G. Victorian Glass Worlds: Glass Culture And The Imagination

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In her 1924 memoir, A Nineteenth-Century Childhood, Mary MacCarthy wrote 'For a long time now the sound of crashing and smashing of glass has been in my ears. It is the strong, rose-colored glass of the nineteenth-century conservatories cracking up'.

The centrality of glass to Victorian culture is the underlying premise of Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Glassrvorlds, a brilliant and challenging exploration of what right at the start she tells us is 'an antithetical material'.

Glass is both a barrier and a medium; allowing for the opening up of the world yet blocking access to it. Utilitarian or ornamental, plain or colored, shaped into lenses that allow for different views on the world, or placed in a mirror that reflects Shoes Online observers back to themselves, Victorian glass, when placed under examination, reveals its multifaceted role both within society and the Victorian literary imagination.

Moreover, ...
... its capacity to shatter, spectacularly, into a myriad of fragments not only made it a ready target for actual rioters, but as Mac Carthy so readily recognized extremely easy to appropriate as a metaphor for iconoclasm.

But Mac Carthy immediately backtracked. 'Now the wrecking is over' she went on. 'There is a great mass everywhere about and something perhaps of the early morning misgiving after the spree'.

However much post First World War writers might have wished to repudiate their predecessors; the break from the Victorian period was not as absolute as might appear at first sight. One of the many triumphs of Armstrong's study lies in her determination to show, through the protean medium of glass.

That its production and deployment illuminate key factors of what she terms 'Victorian modernism' not an oxymoron, but a distinct set of concerns, from conditions of labor to the spectacular elements in industrial society; evolution as made manifest through the microscope, technologies of reproduction, modes of taxonomy, individualism and uniformity.

Thinking through glass was a powerful way for Victorian architects, naturalists, poets and philosophers to mediate between their own time and the shadowy uncertainties of the future. Glass is an extraordinary substance.

As Karl Marx memorably observed, in its making, labor is literally crystallized in blown glass, which holds the spectral breath of the worker who blows it into being. With this in mind, Armstrong opens her book by taking us straight into the glassworks, their fiery furnaces the quintessence of industrial hell.

Their practices revelatory of tensions between those who possessed different types of skills and responsibilities; their products glasses and decanters and mirrors and colored windows and optical glass, polished and painted and engraved and laquered and grounds positioned at the interface of aesthetics and technology.

To look at glass or to look through glass is, as Armstrong goes on to show, to explore Victorian commodity palaces, whether goods Discount Shoes were just on display, or for sale, in shopping arcades or displayed behind the new plate glass windows.

It is to explore the spaces that could disrupt classification or allow for new taxonomies, whether in the jumbled geography of the Crystal Palace, or the protected, planned, yet exotic vegetative life of conservatories.

It is to debate not just the material history of visual forms whether or not there was a progression from dissolving magic lantern slides to the cinema, for example but the epistemological problems of vision as well: as Armstrong puts it, 'optical toys exercised a kind of plagiaristic haunting of the philosophical instruments of high research from which they were derived'.