Gemma Almond-Brown, <i>Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, Defining and Shaping Visual Capacity</i> Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. Pp. 296. ISBN 978-1-5261-6135-2. £85.00 (hardcover).

Over half of the UK population wears spectacles.They form part of our daily lives, sitting on our faces and the faces of loved ones.High-street spectacle retailers blend into the landscape and, when the time comes, we step inside for a vision test.Gemma Almond-Brown historicizes this world, returning to Victorian Britain to addresses how we got here: to the ubiquity of spectacles, an ideal of 20/20 vision, and the integration of testing with dispensing.Attuned to material culture, disability, user experience, retail markets, fashion, science and public health, Spectacles and the Victorians examines the social, professional and technological history of spectacles and vision itself.Almond-Brown contends that 1850-1901 was 'equally transformative' (p.125) as the preceding 150 years that Alun Withey identified in his Technology, Self-Fashioning and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2015).Increasingly complex lenses, greater anatomical understanding of eye, uptake of new activities like cycling, further marketplace diversification, new mass manufacture and jurisdictional battles over vision testing all produced new ways of selling, wearing and understanding spectacles.Chapter 1 introduces the complex commercial landscape of early Victorian spectacles and shows how certain opticians set themselves apart from the competition by claiming scientific and anatomical expertise.Chapter 2 describes opticians' growing professional identity in the late 1800s, which accompanied medical practitioners' growing appreciation of spectacles as a treatment for eye conditions.Public attention was also drawn to the problem of poor vision, defined and addressed using new statistics and measurement technologies.Chapter 3 addresses how these developments combined with the changing nature of work and leisure to create new ways of wearing spectacles with different shapes, materials and attachment styles.Chapter 4 charts how marketing and dispensing practices changed in the late Victorian period.Blurred expertise in vision testing generated a fraught collaboration between dispensers and medical practitioners from which an early version of today's optometrist emerged.Finally, Chapter 5 reflects on the social position of spectacles.Almond-Brown discusses how all the elements from previous chapters impacted individuals' experiences of vision testing and spectacle use.She pays particular attention to the interplay of age and gender in mediating the meaning of spectacle use, and its tangible consequences for one's lifestyle, health and occupation.Almond-Brown is firmly rooted in the burgeoning historiography of disability technologies, offering a fresh analytical perspective on the ubiquitous object.Almond-Brown's