the early 1980s and, now, in the mid-1990s this work sees the light in public! In point of fact, Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries bears the imprint of this protracted delivery. Its main point of reference is Michael Anderson's 1971 monograph on Preston's Family Structure in the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, much of Dupree's discussion takes on the character of a friendly argument with Anderson's pioneering study. This discussion is cross-cut, as it were, with another that draws inspiration from Patrick Joyce's 1980 book on industrial paternalism in Lancashire - Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England - although this is very much a secondary theme.

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The Staffordshire Potteries were a region apart - "a most unusual impression of provincial remoteness, an impression heightened by their odd littleness and shabbiness" is how J. B Priestley viewed them in 1934. One index of their remoteness was the high level of native-born residents, another was the inbredness of the pottery workforce although neither index suggested anything like complete isolation. Rather, their isolation was relatively more intense than either poor, proud Preston or the rest of England and Wales.

The Potteries "odd littleness" is an altogether peculiar construct since the size of firms in the Potteries was very large indeed - in the mid-century the average workforce in region's 180 companies was 167 although the twenty-five largest pottery firms (all vertically integrated in a series of little workrooms) employed over 500 while the biggest (Mintons and Davenport) had more than 1,000 workers apiece. This concentration of employment compares quite favorably with contemporary cotton mills, coal mines, engineering firms, railways, and iron works. Furthermore, although the region was called "the Potteries" it was, in point of fact, industrially diversified - the presence of coking coal and two varieties of ironstone provided the material basis for both mining and iron working which took off in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. These, too, were exemplars of the most advanced vanguard of Victorian capitalism - in 1867 there were 1,500 workers in the Granville Ironworks while Robert Heath's firm employed 3,500 men and boys in a complex which included twenty-eight mines, eight blast furnaces, 144 puddling furnaces, and fourteen rolling mills.

This network of industrial plants would not have been on Priestley's travel agenda, or else how could he have considered the Potteries to be characterized by their "odd littleness." What does seem to have been striking about the physical geography of the Potteries was their straggling character as the industrial plant was scattered across the countryside round and about the commercial center of Stoke-on-Trent. Adding to the dispersed nature of the landscape were the small townlets which cropped up near the industrial plants. In Etruria - a "factory town" par excellence which was the preserve of the Wedgwood works - there were 966 "Etruscans" in 1861. Although not all Etruscans worked in the Wedgwood works nor were all of Wedgwood's workers Etruscans, the fit was quite tight. Certainly, the "provincial remoteness" Priestley noted in 1934 was in place eighty years earlier as the Wedgwoods' influence allowed key workers advances on wages and apprenticeships for their sons while providing paid employment for their wives and daughters in the rabbit warren of workrooms, shops, and finishing departments that had changed but little from the glory days of Josiah Wedgwood himself. Indeed, the "backwardness" of the technical infrastructure is one of the striking characteristics of the pottery industry that gave workers privileged positions.

The labor process in the pottery industry is one of the keys to understanding the family structure of the region's working-class families. Dupree is at pains to point out that the fit between adult male potters and the industry was not perfect - some of their sons went into mining or ironworking, while not all of their wives or daughters worked for wages - but, overall, the role of the minutely-subdivided pottery industry was a huge, readily-tapped source of work. In this sense, then, the potteries were almost proto-industrial since there was no central power plant and each of the processes of production was small, skilled, and self-contained. It was the genius of Josiah Wedgwood to create a system whereby these separate units could be brought together under one capacious roof. His children and grandchildren did not do much to change this structure - nor it would appear were his competitors more likely to supersede his system so much as to imitate it. His workers and their families took advantage of its demand for labor as it suited them, and for their own reasons. The point of contact between this industry and the working-class family was the wages packet.

Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries: 1840-1880. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1997 by David Levine

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