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seemed respectable, inoffensive and unchallenging. She had to consider what her writing might imply about other areas of her life, and was always conscious of her sensitive position as a woman in the masculine world of art scholarship.
    Developing scholarship as an integral part of her collecting, Charlotte would certainly have been aware of the potential hazards of her situation. As far as we know, she was not particularly feminist in her views – her journals give little indication that she was interested in feminist issues – nor was she keen to disrupt her family life with controversy. But she was naturally intellectual and ambitious, and, while she may not have been willing to take up a wider feminist cause, her marriages, her close involvement with the Dowlais steel business and her Welsh studies all indicate that she was happy to challenge, on a personal level, Victorian preconceptions about what she could do as a woman. As her collecting developed, so too did this challenge to convention. Privately, without fuss, she was developing a level of erudition to rival any male collector’s. Wide reading, learned discussion, an excellent visual memory and a talent for thinking on her feet got Charlotte the pieces she wanted. The history of the gourd-shaped bottle shows how her scholarship was constantly evolving and how important this was to her reputation as a collector.
    Her knowledge paid dividends. In one ‘very bad’ shop in Genoa, ‘a dilettante shoemakers’, Charlotte was offered a set of cups decorated with red landscapes. They were fine and unexpected, and they immediately attracted her attention. When she turned one of them over to check the maker’s mark, she found the name ‘Jacques Boselly’ painted crudely across the base, linking them to a small eighteenth-century ceramics factory in Savona, near Genoa in Italy. If they were genuinely Boselly cups, they were quite rare and desirable, a real find. But Charlotte continued turning them over. Three displayed the same scrawled signature. But fortunately Charlotte was not content until she had turned each one of the set and peered closely at every scratch and imprint, and that’s when she saw something else: the name ‘Wedgwood’ impressed into the glaze: ‘I confess the English name was rather faint so that the ingenious foreigner might be excused fromexpecting that it would escape ordinary attention,’ she explained in her journal. At a time when Wedgwood was out of fashion and distinctly less collectable than Boselly, the dealer had tried to upgrade the English cups into something more sought after and valuable. But those with a good knowledge of the trade were not to be so easily fooled: ‘the mark was quite strong enough to be quite clear to the initiated,’ Charlotte noted. 8
    In the competitive world of European collecting, there was no substitute for acquiring better knowledge than other collectors, or acquiring it more quickly. Charlotte’s scholarship gave her the opportunity to make profitable purchases and to speculate for the future. At the dealers in Genoa, Charlotte was quite as happy with Wedgwood cups as with Boselly. She had already decided that Wedgwood was quality china, worth collecting, and this was another opportunity to add the English ware to her collection at a time when ceramics from the factory were of little interest to the majority of European collectors and consequently relatively cheap to acquire. And as Charlotte’s knowledge grew, so did the opportunities for such bargains. In March 1872, she was scouring the shops in Amsterdam when she noticed a china figure of a youth holding a comb. It was a fine piece, and in perfect condition. Charlotte at once recognized that it was scarce Bristol china, a hard, white eighteenth-century porcelain manufactured from Cornish china-clay and much sought after for the quality of its glaze. She was so astonished at the