Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth century 'vase-mania'. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.

With

Jenny Uglow
Writer and Biographer

Rosemary Sweet
Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester

And

Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh

Producer: Eliane Glaser

Reading list:

Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

David Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (Phoenix, 2002)

Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021)

Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds), Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (British Museum Press, 1996)

Berg Maxine, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Iris Moon, Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024)

Rosemary Sweet, Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future (Faber and Faber, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production