POTTERIES. The name of The Potteries! is given to a remarkable district in shire, in which the greater part of the English pottery and porcelain is made. It is a row of seven or eight towns, lying along the same turnpike road, and having the intervals be tween them every year more and more filled up by nvre than twenty hamlets and chapel. ries: It may be characterised as a street eight miles in length, with shorter streets branching out on either side. Over the whole of this space the characteristics of a pottery district are observable; especially the bulky and some what ugly Kilns which every establishment possesses. The chief towns among the group are Tunstall, Burslem, Longport, Hanley, Shelton, Stoke, Fenton, and Lane End ; the smaller places are too numerous for enumer ation here. Etruria, the celebrated establish ment where Wedgewood obtained his fame and his wealth, is not so much a town as a factory, with the mansion of the proprietor and the houses of the workpeople. There are not less than a hundred and twenty pottery and porcelain establishments in the district, some of which employ six or eight hundred persons each. The names of Cope land, Minton, Ridgway, Davenport, and Wood, are among the most celebrated of the manu facturers; and it is among these we are to look for those gradual improvements which will leave us nothing to wish for in emulating the production of China, Sevres, and Dresden.
The Exhibition of 1851 will tell its own tale on this subject.
In the last annual report of the School of Design, the following interesting remarks are made on the progress of the branch Schools in the Pottery district The schools at Stoke and Hanley continue to be conducted in the most satisfactory manner, and are exercising a marked influence on the manu factures of those places. The proportion of
the students actually engaged in the manu factories is unusually large, amounting to three fourths of the whole number ; and about thirty are established modellers and painters. Several of the young pupils have advanced to the study of colour, but the difficulty of forming or maintaining a class, in the absence of proper examples, is extreme. A life class is established at Hanley. The modelling classes have now assumed their proper importance in the schools, with re ference not only to their numbers, but to the quality of the pupils, many of whom are modellers of long standing, established in the manufactories, who come to the schools already skilled in the handicraft of their business. Their practice in the schools is to study the figure, and to model after the finest examples of ornament, and afterwards to exercise their knowledge of form and relief by reproducing specimens of the like cha racter, from the engravings of Albertolli and others. No plan can be better adapted for spreading among the modellers, who are also to a great extent the designers, that in which their previous education has been deficient, that is to say, a knowledge of the best forms, and taste to prefer them. There are also several pupils in the modelling classes who have begun at the beginning, and worked through the elementary studies of the school. One of the principal modellers in the Potteries is stated to have drawn his first line in the Hanley school.'