Doulton Studio Notes

The Studio Notes were precursors of the factory and office ‘house magazine,’ but solely written and illustrated by Doulton employees – a highly talented community of over two hundred women and a much smaller group of a dozen or so men, enjoying an unusually benign working environment in late nineteenth-century England. From the rich variety of educational and social opportunities provided by work and leisure emerged an enchanting flowering of amateur talent in the form of a regular series of manuscript compilations entitled Studio Notes. The contents are a delight to the eye: elaborately detailed title pages; delicate watercolors; humorous verses; philosophising tracts; holiday journals; competitions and the familiar chit-chat and scandal inseparable from any happy working community. Out of the forty or so original volumes assembled over ten years (1883-1892), only half have been traced. This anthology comprising a selection from ten surviving volumes from 1883-1887 with original illustrations, and facsimiled texts annotated by Peter Rose, allows us to enter into the private lives and adventures of these working men and women, capturing the flavor of their experiences and values to an extraordinarily intimate degree.