The Wedgwood Circle - 1730-1897 - Four Generations of a Family and Their Friends

Studio Vista, 1980

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), son of Thomas Wedgwood (1685-1739) and Mary Stringer, was born in Burslem, Staffordshire, and married a cousin, Sarah Wedgwood in 1764. Josiah founded the famous Wedgwood pottery whose wares became an English institution. Josiah's story was a rags to riches tale of an ambitious young man building his business against harsh physical and political odds. But the Wedgwoods had a genius for choosing their company, and the peg-leg Josiag, with his avid scientific curiosity, won a place in the renowned Lunar Society, the circle of savants and inventors to which Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, James Watt and others belonged. His daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin. and was the mother of the naturalist Charles. Charles Darwin also married a Wedgwood. By the 1890s the Wedgwoods had risen from obscurity to hold a secure place in the social and cultural fabrice of Victorian England...