The Toby jug — a pottery jug in the form of a seated figure, typically a corpulent, tricorn-hatted man holding a pot of ale — appears in poems about eighteenth-century English tavern culture and the folk ceramic tradition; A poem about a village alehouse might describe the Toby jug on the shelf: "the fat man in his chair, the jug in his hand, the ale in his belly — a figure who had been drinking since the reign of George III and showed no sign of stopping"; The Toby jug's multiplication — Toby Fillpot, the Squire, the Sailor, the Thin Man — gives poems about English social types a ceramic taxonomy: "the whole village was up there on the shelf, each character fixed in its characteristic pose"; In a poem about a pub's history, the Toby jug serves as a continuity: "the jugs outlasted the landlords who bought them, the customers who drank from them, the brewery that brewed what they held — the fat man still seated, still toasting, still impervious to time"; The original "Toby Fillpot" character was drawn from a broadside ballad about a legendary drinker — making the Toby jug already a poem rendered in clay before the poet approaches it; A contemporary poem about a house clearance might describe a row of Toby jugs left to the last: "nobody wanted the fat men — they went to the charity shop in a box, still holding their invisible ale, still wearing their tricorn hats, still delighted with everything."