Gemma Almond-Brown's Spectacles and the Victorians: Measuring, Defining, and Shaping Visual Capacity offers a valuable addition to scholarship on disability history, material culture, and the social history of medicine. Although spectacles had long been available for purchase and associated with the debilities of old age, during the Victorian era many more people, and more kinds of people, started wearing spectacles, while popular and professional periodicals warned readers about a deterioration of British vision. In this fascinating book, Almond-Brown examines developments in the measurement and supplementation of bodily capacity, specifically vision. She expands upon recent scholarship by analyzing the print corpus and physical artifacts in order to examine the lived experience of spectacle users. While she discusses material and design milestones like earpieces and mass-manufactured uniform frames, her ultimate interest is not so much the technological development of spectacles and diagnostic devices as it is the cultural changes surrounding these objects and their use. Her meticulous survey of Victorian developments in visual diagnosis, medical practice, optical technologies, and the spectacle-selling business usefully tracks changes in the popular understanding of vision and sight loss during this period, showing how Victorian notions of vision, disability, and medicine shifted over time.

After an introductory chapter setting out the project and its aims, Almond-Brown opens her analysis by examining the non-medical culture of spectacle-making and spectacle-wearing from 1830 to 1850. Later chapters, which cover various segments of the period from 1830–1904, trace the increasing medicalization of vision and changes in manufacture during a period when clear vision was increasingly expected of a literate, industrialized population. Chapter 2 is especially important as it centers on the effects of new diagnostic and testing technologies, in particular the ophthalmoscope, which could measure the refractive capability of the human eye, and standardized tests of visual acuity. Almond-Brown's main aim is to show how discourses around “the normal eye” (80) and “abnormalcy” (86) became contested over the latter half of the century. As a result, certain visual conditions were newly marked as medical diagnoses requiring treatment. Almond-Brown shows how ophthalmologists worked to medicalize the diagnosis of vision loss and incorporate optometry into their practice, jockeying for market share with wholesalers and retailers and joining in debates over worker health and safety.

The latter half of the book addresses some challenges to this trajectory, showing the unique role of spectacles during the surge of prostheses and other assistive technologies in the latter decades of the century. Spectacles were more widely available, more widely used, and more visible than many prostheses. This allowed them to become not just medical devices but also markers of fashion. In her final chapter, studded with engaging anecdotes, Almond-Brown tracks the fashion of eyewear through the Victorian period and shows how fashion was one of many ways during this period that spectacles took on meanings (such as studiousness or class status) apart from their original function as an assistive medical device, even as Victorians became increasingly concerned about aging as a process. She discusses, for example, how late-century photographs of children dressed up as elderly people commonly used spectacles as a signifier of old age. Alternately, late-Victorian women might avoid wearing glasses, given the negative connotations of myopia, a hereditary disorder associated with pallor and stooping that was thought to contribute to the degeneration of the national body. Toward the end of the century, the popularity of a more utilitarian, mass-produced steel frame points toward a simpler, more modern, and functional aesthetic in Victorian dress as well as accessories.

Almond-Brown's analysis of the social dimensions of medicine comes to life especially when she discusses popular guides to vision and eye health or examples drawn from Victorian newspapers and periodicals for lay audiences, such as the Practical Teacher (99) or The Saturday Magazine (104). Indeed, Spectacles and the Victorians canvasses an impressive range and variety of primary sources. The book's argument is anchored in Almond-Brown's work at twenty-two different archives, in particular the London Science Museum (where she studied about 1,500 objects), and business archives, including at the College of Optometrists. She has also surveyed medical and optical texts and trade catalogues, and she cites thousands of articles and advertisements in dozens of periodicals. This extensive research enables a deep and supple knowledge of the subject on matters ranging from the arcane details of spectacle arm design to medical debates over vision tests. Almond-Brown does emphasize non-fictional sources; one hopes this book will spark further scholarly work on spectacle use in Victorian fiction, drama, or visual art.

Almond-Brown's work here may be focused on spectacles, but her handling of this subject matter ranges broadly. Throughout she usefully contextualizes her discussion of spectacles with scholarship on the history of medicine and technology more generally, and to other assistive devices specifically, as well as to non-medicalized Victorian accessories like the parasol and fan. She deftly engages with topics as diverse as the history of scientific instrument makers, the history of vision and the senses more generally, Victorian innovations in the marketing of medical devices, and changing expectations of children's education. And reading her lucid prose is a delight. The book should become a mainstay of work on this topic for students and scholars of the history of medicine, the body, disability, and the senses.