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Winner of the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize 2009
Shortlisted for The British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize 2009
Victorian Glassworlds
Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880
Isobel Armstrong
472 pages
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125 black-and-white illustrations
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246x171mm
978-0-19-920520-2
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Hardback
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24 April 2008
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- A properly ground-breaking book from a brilliant scholar of the Victorian period
- Uses the stories of the mass production of glass in the nineteenth century to provide a startling new account of the period
- Includes brilliant and totally original readings of artefacts, manufactured objects, and literary texts
Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period.
The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto
inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.
First, to look through glass was to look
through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.
Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and
artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known.
A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity. Readership: Those with an interest in the history of ideas and in Victorian material culture,
especially from a literary, artistic, or historical perspective
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Isobel Armstrong, formerly of Birkbeck College, University of London
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"Amstrong's book is a jewel among academic publications... It is a multifaceted book, the complexity of which - both theoretical and rhetorical - is impressive." - Monika Pietrzak-Franger, The British Society for Literature and Science "a challenging, major work" - Thomas Marks, The Cambridge Quarterly "Richly researched... A book of great originality and even greater ambition.... in chapter after chapter, Armstrong succeeds in bringing both wide-angle and close-up views of the nineteenth century into fresh focus... a major work" - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Times Literary Supplement "Sumptous production quality and copious illustrations... This challenging book is worth the
effort for the new window it opens on the crucially important Victorian period." - Nature "Like the world of glass it describes, this is a book of gleaming virtuosity. We quickly enter a vision of Victorian England that is dazzlingly new - a glass democracy of crystal boulevards and aerial spaces. Light comes flashing to us from every direction, even as the image of human labour and breath remains steadily in view." - Elaine Scarry, Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University "a brilliant and challenging exploration... remarkable" - Kate Flint, The Review of English Studies "this marvellous book tells the story of the creation, in the nineteenth century, of whole worlds of
glass, with languages and cultures to go with each of them. There is news on every page, and lovingly evoked detail in profusion, but there is also deeply reflective thought and theory. Anyone else might have got lost among these treasures, but Isobel Armstrong always knows just where she is, even when, especially when, she manages to be in so many places at once. Her learning is prodigious but so is her unfailing and enticing clarity." - Michael Wood "the book embodies its subject matter by casting prismatic rays of thought in a myriad of unexpected directions" - Andrew Rudd, True Principles "a thoughtful, painstaking and impressively scholarly book which covers an enormous amount of ground in some detail. It will be invaluable
resource for serious students of Victorian society, arts and culture" - Vulpes Libris
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Introduction: The Poetics of Transparency
PART 1 FACETS OF GLASS CULTURE: MAKING AND BREAKING GLASS
1: Factory Tourism: Morphology of the 'Visit to a Glass Factory'
2: Robert Lucas Chance, Modern Glass Manufacturer: fractures in the glass factory
3: Riot and the Grammar of Window-Breaking: the Chances, Wellington, Chartism
4: The Glassmakers' Eloquence: a Trade Union Journal, the Royal Commission, 1868
Conclusion
PART 11 PERSPECTIVES OF THE GLASS PANEL: WINDOWS, MIRRORS, WALLS
5: Reflections, Translucency, Aura, Trace
6: Glassing London: Building Glass Culture, Real and Imagined
7: Politics of the Conservatory: Glasshouses, Republican and Populist
8: Mythmaking: Cinderella and her Glass Slipper at the Crystal Palace
9: Glass under Glass: Glassworld Fictions
PART 111 LENS-MADE IMAGES: OPTICAL TOYS AND PHILOSOPHICAL INSTRUMENTS
10: The Lens, Light, and the Virtual World
11: Dissolving and Resolving Views: from Magic Lantern to Telescope
12: Microscopic Space
13: Crystalphiles, Anamorphobics, and Stereoscopic Volume
14: Coda on Time: Fixing the Moving Image and Mobilising the Fixed Image - Memory, Repetition, and Working Through
Conclusion: the End of Glass Culture - from Nineteenth-Century Modernity to Modernism
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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