BOOK REVIEW / Renaissance Man in Staffs: 'Josiah Wedgwood 1730-1795' - Robin Reilly: Macmillan, 20 pounds

IT MIGHT almost be a subject for a classical vase, sketched out in white bas-relief perhaps, on a background of olive or terracotta or powder blue. Take the youngest of 13 children. Let him be self-educated and physically handicapped. Let him progress by way of thrusting enterprise and relentless hard work to a partnership in a Staffordshire pottery. Let him set up his own factory in 1759, the original annus mirabilis when Britain's armed forces conquered the world. Then, let him establish himself as potter to the Queen, 'Vase-maker General to the universe', one of the leading influences on interior design in 18th-century Europe. Here is the story of the entrepreneur as hero.

But this version of Josiah Wedgwood's career has a suitably muted sequel. His sons and grandsons succumbed to higher education, gentlemanly status and land ownership. (One of them was even shot by his own gamekeeper: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant' read his epitaph.) As the family rose in the social hierarchy, the once great ceramics firms declined in profitability and enterprise. Wedgwood's descendants became musicians (Ralph Vaughan Williams), or scientists (Charles Darwin), or politicians (Anthony Wedgwood Benn), not successful industrialists. Here, some have argued, is an emblem of Britain's economic decline since the 19th century. Having pioneered the Industrial Revolution, its culture proved too snobbish and scholarly to sustain the phenomenon. Its people placed land, leisure and the pretensions of intellectuals before the essential business of making things and money. And look at the result.

Such crude and schematic stories have grown up around Josiah Wedgwood in part because his real life has been little known. Robin Reilly's new biography is the first scholarly and comprehensive account, and very valuable it is too: lucid, pleasant to read, well-researched and definitive in terms of its treatment of Staffordshire's early ceramics industry. It also disposes of many of the myths.

To begin with, Wedgwood scarcely pulled himself up by his own boot straps. His family had been in the pottery business for generations and was not, Reilly tells us, 'uncomfortably poor'. True, the young Wedgwood was immensely enterprising, becoming a partner when he was only 24, and teaching himself chemistry so as to create new pottery glazes. But he would never have made as much of himself without money. His wife brought him pounds 20,000. And patrician sponsors such as Earl Gower, the Duke of Bridgewater and Lord Cathcart helped him secure better transport facilities for his products as well as prestigious new customers. Consequently, Wedgwood's career is less a monument to self-help than an illustration that successful businesses require enlightened sponsorships and substantial investment.

Moreover, Wedgwood's triumph demonstrates once again that the really great businessmen are not pioneers so much as individuals who can see the full potential of the discoveries of

others. Once it learnt the secret of making Chinese porcelain in 1708, Europe was consumed with lust for sinuously curved household and decorative ceramics. It was Wedgwood's genius to capitalise on this pre-existing taste. By using creamware rather than expensive porcelain, he attracted a much broader market. He convinced the public that it needed vases for decoration, items which had never been found essential before. And he made the switch from the tired and intricate French rococo style to clean classical lines that were excitingly new and blended beautifully with the architectural creations of the Adam brothers and their myriad imitators.

Wedgwood, as Reilly makes clear, was a tough and resourceful employer. He taught himself cost-accounting, pioneered assembly-line production and insisted on punctuality and right behaviour from his workers. And he was a whiz at publicity. He was the first in his industry, for example, to see the advantage of using his own name rather than a symbol as a trademark. As a result, every pot he sold became an advertisement for his firm.

But obsessive and money-oriented though he undoubtedly was, Wedgwood was never a philistine or a Gradgrind. He was a member of Birmingham's Lunar Society, a select group of philosophers, chemists, medics and political theorists. He made his own scientific discoveries and was elected a member of the Royal Society. He loved books. And he was a radical. Reilly is much weaker on broad political and cultural history than on ceramics, and one would have liked rather more about his hero's ideas, dissenting religion, lively nationalism and politics. None the less, the man's breadth emerges clearly. He favoured sweeping parliamentary reform. He supported the American revolutionaries - at least until they allied with the French. And he hated the slave trade. He was the very reverse of current caricatures of thrusting entrepreneurship.

This perhaps is the true lesson of Wedgwood's remarkable life: that in addition to hard work, ingenuity, sponsorship and luck, successful industrialists need more culture, rather than less; that the economic future lies not with Essex Man but with his antithesis - Renaissance Man.