ABSTRACT
Nationalism is a marketable commodity. High street Irish pubs, the bagpipe and kilt heritage industry of Scotland, and cottages representing a bucolic, hazily nostalgic rural little England, all attempt to sell to the public a version of the past that might never have existed, but which the public at large clearly wants to exist. Twentieth-century Britain hardly has a monopoly on marketing a created self-image. Since the arrival of mass marketing and mass production following the Industrial Revolution, producers have by necessity catered to current fashions of public taste as well as creating their own fashions and trends. The Staffordshire potters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were no different in this regard. It is one thing to say that industrial potters were catering to public tastes, however, but quite another to examine what forces formed and informed those tastes. Material culture does not exist in a vacuum, and those that manufacture and those that use ceramics are both influenced by wider social, historical and cultural subtexts. This chapter examines just one small current of the cultural stream, how the creation of a specifically British identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced the designs of transfer-printed finewares, and what aspects of that identity those same finewares represented. By examining this meaning, as well as providing some potential site interpretations based on this analysis, this chapter hopes to demonstrate ways of expanding ceramics analysis to include a more interpretive and contextual approach.
