where its superfluous moisture may evaporate; and finally, isn’t it
slapped and banged and beaten and patted and kneaded and wedged and
knocked about like butter, until it becomes a beautiful grey dough,
ready for the potter’s use?
In regard of the potter, popularly so called (says the plate), you
don’t mean to say you have forgotten that a workman called a
Thrower is the man under whose hand this grey dough takes the
shapes of the simpler household vessels as quickly as the eye can
follow? You don’t mean to say you cannot call him up before you,
sitting, with his attendant woman, at his potter’s wheel – a disc
about the size of a dinner-plate, revolving on two drums slowly or
quickly as he wills – who made you a complete breakfast-set for a
bachelor, as a good-humoured little off-hand joke? You remember
how he took up as much dough as he wanted, and, throwing it on his
wheel, in a moment fashioned it into a teacup – caught up more clay
and made a saucer – a larger dab and whirled it into a teapot –
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
winked at a smaller dab and converted it into the lid of the
teapot, accurately fitting by the measurement of his eye alone –
coaxed a middle-sized dab for two seconds, broke it, turned it over
at the rim, and made a milkpot – laughed, and turned out a slopbasin
– coughed, and provided for the sugar? Neither, I think, are
you oblivious of the newer mode of making various articles, but
especially basins, according to which improvement a mould revolves
instead of a disc? For you MUST remember (says the plate) how you
saw the mould of a little basin spinning round and round, and how
the workmen smoothed and pressed a handful of dough upon it, and
how with an instrument called a profile (a piece of wood,
representing the profile of a basin’s foot) he cleverly scraped and
carved the ring which makes the base of any such basin, and then
took the basin off the lathe like a doughy skull-cap to be dried,
and afterwards (in what is called a green state) to be put into a
second lathe, there to be finished and burnished with a steel
burnisher? And as to moulding in general (says the plate), it
can’t be necessary for me to remind you that all ornamental
articles, and indeed all articles not quite circular, are made in
moulds. For you must remember how you saw the vegetable dishes,
for example, being made in moulds; and how the handles of teacups,
and the spouts of teapots, and the feet of tureens, and so forth,
are all made in little separate moulds, and are each stuck on to
the body corporate, of which it is destined to form a part, with a
stuff called ‘slag,’ as quickly as you can recollect it. Further,
you learnt – you know you did – in the same visit, how the
beautiful sculptures in the delicate new material called Parian,
are all constructed in moulds; how, into that material, animal
bones are ground up, because the phosphate of lime contained in
bones makes it translucent; how everything is moulded, before going
into the fire, one-fourth larger than it is intended to come out of
the fire, because it shrinks in that proportion in the intense
heat; how, when a figure shrinks unequally, it is spoiled –
emerging from the furnace a misshapen birth; a big head and a
little body, or a little head and a big body, or a Quasimodo with
long arms and short legs, or a Miss Biffin with neither legs nor
arms worth mentioning.
And as to the Kilns, in which the firing takes place, and in which
some of the more precious articles are burnt repeatedly, in various
stages of their process towards completion, – as to the Kilns (says
the plate, warming with the recollection), if you don’t remember
THEM with a horrible interest, what did you ever go to Copeland’s
for? When you stood inside of one of those inverted bowls of a
Pre-Adamite tobacco-pipe, looking up at the blue sky through the