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 creative use of anecdote and her critical analysis of how bodily norms are created echoes Coreen McGuire's Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal (2020). She also frequently cites work by Jaipreet Virdi, and Claire L. Jones's recent edited collection, to draw parallels with histories of hearing aids and prosthetics respectively.
Yet Spectacles and the Victorians is not a mere repetition of existing arguments, but a genuine contribution to ongoing discussions. It shows the limitations of prostheses (which have dominated disability histories) as a sole template for theorizing assistive technologies. Spectacles have a much less straightforwardly medical legacy and Almond-Brown's examination indicates the value of expanding our repertoire of case studies to study disability technologies. Similarly significant is Almond-Brown's use of object collections in addition to private correspondence, cashbooks and advertisements. Although many scholars have noted the potential value of material culture to disability history, Spectacles and the Victorians follows through. Chapters 3 and 5 demonstrate this most directly, though evidence from object collections underpins the whole book. Almond-Brown makes convincing connections between changing spectacle designs and technological, commercial, scientific and professional trends. For example, she argues that newly popular activities like cycling and the development of lenses for distance vision required frame arms and lightweight construction to ensure a firm fit. In turn, as spectacles were worn for longer periods, practitioners emphasized the need for expert vision testing to prevent eye damage from incorrect lenses.
Although relatively short at 212 pages, excluding references, Spectacles and the Victorians is packed with detailed analysis. This is made possible by the seven years of research that went into the monograph, including two with object collections at the Science Museum as part of Almond-Brown's PhD. At times, the sheer number of insights comes at the expense of big-picture clarity. Readers might come away from the book with different ideas of what it was about: vision-testing practices, the Victorian marketplace, design change, the cultural meaning of (not) seeing or the development of professional expertise? In truth, it is about all these things and more. This eclecticism also means that there is something for everyone: archivists, disability scholars, optometrists, business historians, not just historians of science, technology and medicine.
Spectacles and the Victorians is an impressive and original contribution to Manchester University Press's Social Histories of Medicine series that encourages historians to think across sub-disciplinary boundaries to capture the interconnectedness of ‘medicine’ with broader webs of commerce, culture and society. Methodologically, it demonstrates how object collections can be used to write highly analytical, materially informed history that remains sensitive to the contributions and experiences of human actors. Ultimately, it challenges any reader to think more deeply about how fifty years of Victorian change left a legacy on the high street, opticians offices and perhaps even your own face.
