The 18th century is an attractive age for British biographers. It was such a transformative time. Samuel Richardson, a printer, became the first great psychological novelist. Henry Fielding, justice of the peace for Westminster, became the paramount picaresque novelist of English literature. Josiah Wedgwood, a potter, became one of his period’s greatest chemists as well as an artist and, in Brian Dolan’s words, the first tycoon.

There is a robust sense of play among the men on the make of 18thcentury English society, which outraged the Victorians, who thought they could improve the moral tone of the self-made man. Thus William Thackeray – no mean satirist himself and one who savored the mendacities of Becky Sharp – nevertheless spoke for a generation that deplored the frivolities of Fielding and his ilk.

Mr. Dolan does not say so in his book (Penguin, 320 pages, $24.95), but he clearly believes that biography can remind us of how much we owe the 18th century – and how our age resembles it. No wonder, then, that he calls on no less than Donald Trump for a comment on Wedgwood’s significance. The term tycoon, the Donald told Mr. Dolan, “belongs to an era when people outside of aristocracy were able to forge ahead for themselves, which inevitably gives rise to the thought of someone being self-made. I would imagine that Josiah Wedgwood would be honored to be so labeled.”

Trump, with his wig-like hair-do, lacks only the powder needed to play the 18th-century game of reveling in success. How delighted the Age of Enlightenment would have been to watch a program enticingly entitled “The Apprentice!” Eminent Victorians might have withdrawn from such vulgarity, but not men like Josiah Wedgwood, who promulgated the idea of natural religion as an antidote to the staid sanctimony of churches that preached the revealed word of God. The world was there to be grasped and experimented upon.

Wedgwood befriended the scientists of his day and presented well-received papers on his chemical experiments with the clay that he transformed in wonderful works of art that rivaled the Etruscan vases and Pompeian vessels wrested from the wreckage of Vesuvius. He thrived in an era of insatiable curiosity, frequenting the new bookshops and booksellers, which one Conservative critic called the “pimps of literature.” How crass society might become if even commoners could read for themselves and develop their own tastes!

Then there is the sex of it. Too fastidious to consort with prostitutes, the pent-up Josiah later in life reveled in his marriage to his distant cousin Sally, who brought him not only a fortune but also connubial bliss. In the first days of their marriage, he wanted to do nothing but “hear, see, feel” Sally, he wrote to a friend. What this intimacy meant to Wedgwood is wonderfully captured in Mr. Dolan’s evocative prose:

For most of his life his own flesh, marked with the trace of his childhood disease [smallpox], was driven from his consciousness. His own limb, from his right knee down, was a sore encumbrance [it was later amputated].The most personal touch he experienced from anyone was therapeutic – his mother’s hand on his hot forehead, the cursory squeeze of a physician’s fingers on his calf. His physiology was so adapted to feeling pain that cosseting sensual pleasures was undoubtedly, as he said, more “than I shall ever be able to express.”

Wedgwood ached for the fulfillment of marriage, and such passages make us feel for him.

The other side of Wedgwood was his work ethic. He sprang from generations of potters, residing in the Midlands, who constituted a kind of priesthood of the craft. One side of the family barely knew how to shape clay and firepots and sell them, but the other side looked for ways to improve

the product and the market for their wares so as to rise in the world. For his part, Josiah discovered early on what he called the “infinite ductility of clay” – no mean metaphor for his indefatigable march to a position of prominence that had him developing pottery for Queen Caroline, a flamboyant dinner service for Catherine the Great, and a range of other beautifully finished objects that rivaled the finest porcelain.

Wedgwood reminds me a great deal of Walt Disney, whose genius consisted of employing the greatest craftsmen of his day. Walt had his studio, Josiah his laboratory. Out on the factory floor Wedgwood could be ruthless, walking past workmen’s benches and smashing with his stick every piece that fell below his exacting standards. Though he had his share of disgruntled employees, he was no Gradgrind. He paid a decent wage and took an active concern in the health of his workers. Their main complaint was automation. Wedgwood countered with the now familiar argument that in the long run such machines would produce more wealth for everyone.

Walter Benjamin worried about the status of works of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Now we have the Disney Channel and QVC. Read Mr. Dolan for another perspective on what is possible, even now: “But as always, Wedgwood represents the elite taste without social prejudice. The name carries the status of an old master, but is accessible to those without aristocratic wealth. Never one to ignore the interests of the ‘Middling Classes’ in favor of the rich, Josiah would be proud to learn the favorable impression his wares continue to make on customers, whether royalty, presidents, or everyday tourists.”