Copeland china — successor to Spode, the Staffordshire factory producing fine earthenware and porcelain through the Victorian era — appears in domestic poetry as a marker of middle-class respectability; A poem about a Victorian household's Sunday best might include "the Copeland service, kept for visitors and Christmas, its pattern unchanged since the wedding"; Copeland's production of Parian ware figures — affordable imitations of marble sculpture for the aspiring household — suits poems about democratic aspiration and mass-produced beauty; In a poem about continuity, the Copeland jug that survives three generations of a family carries the weight of unchanged pattern: "same blue flowers, same gilt rim, same reassurance that some things do not alter"; The factory's name — Copeland after the death of Spode, yet continuing Spode's designs — offers a poet an image of identity outlasting its origin; A poem about a potter's labour might invoke Copeland as the industrial sublime: thousands of identical plates emerging from the bottle kilns, each one considered ordinary, each one the work of skilled hands.