Excerpt from English Porcelain: A Handbook to the China Made in England During the Eighteenth Century as Illustrated by Specimens Chiefly in the National Collections

Contributions to the history of these factories, but the complete tale has not yet been told. Of the smaller and more obscure factories we may learn much in some instances, very little in others. When a few thousand pounds have been sunk in a vain attempt at china-making, the circumstances of the failure are not willingly published far and wide. On the other hand, some of the minor factories have left tangible and fairly complete records of their history.

The origin and nature of English porcelain is treated with some fulness in my introductory chapter. I need not here re capitulate the distinctions, such as they are, between hard and soft paste, and between natural and artificial porcelain. These distinctions are dwelt upon in the earlier chapters of this Handbook, where also will be found brief accounts of the chief materials employed in the several factories. For fuller details of a technical kind, and for more numerous analyses of clays and porcelains, reference may be made to some of the books named in my Bibliographical Notes. Here, however, the'author may be permitted to refer to the discovery, made by him nearly forty years ago, of the early use of bone-ash in the porcelain made at Bow. A claim is made in Chapter III. Anent the introduction of this most important constituent into the body of English china. That introduction has proved of supreme importance in the later manufacture of imitative porcelain, from 1760 at least, if not earlier, down to the present day. In spite of the vagueness, the ineptitude, even the actual errors, in the 1749 Specification of Thomas Frye's invention, I am convinced that to this Englishman, an accomplished draughtsman' and mezzotint engraver, the ceramic world owes a debt of considerable magnitude. In consequence the argument as to this matter will be found to have been developed, in the chapter on Bow porcelain, to a very considerable extent.

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