Book Description

In issuing my present work I have two distinct personal duties to perform, and I hasten, in these few brief lines of introduction, to discharge them. First, I earnestly desire to ask indulgence from my readers for any shortcomings which may be apparent in its contents; and next, I desire emphatically to express my thanks to all who have in any way, or even to the smallest extent, assisted me in my labours. The preparation of the work has extended over a considerable period of time, and I have had many difficulties to contend with that are, and must necessarily be, wholly unknown to any but myself—hard literary digging to get at facts and to verify dates, that is not understood, and would scarce be believed in, by the reader who turns to my pages—and hence errors of omission and of commission may have, nay, doubtless have crept in, and may in some places, to a greater or less extent, have marred the accuracy of the page whereon they have occurred. I can honestly say I have left nothing undone, no source untried, and no trouble untaken to secure perfect accuracy in all I have written, and yet I am painfully aware that shortcomings may, and doubtless will, be laid to my charge; for these, wherever they occur, I ask, and indeed claim, indulgence. I believe in work, in hard unceasing labour, in patient and painstaking research, in untiring searchings, and in diligent collection and arrangement of facts—to make time and labour and money subservient to the end in view, rather than that the end in view, and the time and labour and money expended, should bend and bow and ultimately break before time. Thus it is that my “Ceramic Art” has been so long in progress, and thus it is that many changes have occurred during the time it has been passing through the press which it has been manifestly impossible to chronicle. I have the proud satisfaction, however, of knowing that my work is the only one of its kind yet attempted, and I feel a confident hope that it will fill a gap that has long wanted filling, and will be found alike useful to the manufacturer, the china collector, and the general reader. When, some twenty years ago, at the instance of my dear friend Mr. S. C. Hall, I began my series of papers in the Art Journal upon the various famous earthenware and porcelain works of the kingdom, but little had been done in that direction, and the information I got together from time to time had to be procured from original sources, by prolonged visits to the places themselves and by numberless applications to all sorts of people from whom even scraps of reliable matter could be obtained. Books on the subject were not many, and the information they contained on English Ceramics was meagre in the extreme. Since then numerous workers have sprung up, and their published volumes—many of them sumptuous and truly valuable works—attest strongly to the interest and pains they have taken in the subject. To all these, whoever they may be, the world owes a debt of gratitude for devoting their time and their talents to so important a branch of study. To each of them I tender my own thanks for having devoted themselves to the elucidation of one of my favourite pursuits, and for having given to the world the result of their labours. No work has, however, until now been entirely devoted to the one subject of British Ceramics, and I feel therefore that in presenting my present volumes to the public I am only carrying out the plan I at first laid down, and am not even in the slightest degree encroaching on the province of any other writer.