The Wedgwood Papers

Extract

In the museum of the Wedgwood firm at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, is a collection of more than a million manuscripts, the business papers of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the firm (b. 1730, d. 1795). Invoices, ledgers, oven books, letters to his customers and his bankers, memoranda on the organization of his business and of the industry as a whole — there is a mass of material, incomplete and only gradually being got into order by the devoted labours of the Curator, Mr. Cook. Unfortunately no effort had been made at the time to preserve these records, which were therefore destroyed or dispersed.