American Toby Jug Museum 

Emerson character jug produced by Lancaster and Sandland of Hanley, England, circa 1940. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman called him his "master". He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him.