Isobel Armstrong. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830-1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-19-920520-2. Price: US$55.95/£36.00

Isobel Armstrong’s magisterial Victorian Glassworlds is a sweeping investigation into what the author calls a “culture of glass” (89). In the years between 1830 and 1880, she notes, there arose in Britain, and in London especially, a “new glass consciousness” and with it, “a language of transparency” (1). In this sweeping study, Armstrong undertakes to understand the mid-nineteenth century by describing the new enterprise of literally “seeing” the “period through glass” (16). Glass, she demonstrates, was at the “center” of a variety of “debates” about what she calls “Victorian modernism” (202). Throughout the text, Armstrong takes pains to distinguish the modernism of the Victorian era from the modernity of twentieth-century theorists, and most notably Walter Benjamin. This eschewal of a teleological modernism allows Armstrong to probe the nineteenth century and its cultural productions with great depth, specificity, and play. Armstrong’s Victorian modernism encompasses questions of labor, spectacle, and science, as they pertain to political economy, urban experience, and cultural representation. At the heart of all of these developments, Armstrong argues, were preoccupations with transparency and “anxiet[ies] about mediation” that found their ways into the literary and artistic productions of the period, both high and popular (362). The book has a tripartite structure, with sections devoted, respectively, to labor and politics, the scopic culture of the city, and optical instruments and toys. The first section of the text uses glass as a window into the labor regimes and political ideals of the mid-nineteenth century. A particularly prescient chapter addresses the genre of factory tourism that was a feature of magazines and periodicals in the early Victorian period. Here, with great ingenuity, Armstrong brings to light the literary structure of these accounts, which “drew upon both empirical and aesthetic registers” (19). Densely detailed and richly illustrated, the “visit genre” marshaled empirical detail while also gesturing to the Bible, Dante, and Milton, as it brought readers down into the furnace and then “home” into the showroom (24, 35). In the process, it raised the question of the humanity of workers like glassblowers. Other chapters in this first section concern themselves with the relationships between glassblowers and their employers. Of interest to historians will be Armstrong’s examinations of both business practice and labor politics. She assesses the politics of labor and the practices of protest by examining not only glass making, but glass breaking too. The breaking of glass was a form of protest from the post-Napoleonic era well into the twentieth century when Suffragettes famously threw bricks through department store windows. Not a mere spontaneous outbreak of mob violence, glass breaking articulated a popular critique of the status quo, Armstrong shows. Bringing a literary critic’s eye to the endeavor, Armstrong argues that the “grammar of glass-breaking” connoted a particular “style” at a moment when notions of property and work were under renegotiation (91). The second section of this rich text moves to a consideration of the urban spaces of the Victorian era, along with the cultural responses and political potentials that they engendered. Armstrong is particularly concerned with the Victorian capital, for, as she contends, the “glazed shopfront was London’s genre” (133). Here, Armstrong seeks to show how “reflection and translucency created a new order of perception in the everyday,” both artistic and political in its implications (95). Armstrong commences this intriguing section with an experimental, and sometimes vexing, chapter employing a collage of quotations from philosophers, optical theorists, painters, and novelists as an effort to get at the “poetics of windows” (132). Happily, the lines of analysis suggested here are worked out more concretely in the subsequent chapters, which probe the political, …