To read Tristram Hunt’s delightful new biography of Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) is to be beamed back to an intellectual environment that, compared with that of our dogmatic and uncompromising twenty-first century, seems a scarcely believable neverland. Imagine, if you can, a time when science and Christian revelation seemed mutually supportive, with the Newtonian universe being perceived as God’s plan. A time when “paternalism” was a positive value rather than a term of opprobrium. A time when a great capitalist could also be a great liberal and feel no conflict between the two creeds. A time when that same great liberal could simultaneously be a great patriot, with a firm belief in “the semi-divine calling of Great Britain.” A time when “mass production” and “craft” were not yet mutually exclusive terms.

It was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, with the young Wedgwood placed fortunately at its center. “His genius,” Hunt writes, “surfaced at a moment of expanding consumer demand, globalization, new energy sources and a shifting ethos of capitalist production.” He was in the right place at the right time, and for a man of his intelligence, drive, curiosity, and native good taste, infused with a hefty measure of Calvinist work ethic, almost anything was possible.

Bentley’s “charm, grace, urbanity, culture, Dissenting conviction and political radicalism” impressed Wedgwood and blended well with his own political creed.

Josiah was the twelfth child in a family that had been at work in “the Potteries,” the six towns that