Haemophobes might want to skip page five of AN Wilson's new novel The Potter's Hand.
The blood gushes, it spurts, it splatters. It's a fountain of gore, a geyser, and Wilson – that refined novelist, historian and biographer – describes it all with the relish of a schlocky horror writer.
The blood belongs to Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century craftsman and founder of the famous pottery empire, who in 1768 had his leg amputated – without anaesthetic – after smallpox left him lame. Wilson's description of the scrapings of the hacksaw is uncomfortable and vivid, but by the end of the novel, it's another, much more subtle horror that lingers: the terrible fate of the intelligent woman in the 1800s.
The principal character in this sad story is Sally Wedgwood, Josiah's wife, who, in Wilson's novelised version of a true story, is hustled into an arranged marriage. Even worse is the fact that Sally is educated and intelligent but has always had to repress it. The sharper her wits become, says one observer, the less marriagable she is.
Much of Wilson's novel explores the effects of this reality, of marriage as a negotiated contract, on Sally and other well-read women like her in this period. As Sally gives into the marriage, she relies on what Wilson calls the narcotic of bookishness, but even that is not quite enough to anaesthetise her life and make the trap attractive.
"We talk about the rights of man and Thomas Paine," says Wilson, "and the women in the book talk about it; but one of their friends was Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote, in reply to Paine, The Rights Of Women, and it's very much the era when women are emerging only to have the lid shut back on again by the Victorians."
Wilson – who was partly inspired to write The Potter's Hand because of his personal connection to Wedgwood (his father was managing director of the firm in the 1950s) – believes Sally Wedgwood ended up depressed by her situation, although he reaches that conclusion with the imaginative leap of a novelist rather than the slow steps of a historian. The reason he chose to novelise the story is that the letters left behind by the Wedgwoods do not say anything about their happiness or otherwise. It was only a novelist who could colour in the gaps.
There is the same mixing of fact and imagination in another main thread of the novel: the story of how Josiah Wedgwood's nephew Tom went to America to buy clay from the Cherokee. It's this story that inspires some of the best passages, in particular the brutal way the leaders of the American Revolution put down the native tribes. What emerges is a landscape in which the native Americans saw the British as protectors and the colonialists as the enemy.
"I did a lot of reading for this section because it wasn't in my bloodstream," says Wilson. "There's been a lot of research recently into what the American revolution meant for the Native Americans. Washington and all those people were the enemies of the Native Americans, and it was written into the constitution – it's not a bit that's often read out, that the Native Americans were savages, that's the word used in the constitution – and that they should be exterminated if necessary. America was posited on a programme of genocide and it was appalling what happened, particularly to the Cherokee, who were a civilised nation."
The conclusion Wilson is nudging you towards is that it would have been much better for the Native Americans had the British remained in charge. In many ways, it's no surprise that he should end up here: Wilson is a passionate British nationalist and in many of his books, particularly The Victorians, celebrates British achievement.
He is also hugely nostalgic about the past and many of his novels, like The Potter's Hand, are set there. In many ways, he would prefer to live there too, largely because he thinks the present is so ugly. Throughout The Potter's Hand you can sense Wilson's mixed feelings about the Industrial Revolution: on the one hand, it was a great switching-on, a leap forward from superstition and into rationality. On the other hand, as Wilson sees it, the Industrial Revolution wrecked "the green of that sublime England".
"The past was less ugly," he says, "when you think of motorways, airports, the sheer unplannedness now. There's a kind of mess everywhere – nobody seems to have any aesthetic at all. And it's not just physically ugly, there is a kind of awfulness to a great chunk of life. There are things which we have lost although I'm perfectly aware that I live in the 21st century."
Certainly, there is no sense in The Potter's Hand that Wilson regrets the Industrial Revolution – quite the opposite, he celebrates it as a great change and the birth of scepticism ("We've metamorphosed," says Josiah at one point.) But what Wilson fears is that British society is going through another metamorphosis now, in which we're losing the skills the Industrial Revolution gave us.
"The 18th century and the Industrial Revolution are where it all begins," he says. "A potter picks up a lump of clay and produces a beautiful object, but you could make the same metaphor out of people using steel to build great ships on the Clyde or in Newcastle. All those industrial plants, all those skills, which made Britain the richest country in the world and politically the most powerful, they're all people making something. They weren't just making money, they were making things which people wanted and they were using skills.
"But since Margaret Thatcher and her gang, we seem to think it's a good idea to make money out of money; not to make things. Inventors like Dyson are the spirit of the 18th century and we don't have it very much any more. We think somehow or other mysterious services and financial skulduggery will see us through."
Wilson even feels a little bit of this metamorphosis in himself: his father worked with clay but he works with words. "My brother and I were the first people in our bit of the family who haven't been potters since the 1750s probably." He doesn't feel guilt about that, he says, just a little useless. But at least he has written this novel, as an homage not only to Josiah Wedgwood but also to the 18th century; it is a novelist's tribute to the century that gave us the novel. It's not a beautiful piece of pottery made from perfect white clay. But it's something.
The Potter's Hand is published by Atlantic, £17.99. AN Wilson will discuss the novel at the Wigtown Book Festival tomorrow at noon, www.wigtownbookfestival.com
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