Some new and local items for free on Archive.org:
The Two Universities Way: a green route to walk from Staffordshire University to Keele University (2012).
Mountain Bike Guide: Midlands (1994).
The Technique of Pottery (1962).
Staffordshire Poets (1928) (Poets of the Shires series).
Anglo-Saxon burial mounds : princely burial in the 6th & 7th centuries (partly a survey of Midlands mounds).
And I also found this commentary by the writer A.S. Byatt, recalling her Stoke great-aunt, and possibly also a Stoke headmistress…
“I made a story, ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’. It was written partly to defend Racine and ‘the gods in the blood’ against the schoolteachers who were encouraging my ambitious daughter to ‘be a gardener, if she wanted to’. She didn’t. She wanted to learn enough French to read Racine and go to university, but they wanted to persuade her that ambition was bad, competition was bad, French was for railway stations […] Into my story of my wrath and despair [at this attitude…] I wove an image of my great-aunt Thirza, who was photographed when she was over eighty, in her house in Stoke-on-Trent amongst her exquisitely bright tablecloths and cushions, embroidered on ivory satin, of the kind sold for wedding dresses. She was a mythical figure. my great-aunt Thirza. ‘She had blonde hair so long she could sit on it’ my aunt would always say. I believe that as well as following the linear shadowed ‘transfers’ (like neo-Platonic ‘forms’) [in her embroidery] she sometimes invented her own fruit and flowers, boughs and garlands. I have several of the cushions still. The silks are still bright. In my story my great-aunt Thirza stood for my ordinary origins, and her own bright work, for women making things in snatched time. But she was not allied with my levelling, ladylike headmistress, who haunts my dreams still: the nay-sayer, the antagonist, the fairy godmother who turned gold threads back into dull straw.” (Ovid metamorphosed).
Also on early education in the Potteries…
[In the early part of the Industrial Revolution affordable books for spelling, reading and writing – and their associated small paid-for single-teacher ‘dame’ or ‘penny’ schools – served] “a rapidly expanding middle class market, but they were so cheap and published in such numbers that it was not difficult for a working-class parent to get hold of something like Mayor’s English Spelling Book. The local newspapers in the Potteries for instance, regularly carried bookseller’s advertisements in the 1830s and 1840s for manuals on reading and writing at prices from sixpence to two shillings.” (Silences & images : the social history of the classroom).
The Spyders of Burslem 