The present volume was the chief occupation of its author during the last four or five years of her long life. Miss Wedgwood had long desired to make more familiar the life of her great-grandfather, and at the same time to put on record many early memories of the two ensuing generations which would otherwise have vanished at her death. The correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood with his friend and partner Bentley, which occupies many volumes in the Wedgwood Museum at Etruria, offered a rich fund of information about his personal as well as about his business life which none of Wedgwood's biographers - not even the laborious and talented Miss Meteyard, whose work, moreover, has long been out of print - had fully utilised. Before Miss Wedgwood's death in November 1913 the book had made substantial advances towards completeness.