Scholars and collectors have long dismissed British commercial ceramics between 1840 and 1880, which had yet to be reformed by the decorative principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Nineteenth-century design arbiter Charles Eastlake explained why, pronouncing, 'there is no branch of art-manufacture exposed to greater dangers, in point of taste, than that of ceramic design'. While V&A keeper Hugh Wakefield attempted to elevate Victorian pottery in his titular mid-century publication, in the twenty-first century, it was much the same. Robin Hildyard, also from the V&A, argued that consumer demand for 'cheap crudely moulded pottery hidden beneath pervasive and inappropriate decoration' justified why he concluded his 2005 survey on English ceramics before 1840. For these at once simple and complex reasons, current scholarship ignores Victorian industrially produced ceramics, apart from Regina Lee Blaszczyk's groundbreaking Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (2000) or the Staffordshire-produced willow pattern as an example of Orientalism and Aestheticism.
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