The Chelsea porcelain manufactory (established around 1743-45) is the first important porcelain manufactory in England; its earliest soft-paste porcelain, aimed at the aristocratic market—cream jugs in the form of two seated goats—are dated 1745. The entrepreneurial director was Nicholas Sprimont, a silversmith by trade, but few documents survive to aid a picture of the manufactory's history. Early tablewares, being produced in profusion by 1750, depend on Meissen porcelain models and on silver prototypes, such as salt cellars in the form of realistic shells.
Chelsea was known for its figures. From about 1760 its inspiration was drawn more from Sèvres porcelain than Meissen.
In 1769 the manufactory was purchased by William Duesbury, owner of the Derby porcelain factory, and the wares are indistinguishable during the "Chelsea-Derby period" that lasted until 1784, when the Chelsea factory was demolished and its moulds, patterns and many of its workmen and artists transferred to Derby.
The factory history can be divided into four main periods, named for the identifying marks under the wares:
Triangle period (around 1743-1749)
These early products bore an incised triangle mark. Most of the wares were white and were strongly influenced by silver design. The most notable products of this era were white saltcellars in the shape of crayfish. Perhaps the most famous pieces are the Goat and Bee jugs in 1747 that were also based on a silver model. Copies of these were made at Coalport in the 19th century.
Raised anchor period (1749-1752)
In this period, the paste and glaze were modified to produce a clear, white, slightly opaque surface on which to paint. The influence of Meissen, Germany is evident in the classical figures among Italianate ruins and harbour scenes and adaptations from Francis Barlow's edition of Aesop's Fables. In 1751, copies were made of two Meissen services. Chelsea also made figures, birds and animals inspired by Meissen originals. Flowers and landscapes were copied from Vincennes.
Red anchor period (1752-1756)
Kakiemon (Japanese pottery), subjects were popular from the late 1740s until around 1758, inspired by the original Japanese and then by Meissen and Chantilly. Some English-inspired tableware decorated with botanically accurate plants, copied from the eighth edition of Philip Miller's The Gardener's Dictionary (1752) were also produced in this period.
Gold anchor period (1756-1769)
The influence of Sèvres was very strong and French taste was in the ascendancy. The gold anchor period saw rich coloured grounds, lavish gilding and the nervous energy of the Rococo style. In the 1750s and 1760s, Chelsea was also famous for its toys, which included bonbonnières, scent bottles, étuis, thimbles and small seals, many with inscriptions in French. In 1769 the failing factory was purchased by William Duesbury of Derby who ran it until 1784; during this time the Chelsea wares are indistinguishable from Duesbury's Derby wares and the period is usually termed "Chelsea-Derby".
Tobias Smollett, in full Tobias George Smollett (baptized March 19, 1721, Cardross, Dumbartonshire, Scot.—died Sept. 17, 1771, near Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]), Scottish satirical novelist, best known for his picaresque novels The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).
Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers, Whig in politics and Presbyterian in religion. In 1727 or 1728 he entered Dumbarton grammar school, proceeding from there to the University of Glasgow and apprenticeship to William Stirling and John Gordon, surgeons of that city. His first biographer states that he “attended the anatomical and medical lectures,” and, if his first novel, Roderick Random, may be taken as evidence, he also studied Greek, mathematics, moral and natural philosophy, logic, and belles lettres. He left the university in 1739 without a degree and went to London, taking with him his play The Regicide. A year later he was commissioned surgeon’s second mate in the Royal Navy and appointed to HMS Chichester, which reached Port Royal, Jam., on Jan. 10, 1741. It is probable that Smollett saw action in the naval bombardment of Cartagena (now in Colombia). The expedition was disastrous; he would later describe its horrors in Roderick Random. In Jamaica he met and was betrothed to—and perhaps there married—an heiress, Anne Lassells. He returned to London alone to set up as a surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, his wife joining him in 1747. He failed to secure a production of The Regicide, but in 1746, after the defeat of the Jacobite rebels at Culloden, he wrote his most famous poem, “The Tears of Scotland.” He had by now moved to cheaper accommodations in Chapel Street, Mayfair, no doubt because, despite litigation, he had managed to recover only a fraction of his wife’s considerable dowry, which was invested in land and slaves. It was in Chapel Street that he wrote Advice and Reproof, verse satires in the manner of the Roman poet Juvenal.
In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random, in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out material for The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. This work contains a great comic figure in Hawser Trunnion, a retired naval officer who, though living on dry land, insists on behaving as though he were still on the quarterdeck of one of his majesty’s ships at sea.
In 1752 he published “An Essay on the External Use of Water,” an attack on the medicinal properties of the waters of a popular English health resort, Bath (he would resume the attack in his later novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker). The essay made him many enemies and little money. His financial difficulties were intensified by his generosity in lending money to a hack writer called Peter Gordon, who employed legal stratagems to avoid repayment. Smollett came to blows with Gordon and his landlord and was sued by them for £1,000 and £500, respectively, on charges of trespass and assault. In the event, Smollett was required to pay only small damages. He was now living at Monmouth House, Chelsea, where he was host to such leading literary figures as the authors Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as to the actor David Garrick and John Hunter, a famous surgeon and anatomist. On Sundays, if one may take a passage in Peregrine Pickle as autobiographical, Smollett threw his house open to “unfortunate brothers of the quill,” whom he regaled with “beer, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert’s entire butt-beer.” He himself seems to have been a man irascible, pugnacious, infinitely energetic, courageous, and generous.
The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (now, with The History and Adventures of an Atom, the least regarded of his novels) appeared in 1753. It sold poorly, and Smollett was forced into borrowing from friends and into further hack writing. In June 1753 he visited Scotland for the first time in 15 years; his mother, it is said, recognized him only because of his “roguish smile.” Back in London, Smollett set about a commitment to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes, and this translation was published in 1755. Smollett was already suffering from tuberculosis. Early in 1756 he became editor of The Critical Review, a Tory and church paper, at the same time writing his Complete History of England, which was financially successful. This work relieved the financial pressure that he had felt all his adult life. A year later, his farce The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England was produced at Drury Lane and brought him a profit of almost £200. In 1758 he became what today might perhaps be called general editor of Universal History, a compilation of 58 volumes; Smollett himself wrote on France, Italy, and Germany. His friendship with the politician John Wilkes enabled him to secure the release of Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s black servant, from the press-gang. But a libel on Admiral Sir Charles Knowles in The Critical Review led to Smollett’s being sentenced to a fine of £100 and three months’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench Prison. He seems to have lived there in some comfort and drew on his experiences for his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett became editor in 1760.
Two years later he became editor of The Briton, a weekly founded to support the prime minister John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. He was also writing an eight-volume work entitled The Present State of all Nations, and he had begun a translation, in 36 volumes, of the varied works of the French writer Voltaire. Smollett was now seriously ill; attempts to secure a post as physician to the army in Portugal and as British consul in Marseille or Madrid were fruitless. In 1763 the death of his only child, Elizabeth, who was 15 years old, overwhelmed him “with unutterable sorrow.” He severed his connection with The Critical Review and, as he said, “every other literary system,” retiring with his wife to France, where he settled at Nice.
In 1766 Smollett published Travels Through France and Italy, his one nonfiction work that is still read. It is a satire on both tourists and those who batten on them, and its jaundiced version of traveling on the Continent led to Smollett’s appearance as the splenetic Smelfungus in Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768). He returned to England in that year, visited Scotland, and at Christmas was again in England (at Bath), where he probably began what is his finest work, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, an epistolary novel that recounts the adventures of a family traveling through Britain. In 1768, steadily weakening in health, he retired to Pisa, Italy. During the autumn of 1770 he seems to have written the bulk of Humphry Clinker, which was published on June 15, 1771.
Smollett is not the equal of his older contemporaries, the novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he is unrivaled for the pace and vigour that sustain his comedy. He is especially brilliant in the rendering of comic characters in their externals, thus harking back to the manner of the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and looking forward to that of the novelist Charles Dickens. By modern criteria, his art as a satirical novelist is defective, his model being the “picaresque” novel, relating loosely linked episodes in the life of a rogue hero. But his panoramic picture of the life of his times is surpassed only by that given by Henry Fielding, while his account of conditions in the Royal Navy is especially valuable.