The Knowledge Of Glass

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For the continual double quality of glass as something both solid and transparent stands, in many ways, for the dual emphasis of this remarkable book, at once material history (Armstrong loves to enumerate the continual inventiveness of vitreous production) and investigation of the more abstract, conceptual implications of vision.

Glass, Armstrong writes, 'is smeared with the prints of toil and thought'. Given its multifarious appearances, and the questions about the reliability or otherwise of human sight that it provokes, small wonder she produces a huge number of poetic and fictional descriptions and metaphors that in turn demonstrate and illuminate the Victorian fascination with the medium.

And she herself relishes the vocabulary of glass, even when it is transferred to a different sphere: thus the 'transparent webbing of a fly's wing, its crystal viscera and respiratory organs, the "glass-like" tongue of the slug' the language Jewelry Store ...
... here is Philip Gosse's 'presented the world as diaphane, calling out a poetics of limpidity that attempted to capture the source of life in visual language chrysophrase, luster, iridescence'.

At times, glass's lexicon seems to threaten to overwhelm argument Armstrong will intentionally string together quotations like beads of glass on an elaborate chandelier, meaning flashing off them in oblique and intersecting shafts of light. For Victorian Glassworlds is, in places, written in an allusive, exuberant, bravely experimental style that seeks to be true to its multi-faceted subject matter.

Yet like an ambitious palace of glass, Armstrong's prose is strongly supported its girders include Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the twentieth century, and back in the Victorian period itself, Herman von Helmholtz, John Herschel, and David Brewster.

It both calls attention to the book's own overarching structure for she is meticulous in signposting her route through her rich sources, both verbal and visual and offers an aesthetic of freedom, in which the reader's own powers of association are deliberately brought into play.

Armstrong's careful yet imaginative deployment of ideas of light, space, and time, captured or refracted through the interpretive medium of glass, makes we see the Victorians as questioning the stability of all kinds of images: not so much proto-modernists as seeking to understand their own modernity.

Whether she is discussing versions of Cinderella's glass slipper or the extraordinary, sixty-three pane looking glass curtain at London's Coburg Theatre that reflected the audience back to itself.

Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass world or Joseph Paxton's designs for a huge glass viaduct over London, Armstrong never takes her eye Chanel Jewelry off the topic of observation, the instability of perception, and the presence of the human whether as producer, consumer, or commentator within the brittle, prismatic world of glass.

'Knowledge,' she remarks at one point, 'is driven by the passions. This is actually the condition of untethering thought from detail so that the discovery of form can take place'.

What Isobel Armstrong has managed to do in this remarkable book in which her own passions for the vitreous object and the pleasures of conceptual thinking are powerfully displayed is to keep both detail and thought in play: not in the ludic and random spirit of a kaleidoscope, but as essential, complementary components of cultural analysis.