Abstract
There are, therefore, at least three ways to think about Victorian Glassworlds: as a guide to the industrial and political infrastructure of glassmaking and the industrialists, artisans, and laborers who fabricated it into reality; as a richly informed tour through the cultural institutions that were transformed or even created by the new ubiquity of sheet and plate glass; and as a theoretically informed and at times dizzyingly sophisticated quarrel with Walter Benjamin, who "believed that an 'empty' homogeneous glass culture evolved in the nineteenth century" (14). Armstrong demonstrates that it is a mistake, for example, to overvalue the importance of stained glass in Great Exhibition culture because it was the puzzlingly double nature of hard transparent crystal that most fascinated audiences and authors at the time.