Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (review)

If you thought you knew your Crystal Palace, think again. Did you, for example, know that after the 1851 triumph of the Great Exhibition there were serious and sustained discussions about building a Crystal Way, or a ten-mile Crystal "girdle" around London, with a raised railway on top and miles of plate-glassed shops beneath? The Arcades of Paris and the Crystal Palace itself seem small potatoes compared to such a glass circulatory system. Yet Isobel Armstong's thought-provoking and wide-ranging new book demonstrates that the plan was only one indication of how deeply Victorian ways of seeing had been transformed by the technological and economic revolution that placed sheets (and later, panes) of glass into virtually every English line of sight.

In a single volume, long and lavishly illustrated but still tautly and compellingly written and executed, Armstrong aims to lay bare the industrial history behind glassmaking (including a wonderfully rich chapter on Robert Lucas Chance and his Smethwick factory) as well as the role that glass and glassbreaking played in the day's industrial unrest. But she also sets out to unfold the paratext of the Great Exhibition and to reveal the oft-overlooked developments that made that triumph of sheet glass both feasible and profoundly transformative of worldwide attitudes about both the philosophical and the industrial/political ramifications of the new glass culture. There are, therefore, at least three ways to think about Victorian Glassworlds: as a guide to the industrial and political infrastructure of glassmaking and the industrialists, artisans, and laborers who fabricated it into reality; as a richly informed tour through the cultural institutions that were transformed or even created by the new ubiquity of sheet and plate glass; and as a theoretically informed and at times dizzyingly sophisticated quarrel with Walter Benjamin, who "believed that an 'empty' homogeneous glass culture evolved in the nineteenth century" (14).

Armstrong argues that Victorians saw glass as simultaneously medium and barrier. That is, if it was an industrial product that "makes evident its materiality as a brittle film" between viewer and world (115), it also allowed that world to come through or bounce off it, in a dizzying range of magnifications, refractions, and reflections that forced viewers to contemplate objects both in their original and in their glassed manifestations. In her terms, "a glass dialectic marked contradiction, a subject in difficulties, rather than a smooth transitivity . . . not invisible mediation but marks on the surface, scratches, fingerprints" (14). Victorian Glassworlds accordingly sets out to detail the "impurities and bubbles of air," the "internal impediments to vision," that were central to the era's "glass culture" (14). It is Armstrong's contention that "glass culture is at the centre of the debates of what I have called Victorian Modernism—labour, political radicalism, the 'free' human subject, spectacle in an industrial society, the politics of evolution in astronomy and under the microscope" (362).

Armstrong's book is a lens: it puts tiny individual moments under acute pressure so as to bring their concerns, whether with reflection, refraction, magnification, or mediation, into the overall Victorian web she is describing. The reward of admitting the impossibility of doing justice to the entire scope of the argument is that it frees me to single out moments for especial praise (and exempts me from trying to do justice to moments when I found its arguments hard to follow clearly). Armstrong's accounts of poems about mirrors and backward glances by Thomas Hardy and A. C. Swinburne are especially compelling, for example. So too are her readings of the sublime effect of magnified detail piled upon detail in descriptions of tiny aquatic animals in the seaside studies of P. H. Gosse, G. H. Lewes, and Agnes Callow. Those readings about magnification are also completely persuasive evidence for Armstrong's larger claim (in a chapter called "Microscopic Space") about the immense cultural impact of the close-up, with its power to...