remained sole owner of the Etruria works until 1790, when he took some of his sons and a nephew, named Byerley, into partnership. He died on the 3rd of January 1795, rich in honours and in friends, for besides being a great potter he was a man of high moral worth, and was associated with many noted men of his time, amongst whom should be mentioned Sir Joseph Banks, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin. His descendants have carried on the business at Etruria to this day, and have lately established at the works a Wedgwood museum of great interest.
See Ceramics. For detailed accounts of his life see Eliza Metyeard, Life of Wedgwood (1865–1866) Jewitt, Life of Wedgwood (1865); Rathbone, Old Wedgwood (1893); Church, Josiah Wedgwood: Master-Potter (1894; new ed., 1903); Burton, History and Description of English Earthenware and Stoneware (1904); J. C. Wedgwood, A History of the Wedgwood Family (1909). (W. B.*)
WEDMORE, FREDERICK (1844 – ), English art critic and man of letters, was born at Richmond Hill, Clifton, on the 9th of July 1844, the eldest son of Thomas Wedmore of Druids Stoke, Stoke Bishop. His family were Quakers, and he was educated at a Quaker private school and then in Lausanne and Paris. After a short experience of journalism in Bristol he came to London in 1868, and began to write for the Spectator. His early works included two novels, but the best examples of his careful and artistic prose are perhaps to be found in his volumes of short stories, Pastorals of France (1877), Renunciations (1893), Orgeas and Miradou (1896), reprinted in 1905 as A Dream of Provence. In 1900 he published another novel, The Collapse of the Penitent. As early as 1878 he had begun a long connexion with the London Standard as art critic. He began his studies on etching with a noteworthy paper in the Nineteenth Century (1877 – 1878) on the etchings of Charles Méryon. This was followed by The Four Masters of Etching (1883), with original etchings by Sir F. S. Haden, Jules Ferdinand Jacquemart, J. M. Whistler, and Alphonse Legros; Etching in England (1895); an English edition (1894) of E. Michel's Rembrandt; and and a study and a catalogue of Whistler's Etchings (1899). His other works include Studies in English Art (2 vols., 1876 – 1880), The Masters of Genre Painting (1880), English Water Colour (1902), Turner and Ruskin (2 vols., 1900).
WEDNESBURY, a market town and municipal and parliamentary borough of Staffordshire, England, in the Black Country, 121 m. N .W. from London by the London & North-Western railway, and on the northern line of the Great Western. Pop. (1901) 26,554. An overhead electric tramway connects with Walsall, 3½ m. N. The town is ancient, but of modern growth and appearance as an industrial centre. The church of St Bartholomew, however, is a fine Perpendicular building, standing high. It is traditionally supposed to occupy the site of a place of the worship of Woden or Odin, and the name of the town to be derived from this god through the form Wodensborough. A church was built, probably in the 11th century, and from 1301 to 1535 the advowson, tithes, &c., belonged to the abbot of Halesowen. The present church was several times restored in the 18th and 19th centuries. The chief public buildings are the town hall (1872), art gallery (1891), and free library (1878). Coal, limestone and ironstone are mined. A special kind of coal, giving an intense heat, is largely used in forges. There are great iron and steel works, producing every kind of heavy goods used by railway and engineering works, such as boiler plates, rails, axles, tubes, bolts and nuts. Stoneware potteries are also important. Similar industries, with brick-making, are practised at Darlaston, an urban district (pop. 15,395), within the parliamentary borough. Wednesbury returns one member to parliament. The town is governed by a mayor, 4 aldermen, and 12 councillors. Area, 2287 acres.
Here Ethelfleda, widow of Æthelred of Mercia, in 916 constructed a castle. The place is not mentioned in Domesday, but appears to have belonged to the barony of Dudley. After the Conquest it became a demesne of the crown, and it was bestowed by Henry II. on the Heronvilles. It received parliamentary representation in 1867, and became a municipal borough in 1886.
WEED, THURLOW (1797 – 1882), American journalist and politician, was born in Cairo, Greene county, New York, on the 15th of November 1797. He began to earn his own living the age of eight. From 1811 to 1818 he worked as an apprentice and journeyman printer in Onondaga Hollow, Utica, Auburn, Cooperstown, Albany and New York City. His first independent enterprises, the Republican Agriculturist, established at Norwich, N.Y., in 1818, and the Onondaga County Republican, established at Manlius, N.Y., in 1821, proving unsuccessful, he became editor of the Rochester Telegraph in 1822. Entering politics as an opponent of the Democratic machine, which he termed the Albany Regency, Weed was in 1824 elected to the Assembly on the John Quincy Adams ticket, serving for a single session (1825). Two years later, during the excitement over the disappearance of William Morgan (see Anti-Masonic Party), he retired from the Telegraph and threw himself with enthusiasm into the attack on the Masonic order, editing for a time the Anti-Masonic Enquirer. In 1830 he established and became editor of the Albany Evening Journal, which he controlled for thirty-five years. Supporting the Whigs and later the Republicans, it was one of the most influential anti-slavery papers in the northeast; and Thurlow Weed himself became a considerable force in politics. In 1863 he retired from the Journal and settled in New York City. In 1867 he assumed editorial control of the Commercial Advertiser, but was soon compelled to resign on account of ill-health. He died in New York City on the 22nd of November 1882.
See The Life of Thurlow Weed (vol. i., Autobiography, edited by his daughter, Harriet A. Weed; vol. ii., Memoir, by his grandson, Thurlow Weed Barnes, Boston and New York, 1884). The Memoir is especially full for the period 1850 – 1867.
WEEHAWKEN, a township of Hudson county, New Jersey, U.S.A., in the N.E. part of the state, on the Hudson river, adjoining Hoboken and opposite the city of New York. Pop. (1890) 1943; (1900) 5325; (1910 census), 11,228. It is served by the New York, Ontario & Western, and the West Shore railways (being a terminus of the latter), and by suburban electric lines, and is connected with New York City by steam ferries. The township consists of a narrow strip of land along the western bank of the Hudson, and at the southern extremity of the Palisades. The extensive water-front is lined with wharves, some of which can accommodate the largest ocean steamers. On a ledge below the crest of the Palisades is the famous duelling ground, where New York citizens and others once settled their quarrels. Originally a part of Hoboken and North Bergen, the township of Weehawken was separately incorporated in 1859. Its name is an Indian word said to mean “maize land.”
WEEK (from A.S. wicu, Germanic *wikôn, probably = change, turn), the name given to periods of time, varying in length in different parts of the world, but shorter than a “month.” The month may be divided in two ways: a fractional part may be taken (decad or pentad), as in East Africa or Ancient Egypt (moon-week), or the week may be settled without regard to the length of the month (market-week, &c.). The seven-day week (see Calendar) originated in West Asia, spread to Europe and later to North Africa (Mahommedan). In other parts of Africa three, four (especially in the Congo), five, six and eight (double four) day weeks are found, and always in association with the market; the same applies to the three-day week of the Muyscas (S. America), the four-day week of the Chibchas, the five-day week of Persia, Malaysia, Java, Celebes, New Guinea and Mexico; in ancient Scandinavia a five-day period was in use, but markets were probably unknown. That the recurrence of the market determined the length of the week seems clear from the Wajagga custom of naming the days after the markets they visit, as well as from the fact that on the Congo the word for week is the same as the word for market. Among agricultural tribes in Africa one day of the week, which varies from place to place, is often a rest-day, visiting the market being the only work allowed.
Lasch in Zts. für Socialwissenschaft, ix. 619 seq., and N.W. Thomas in Journ. Comparative Legislation, xix. 90 seq., refer to the week in connexion with the market. (N. W. T.)
WEEKS, EDWIN LORD (1849 – 1903), American artist, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1849. He was a pupil of Léon Bonnat and of J. L. Gérôme, at Paris. He made many
