The Victorian era is universally acknowledged, among other things, as being a time characterized by massive population growth, urbanization and urban-centered problems, suburbanization and mansion building, the emergence of public health, and the expansion of engineering knowledge capital. It was also, as Isobel Armstrong contends in Victorian Glassworlds, an age of glass manufacture and extensive glass usage: “One of the oldest artificial materials in the world suddenly became a modern material as an environment of mass transparency, never before experienced, came rapidly into being” (1). In Victorian Glass worlds, a 450-plus page tome richly filled with more than one hundred illustrations, Armstrong thus strives to explicate this state of affairs, and this is to be achieved through offering a dialectic covering the early to late Victorian period. In so doing Victorian Glassworlds investigates glass as a physical property used within the home, as a structural material utilized in the construction of various industrial age building types, and as a subject within texts and visual sources composed at that time. By introducing and expounding the complexities of glass in the daily sensory experience of Victorian living, Armstrong adroitly grants an insight into translucency and reflection and how these were associated with notions of modernity by those residing in the towns and cities of Britain (124). It is a compelling cultural journey on which the reader is taken.

Composed of three principal sections, “Facets of Glass Culture: Making and Breaking Glass,” “Perspectives of the Glass Panel: Windows, Mirrors, Walls,” and “Lens-Made Images: Optical Toys and Philosophical Instruments,” each with a small number of chapters, Victorian Glassworlds is a thoroughly comprehensive body of work. Exploring Victorian glass by focusing upon subjects such as factory tourism, the dissemination of glassmaking knowledge, factory narratives, the phenomenology of reflective surfaces, the meaning of glass architecture, crystalphilia, lens-made images, and glass myth making, Victorian Glassworlds should be recognized too for its rich detailing in light of Armstrong's scrupulously unraveling of glass's meaning within the dense cultural DNA of the nineteenth century. The scope of the book is, to be blunt, quite staggering, as is its detailing. Arguably few monographs on the Victorian past this year shall trump the compass of Victorian Glassworlds.

As Armstrong asserts in the opening paragraph of the introductory chapter, the nineteenth century was an age when glass output increased, new innovations in production were established, the cost of the commodity fell, and structures such as the Crystal Palace epitomized a new world of refraction, reflection, and transparency. However, as subsequent chapters demonstrate, the growing presence of glass in the ever-urbanizing Victorian world brought with it a range of transformations to the consciousness and mind-sets of the public. As shown in the informative chapter “Riot and the Grammar of Window-Breaking,” the material became a crucible for political and psychological conflict. The shock thus of having a window broken in one's home by a burglar brought with it a vulnerability to living in a modern society, thereby raising issues of safekeeping being breached and the potential fear of mob rule. It asserted, argues Armstrong, a violent shattering of barriers that had both a symbolic and literal meaning within Victorian Britain (67), an ideological challenge to many principles on which middle-class society was founded: property ownership, domestic security, and commodity possession as a result of labor. Glass breaking, as Armstrong notes, turned Victorian culture upon its head: “in breaking a window you were claiming that that ownership of the window was not to be identified with the domination of the gazer from inside over the space beyond the window. That is to say, you were fundamentally challenging his or her perceived right to perspective” (68).

Colorful in its linguistic texture, although difficult to read in some places, there is much to be mentioned of Victorian Glassworlds with regard to its analysis of how glass affected the Victorian world and how the Victorians forged a deep sense of fascination with the imagery and usefulness of the material. If ever students wish to be informed of matters of cause and effect within Victorian Britain, then Victorian Glassworlds is a work worth putting forward and taking stock of. Yet a word of caution is necessary. The thickness of the subject, coupled with the author's phraseology, arguably makes the book off-limits for those engaging in undergraduate study. Nonetheless, Victorian Glassworlds offers an intriguing account as to how the discovery of mass-producing glass literally opened the floodgates to the creation of a new world, one in which how you see and are seen was redefined. Touching upon matters of industrial and technological history, architecture and the visual arts, literature and print culture, philosophy and optics, Victorian Glassworlds offers a broad grasp of how the view of the world, to pardon the pun, was seen through glass eyes during Queen Victoria's reign. Importantly, Victorian Glassworlds allows us to reappraise how glass, a material that is so familiar to us and so taken for granted too, transformed modern life and, in so doing, how we now live, think, and behave. It's a fascinating way to see our history.