<i>Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, defining and shaping visual capacity</i>, by Gemma Almond-Brown

In Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1840 painting Trial by Jury (more commonly known as Laying Down the Law), the packed courtroom clusters around the imposing figure of the Lord Chancellor. In front of him, the trappings of his position: a roll of papers tied with red string, an ink pot with quill pens, and a thick, open legal volume. On the right-hand page of this book lies a pair of spectacles. The fact that this is a satiric scene—the senior legal figure is a solemn French poodle; his law clerk a spaniel; terriers, a greyhound, and representatives of other breeds press in to hear the verdict—does nothing to diminish the portentous role of the spectacles lying side by side with the Lord Chancellor’s firmly placed paw. They may be necessary to allow the poodle to read the closely printed text—his eyes are rather rheumy—but they are clearly a prop as well; they signal authority.After reading Gemma Almond-Brown’s excellent Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, defining and shaping visual capacity, it is no longer possible to take the spectacles in Landseer’s anthropomorphic painting for granted. Indeed, one starts to notice them, or their absence, everywhere in Victorian paintings. Almond-Brown’s extensively researched book supplies plenty of context for this visual technology and the Victorian advances in medical technology that allowed for the increasingly precise diagnosis of vision defects and the prescription of corrective lenses. This was, she explains, the period in which vision became medicalized since measuring and testing eyesight developed alongside the growth of ophthalmology as a medical specialism. She not only discusses the period’s progress when it came to understanding the workings of the eye; she also directly asks how this new knowledge affected the average user of spectacles. She explains where these optical aids could be purchased—with outlets ranging from the prescribing ophthalmologists themselves to miscellaneous high-street retailers and traveling peddlers—and she draws extensively on the language of trade cards and retailers’ advertisements to show the workings of the varied medical marketplace of the time.Diagnosing the defects of the eye could involve considerable specialist expertise; at the same time, of course, an individual could, as now, self-diagnose simply by donning different pairs of glasses and seeing how legible print might be. Yet Almond-Brown’s emphasis is on the development of professionalization when it came to the diagnosis of visual acuity, or its lack, in the period: the enormous improvements in diagnostic technology in vision testing, the capacity to adapt particular lenses to an individual’s particular optical needs, the growing importance placed on ocular health and eye care. Inevitably, there were debates around testing standards, to be sure, but there were also discrepancies in (and this was more nuanced) what could be considered “normal” or “natural” when it came to eyesight. For example, was the shrinking elasticity of the eye that can be expected with age—and therefore regarded by most people as perfectly “normal”—a vision “defect” or not? Such gray areas complicated, as Almond-Brown ably shows, categories of normalcy and abnormalcy.Spectacles and the Victorians moves among paying attention to the eye, to those who laid claim to being ocular specialists, to the wearers of optical technology, to the spectacles themselves. This is a terrific example of material history that looks in considerable depth at very ordinary and everyday objects, and in doing so, explores practices relating to the prescription and wearing of spectacles not just in the metropolis but nationwide. In considering the whole range of those whose sight was aided by spectacles—we might think not just of lawyers but also needlewomen or an elderly lady reading the Bible by the fireside—Almond-Brown has consulted medical texts, catalogs, periodicals, and, of course, the trade journal The Optician, and she also has exhaustively combed local newspapers for articles and publicity announcements. This tracing of optical culture into the provinces is not a project, she explains, that would have been feasible in its extensiveness before digitization. She also spent three years working in two large collections in London’s Science Museum that had been made by Henry Wellcome and Matthew Dunscombe. Here she underscores the important point that studying Victorian material history does not depend on the close scrutiny of physical objects alone. As well, using them as evidence of the copious variety in spectacles, she calls our attention to the interpretive challenges posed by these collections. What information is missing? What objects, indeed, were omitted? How can we make these historical visual devices give up the stories of their trajectories between producer, dispenser, and user? And how does turning our focus on these material objects reveal the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they were prescribed and used? Her deep investigation of contemporary print starts, of course, to fill out this last question.Compelling though the story of spectacles is in its own right, the reach of this book goes further. Almond-Brown’s work rewrites the history of blindness in the nineteenth century. By the end of Victoria’s reign, “blindness” came to be used less as a term that included a range of visual deficiencies than one connoting an entire and permanent loss of vision. Indeed, considering the intermediate stages of defective vision that could be corrected by spectacles raises the issue of what it means to consider someone “disabled” if their disability can be adequately compensated for by artificial aids. Hearing and hearing aids form an analogy here; the author is well aware of the dangers of being overly ocularcentric at the expense of other senses. In this way, the book can be seen as adding valuably, as the author puts it, to “growing trends in disability history, which . . . seek to explain sensory capacity as a varied, deeply contextual and subtle continuum” (31).In the conclusion to this admirable work of scientific, medical, and dis/ability history, Almond-Brown comments that “[t]he study of Victorian visual aids would also benefit from an analysis of visual and literary representations” (252–53). Full as this volume is, that is undoubtedly true, and one of the most compelling things about the monograph is how it opens up fields of inquiry for others. Such cultural analysis would follow especially well from the final chapter, which asks not just how Victorian vision was transformed but who wore spectacles, what range of social and cultural meanings these optical devices carried, how an individual’s choice of frames could be an occasion to practice self-expression, and how the meanings commonly attached to spectacle wearing were modified by the wearer’s gender, age, and class.Building on this, I would love to learn more, for example, about the correlation between spectacles, the filtering of light, and metaphor. All the lenses Almond-Brown discusses appear to be clear, but what about tinted ones? William Wordsworth wore green-tinted spectacles, as did Samuel Pepys. Moses Primrose, in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (published in 1766 and much read in the Victorian period) foolishly bartered a perfectly good horse for a gross of worthless green spectacles with copper rims; green spectacles are worn by a number of characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. And when did the overly optimistic start to see the world through rose-colored spectacles?The spectacles that form a carefully curated part of Landseer’s poodle’s legal authority are very prominent, themselves a different kind of visual aid when it comes to interpreting the pomposity of the central figure. But once one has taken on board the widespread use of spectacles by the later decades of the nineteenth century, their absence from an image can be as telling as their appearance. William Powell Frith’s large, crowded A Private View at the Royal Academy (1881) is unquestionably a painting about looking, whether at the canvases that are clustered together on the walls, the fashionable outfits in the room, celebrities (Oscar Wilde is prominent), or exhibition catalogs. There are about forty-five faces visible, mostly adults. One lady near the back seems to be peering through opera glasses, while on the far right-hand side, a very myopic man, standing next to Sir John Everett Millais, scrutinizes a painting through some kind of viewing device. But spectacles? Given their ubiquity in everyday life by 1881, especially in a roomful of aging adults, the naked eyes painted by Frith either point loudly to vanity, meaning that many people were reluctant to employ them in public, or, given the fact that almost all the persons in this canvas are identifiable, suggest that conventions of portraiture, likewise, omitted something that might signal physical weakness. Upper-middle-class people may increasingly have purchased fashionably designed spectacles, but this didn’t necessarily translate to wearing them on a fashionable occasion.Spectacles and the Victorians is, literally, about seeing better and the developments in technology that allowed individuals to be tested and prescribed lenses and purchase devices that would allow them to navigate the world with increased pleasure and safety. Gemma Almond-Brown removes spectacles from the periphery of our cultural vision and ensures that whether we encounter them in the context of medical literature or close to the paws of a painted poodle, we will understand their relationship to questions of physical normalization and the individuality of any person’s sight. Her meticulous research, combined with her nuanced understanding of nineteenth-century debates around human sight and its correctability, deepens our understanding of what it meant for the Victorians to be able to see.