When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his hard-won earnings to leave to his children much--£20 when they reached the age of twenty-one.
"And so," as Josiah used to say long afterwards, "I began on the very lowest round of the ladder."
And now the child's scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic, but for the rest--that great storehouse of knowledge the world contained--he had to unlock the door of _that_ for himself, and he did it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years went on.
To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post of turning what was called "the potter's wheel."
This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved horizontally and beside which sat a man called "a thrower," shaping with his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.
The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of "thrower," hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud descended and settled on his life--a cloud that, though he struggled bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.
The terrible epidemic of small-pox visited Burslem, and the Wedgwood family, living as they did on the edge of the churchyard, were among the first to take it, the youngest so badly that his life was despaired of. However, after long struggle, they pulled him through; but the disease left behind it a knee which gave him hours and days of excruciating pain, and seemed almost as if it would blight his whole life and ruin his career. Every remedy was tried, in vain. At first when he rose in bed, weak and unstrung, he fell back again. When later he began to stand it was with weariness and pain. But the dark cloud had, though all unseen at first, a silver lining. Out of what looked a great calamity there sprang good. The boy when he crawled back to work was no longer fit for the "thrower's" bench. The position he had now to take--with his leg stretched out in front of him--cramped and impeded him. No longer active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and so took to thinking--not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay very near to his heart.