The Forty-Fourth Trial

by Josiah Wedgwood, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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At the forty-first hour of the firing Eli Mountford put his eye to the spy-hole of Number Two glost oven and saw nothing he could use. White, and inside the white a whiter white where the bung stood nearest the firemouth. A man could look at that for thirty years and not learn the temperature from it. Eli had looked at it for eleven, and he knew how much he did not know.

He took the iron off its hook, fed it through the hole, felt for the trial on its ledge, and drew it out glowing. He set it on the brick to cool. He did not hurry it. A trial cooled too fast would craze and tell him a lie.

The hovel round the oven held the heat the way a coat holds a body. Somebody had chalked a date on the inside of the door, 14 Oct 98, and under it the tally of the firemouths battened: eight mouths, every four hours, a stroke for each. Eli's own strokes. He had eaten bread and dripping on the coal heap at the thirtieth hour and slept upright for forty minutes at the thirty-sixth, with his back against the warm brick and the iron across his knees, so that if he slept too long it would drop and wake him. It had.

When the trial was cool enough to hold in a wet rag he turned it to the lamp. The glaze had gone down smooth. It had the shine. Lead glaze always had the shine; that was what lead was for. That was the trouble with it.

He hung the iron back on its hook and took out of his jacket a penny notebook with a split cover, and found the page, and did not write in it. He could write. He wrote like a man digging with a fork. The book was in his sister's hand, which was her left hand, and he would carry this home to her and say it, and she would write it.

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No. 1. 9 March. Borax 2 oz, flint 2 oz, Cornish stone 3 oz, whiting 1 oz, mixed with water and dipped. On a biscuit tile, top of the bung, Number Two oven. Came out like sugar on a bun. Did not melt.

No. 2. Same, with borax 3 oz. Melted. Ran off the tile and stuck it to the saggar. Lost the tile and the saggar. Joby says no more.

No. 3. Joby says one more.

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Harriet had dropped her right hand in February. That was the word for it, dropped, the way you dropped a stitch; as if it were a small thing and could be picked up again by somebody patient. She had cleaned ware for Mr Clewlow since she was thirteen, which was seven years. A ware-cleaner takes the piece after the dipper has dipped it and scrapes and brushes away the glaze that has gathered where it should not, round the foot and in the beading. The glaze dries to a powder. The powder gets up. It is white lead and flint and stone and water, and the water is the only part that goes away.

First the colic, which half the women had and talked about the way they talked about the weather. Then the blue line on her gums, which she showed nobody. Then one morning she could not lift her wrist. The fingers would close, a little, but the hand hung off the end of the arm like a glove on a peg. She held her tea in both hands now, the dead one underneath as a saucer.

Mr Clewlow paid her to the end of the week and said she was a good girl and might come back when it mended. It was not going to mend. The doctor said so to Eli on the stair and would not say it to her, which Eli thought was the wrong way about.

So she sat at home in Longton with the window and the left hand, and in March she began to practise letters on the backs of the rent book, and in March Eli brought home the first of the trials.

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He had got the idea from a newspaper, which was not the same as getting it from a book. The newspaper said that in Germany there were works glazing without lead, and that the gentlemen in London had been asked whether it might be done here. It gave no recipe. It said "borax" and "felspar" and "fritted", and it said that the Staffordshire manufacturers were of the opinion that it could not be done.

Eli was not of any opinion. He knew a glaze was a glass, and a glass was sand made to melt, and lead was the thing you put in to make sand melt at a heat a bottle oven could reach. If you took the lead out you had to put something else in that did the same work. Borax did it. Borax also dissolved in water, which meant it soaked into the biscuit and would not stay where it was put. That was why the newspaper said fritted: you melted the borax with some of the flint first, into a glass, and broke the glass, and ground it, and then it would not dissolve. He had not known that. He learnt it from his first fourteen trials, all of which told him the same thing in different words.

No. 15. 2 May. Made a frit. Borax 4 oz, flint 2 oz, in a crucible from the chemist's, set at the back of No. 3 firemouth through the whole firing. Came out a lump of green glass with the crucible cracked round it. Broke the crucible off with a hammer. Threw the glass hot into the bucket so it would shatter. It shattered.

No. 16. Ground the frit. Two nights. With the flat-iron on the hearthstone and then the chemist's mortar. Sieved through H's stocking.

That entry was the first in the book that did not look like Eli. Sieved through H's stocking was Harriet putting herself in the record. He noticed it and said nothing about it, and in the next entry she wrote Sieved through H's other stocking, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairs.

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By the end of the summer the book had forty entries and a method. Harriet had made the method, though she would have said she only wrote down what he said. Every trial had a number. Every number had the same five things after it, in the same order: what was in it by the ounce, how it was mixed, where it stood in the oven, how long the firing ran, what came out. When a trial failed she drew no line through it. She said a line through it would be telling a lie about it, and that a failure was a measurement like anything else.

So the book said:

No. 22. Dull. Like a slate roof after rain.

No. 27. Crawled. Pulled itself into islands and left the biscuit bare between.

No. 31. Crazed all over, fine as a spider's web. Not a glaze, a cobweb.

No. 35. Pinholed.

No. 38. Dull. The duller for being nearly right.

No. 40. Shine on one side. Dull on the other. Which side faced the firemouth? Eli does not know. FIND OUT.

The capitals were hers. She had pressed so hard that they came through onto the next page, and you could read FIND OUT backwards under the entry for Number 41.

Eli found out by asking Joby Fenton, who placed the saggars, which was the only way anything was found out about where a thing stood in Number Two oven. Joby was a big slow man who could carry six full saggars on a pad on his head up a ladder into the dark of the oven and set them in their bung without looking. He knew his oven like a parish. When Eli told him what the book said, Joby took his pipe out of his mouth and said that a saggar at the top of a bung by the bags went one way and a saggar three down went another, and the side of a saggar facing in to the well-hole went another again, and everybody knew that. Everybody had always known that. It was why there were seconds.

"Then put two of mine where it goes hot," Eli said, "and two where it doesn't. And mark which."

"What for?"

"So I know."

Joby thought about it for the length of a pipe and said it would cost a pint each firing, two if they wanted him to remember the marks.

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The gentlemen came on a Thursday, the day before the October firing of Number Two. There were two of them, and Mr Clewlow, and Mr Clewlow's son, who kept the books, and they walked through the dipping house in their good coats with their hands behind their backs so as not to touch anything. One of the gentlemen was a doctor; you could tell from the way he looked at the dippers' hands and not at the ware. The other asked the questions.

Eli was in the hovel, banking up for the morning, and they came and stood in the doorway because Mr Clewlow wanted them to see a bottle oven, as a man shows off a horse.

"Fifteen ton of coal," Mr Clewlow said. "Two days to fire and two to cool. And you'll find, gentlemen, that it is the heat we can get that decides what glaze we can use, and not the other way about. The leadless glazes want more heat than an oven like this can give, and if you give them less, you get no brilliance. You'll have us selling slate."

The gentleman who asked questions wrote in a book. He had a better book than Eli's, with a cloth spine. The doctor looked at Eli, at his hands and his face, and Eli looked back.

"How do you know how hot it is?" the doctor said.

"Trials, sir," Eli said. "Draw them out with the iron and look at them."

"And what do you look for?"

"Whether it's done."

The doctor nodded as if that were an answer, which it was not, and the gentlemen went on to the warehouse.

When they had gone Eli took the four tiles out of his jacket, each one dipped and dried on the shelf over his own fire at home, each with its number in pencil on the back, and gave them to Joby.

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No. 41. 13 October. Frit 6 oz (made 2 July, ground, the third lot). Cornish stone 3 oz. Whiting 1½ oz. China clay ½ oz. Water to the thickness of cream. Dipped twice, dried a day between. Four tiles, all the same. Joby places them:

41a. Top saggar of the bung by No. 3 firemouth. Hot.

41b. Same saggar, the side away.

41c. Fourth saggar down the same bung.

41d. Bung against the far wall by the clammins. Cold.

At the forty-sixth hour the trial from the iron told Eli the oven was done, and he let the fires die, and closed the dampers in the crown by the chains, and sat down for the first time since Friday morning with nothing in his hands.

It was two days before the clammins could be pulled down and the oven drawn, and Eli spent them asleep and awake and at the mill fetching a fresh sack of stone for nothing in particular. Harriet asked him every hour whether it would be cool yet. It would not be cool yet. She knew that. She had lived beside the works her whole life. She asked anyway, and then she would tell him what time it was, as a fireman tells the hour of a firing, and they would both say nothing.

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Joby brought the saggar out himself on the Tuesday, on his head, and set it down in the yard and lifted the lid off with a rag round his hand, though it was not hot by then. Eli had not asked him to. He did it as if he were bringing out the Queen's own dinner service.

The ware in it was Mr Clewlow's: twelve plates in creamware, Rose pattern, in their cranks. Bright as wet stones. Stuck into the gap at the top of the saggar, where Joby had put them, were Eli's two tiles.

41a shone.

He held it up and turned it into the light from the yard gate and the light ran across it the way it runs across the inside of a wet cup. Not as bright as the Rose plates, a shade under, and the colour a shade warmer, as if a little cream had got into the glass. But a glaze. Whole. No crawl, no pinholes. He ran his thumbnail over it and it was smooth as a plate.

41b, on the far side of the same saggar, was the same, nearly. A little less in the shine.

41c came out of the fourth saggar down twenty minutes later. It was dull. Not slate; satin. You could have sold it for satin to someone who did not know the difference.

41d came from the cold bung by the clammins, and it was what the book had been saying since the summer. Dull as a slate roof after rain.

Joby looked at the four of them laid out on the coping of the yard wall in a row, hot to cold.

"So it wants the heat," Joby said.

"It wants the heat," Eli said.

"Which Clewlow said."

"Which Clewlow said," Eli said. "He said this oven can't give it. It gave it. It gave it to the top of that bung. It gave it to his Rose plates, in the same saggar. It's not that the oven can't. It's that it doesn't, everywhere."

Joby put his pipe in his mouth and thought about it. He was a placer. Where the heat went in an oven was the only thing he had ever been paid to think about.

"Fire her longer," he said. "Two hours more at the top, three. Bring the cold side up."

"More coal."

"A ton," Joby said. "Ton and a half."

"That's all it is," Eli said. "That's all it is, then."

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He carried the four tiles home in his cap. Harriet laid them on the table in the order he gave her, and looked at them for a long time without touching them, and then she turned the book to a new page and held it flat with the dead hand, and wrote No. 44 at the top.

She had already written forty-two and forty-three, short, from what he had told her at the door.

He said, "It's forty-one."

"Forty-one was the tiles," she said. "Forty-two is what you saw, and forty-three is what Joby said. Forty-four is what it comes to."

She wrote while he watched, slowly, with her tongue between her teeth:

Taking 41, 42 and 43 together.

The glaze is a glaze. It is a shade under lead in brilliance and a shade warmer in colour.

It wants the heat of the top of the bung by the firemouths. Below that it goes to satin, at the far wall to slate.

Joby reckons two or three hours more at the top heat would bring the whole oven up. One ton more coal. A ton and a half at the most.

So it is not that it cannot be done. It is that it costs a ton and a half of slack a firing.

She put the pencil down and looked at what she had written. Then she picked the pencil up and wrote one more line, and turned the book round so that he could read it.

Find out what a ton and a half of slack costs. Find out what a dipper costs.

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There were fourteen benches in Mr Clewlow's ware-cleaning shop, and in November there were thirteen women at them, because Harriet's had not been filled.

Eli made twenty tiles for the November firing of Number Two, dipped face down so that the backs stayed bare, and Joby, for four pints, put every one of them in the top of a bung by a firemouth, where the heat was, and fired nobody's ware any differently, because Eli did not have a ton and a half of coal to give Mr Clewlow and would not have been thanked for it. Sixteen came out with the shine. Four came out half-way to satin, from the side of the saggars that faced away, and Eli kept them too. A satin tile was also a measurement. It said where the heat had not gone.

Harriet had written on the back of each tile before it was dipped, with a fine brush and a saucer of underglaze red begged from the printing shop, so that the firing would fix it where pencil would burn away in the oven: the number of the trial, and the frit, and the stone and the whiting and the china clay by the ounce, and the words top of the bung. Twenty times. It had taken her a week with her left hand, and her letters got better by the end, so that you could tell which tile she had written first.

They were not for sale. There was nobody to sell them to. The manufacturers did not want them, and the gentlemen from London had their own books.

Eli went in early on a Tuesday morning before the shop opened, when the gas was not yet lit and the windows were only grey, and walked along the benches with the tiles in a basket, and put one at each place. One beside each brush and each scraper and each knife. Thirteen. And one at the fourteenth, where nobody sat.

Harriet came to the door of the shop with him. She was not supposed to be there. She stood at the bench that had been hers and looked down at the tile on it.

She could not pick it up with her right hand. She did not try. She put the tips of her left fingers under its edge and lifted it and turned it, slowly, towards the window, until the first of the light came across the glaze, and ran along it, and stopped at the far edge, where the shine was.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Iōsiā Wedgwoodiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Josiah Wedgwood, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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