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Victorian Glassworlds: Glass culture and the imagination 1830-1880

It is unavoidably tempting for a reviewer to describe Isobel Armstrong’s book in terms that echo its subject matter: kaleidoscopic in its constellation of ideas, sparkling in the poise of its prose, dazzling in its range, and crystalline in offering up fascinating points-of-view. Such praise not only recognises its ground-breaking achievement but is a mark of its deep saturation with the languages, aesthetics and phenomenology of glass. Victorian Glassworlds provides its own lens on the remarkable role played by glass in nineteenth-century culture, linking chandeliers, microscopes, telescopes, conservatories, candelabra, decanters, plate-glass shop windows, magic lanterns, arcades, the Crystal Palace and Chartist riots. It is an exploration of the impact of the three simple yet endlessly mutable forms: the glass panel, the mirror and the lens. That the modernity of nineteenth-century culture was often characterised in terms of the play between material and immaterial, the mediation of subjectivity, the instability and interconnectedness between seer and seen – is due to the properties and pervasiveness of the Victorian glassworld. Between 1830 and 1880, glass was the modernist material par excellence, transforming not only the experience of urban space and the domestic interior, but subjectivity more generally. As Armstrong elucidates, glass was the material of mediation par excellence: it was both medium and barrier and ‘interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen.’ (3). Literally and figuratively, glass provided new refractions of the self; a multiplication of glass surfaces, artefacts and devices reflected individuals and crowds, and concomitantly gave them means to reflect upon their own self-fashioning. While the transparency of glass offered up the possibility of an enlightenment subject clear and knowable to itself, the refractive properties of glass, particularly the lens, invariably pointed to the contingency of visual perception. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s well-known statement on the phenomenology of vision, that the body is both subject and object of perception, encapsulates a condition that was, in many ways, dramatically expanded by the new-found glass forms of this most everyday yet revolutionary of materials. One of the defining features of this important book is that its commitment to thinking through the materiality of glass is inseparable from showing how Victorian glassworlds provided a conceptual site for nineteenth-century modernisms to work out its concerns. There are three sections to Armstrong’s book; the first is on the making and breaking of nineteenth-century glass; the second is on the architectural forms of the panel, conservatory and window, while the third moves to the world of images through the effect of the lens and optical toys. The opening chapters detail the Early Popular Visual Culture Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2012, 93–104