October 27, 1923] 



NA TURE 



61 



of glassware, the number of books of any note, written 

 by persons having intimate acquaintance with the 

 industry, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. 

 Thus, W. GilHnder's unpretentious but, in its day, 

 useful little book appeared in 1854 ; in 1883, H. J. 

 Powell, to whom we owe the volume under review, was 

 the chief author of a book on the " Principles of Glass- 

 making " ; while, since 1900, two other books have 

 appeared giving some account of the manufacture of 

 glass. It is doubtful if any other important industry 

 has so poor a technical literature. 



Now, for the first time, if we except A. Hartshome's 

 work on " Old English Glasses," published in 1897, we 

 have a general history of glass-making in England, one, 

 indeed, written by a manufacturer of specially rich 

 experience and knowledge of the handicraft. It is a 

 matter of great regret that he did not live to see the 

 actual publication of the book. 



The book gives, in the space of fifteen chapters, a 

 general survey of glass-making in England. It carries 

 us back to the Roman occupation, discusses such re- 

 mains of this period as have been discovered, as also of 

 the glasses of Anglo-Saxon date, but without arriving 

 at any definite conclusion on the existence of a native 

 industry before the thirteenth century. 



It was in 1226 that we first meet with the definite 

 and undeniable existence of the industry in Great 

 Britain, at Chiddingfold in Surrey. The south- 

 eastern counties of E^ngland, Surrey and Sussex in 

 particular, appear to have been favourite spots for the 

 native glass-makers during the thirteenth, fourteenth, 

 fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, largely on account of 

 the presence of much beechwood, which was the 

 favourite fuel of the glass-maker. The native pro- 

 ductions during these centuries do not appear to have 

 reached a very high level, and it needed the impetus of 

 foreign workmen from the middle of the sixteenth 

 century onwards to raise the art of glass-making in 

 Great Britain, some of these workmen comfng from 

 Venice and others from Lorraine by way of the Low 

 Countries. The moving spirits, however, who assisted 

 most effectively in the English developments were 

 most of them Englishmen, of whom Sir Robert Mansell 

 in the first half of the seventeenth century was the 

 most persistent of the pioneers in the industry, being 

 responsible for the development of glass-making at 

 Newcastle and mainly instrumental in introducing coal 

 instead of wood as the fuel in glass furnaces. 



One of the achievements of this period, namely, the 

 first part of the seventeenth century, was the production 

 (j1 lead crystal glass, whi( li ■ cii lituted a contribution 

 of fundamental imf>ortance to the industry and was 

 destined, in virtue of its capacity to bear cutting and 

 decorating, to supplant the famous Bohemian glass 



NO. 2817, VOL. I 12I 



for ornamental purposes. By the middle of the 

 eighteenth centur\' the English crystal glass was 

 already beating the Bohemian glass as that previously 

 had beaten the Venetian. 



Of considerable interest is chap, iv., on English 

 drinking glasses, since it presents the view of a glass 

 manufacturer and opposes various theories of glass 

 collectors. Mr. Powell held the view, with which the 

 reviewer heartily concurs, that connoisseurs have often 

 attempted too much in endeavouring to assign dates 

 and periods to articles of glassware on the basis of 

 variety of form, of decoration, and of tint. Artistic 

 development and skill varied so considerably from 

 factory to factory that it was quite possible for different 

 forms, both simple and highly developed, to be produced 

 at contemporary factories ; whilst it is a comparatively 

 simple matter to reproduce tints in glass. Some 

 factories, indeed. lia\ r made a study of the reproduc- 

 tion of antique glasses, and the author himself was re- 

 sponsible for some fine reproductions of Venetian glass. 



Chap. xiv. is of special interest from the point of view 

 of the scientific development of glass. It contains 

 notes of the author's own experience as a glass 

 manufacturer between the years 1875 and 1915, and 

 the experiments recorded prove that there was at 

 least one works in Great Britain which did not depend 

 on rule-of-thumb methods. A study of the records of 

 the provincial glass-houses (chap, vii.) shows that enter- 

 prise was by no means lacking, even during Government 

 control (see chap, xii., the Excise Period), when it was 

 a matter of surprise that men could still be found 

 to carry on glass manufacture under the conditions 

 prescribed by law, which insisted that notice in writing 

 must be sent to the Excise Officer before any of the im- 

 portant operations of glass-making could be carried out. 



Not unnaturally, the main portion of the book is 

 concerned with glass-making as an art. As a handicraft 

 the author's view was that glass-making was doomed. 

 He states so quite definitely in the preface ; and, 

 whether his view be correct or not, it was the chief 

 factor at any rate which induced him to write this 

 account. The disappearance of glass-making as a 

 handicraftand the introduction of the machine, however, 

 did not necessarily mean to him the final loss of the 

 artistic in glass. He says : " If mechanically produced 

 tableware is inartistic and ugly the fault lies with the 

 designer. . . . Designs, whether for hand-made or mech- 

 anically produced tableware must be evolved from an 

 intimate acquaintance with the nature of molten glass 

 and the technid'" "•' ni.mufacture rather ilian from the 

 superior inner ness of the art . 1m mI 



Several of the chapters of the book were written 

 as lectures or as journal articles, and in some ways the 

 book is therefore disjointed, whilst some of the chapter 



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