Birdlenses
20th Century Spectacles
Boynton pointed out a wonderful Slide Show of 20th Century Spectacles. I was getting set to annotate some articles on spectacles of a different sort, but this pair of glasses reminded me of another Stanhope viewing lens I thought I'd share with a stork cast in the handle. Obviously, there are a variety of ways of looking at things.
Under the Lens
The Stanhope lens—a portable, powerful, and cheap “help to the knowledge of common things”— circa 1830.
Rational recreation was visual education. Enlightened entertainment allowed for the legitimate indulging of the eyes in nondelusory patterns and mind-building shapes. International in appeal, this popular form of instruction relied on novel and sensuous technology. Here, however, was the rub. Optically communicated information comprised the stock-in trade of quackish hosts of prestidigitators, operators, schemers, empirics, entrepreneurs, and instrument makers. Rational recreation therefore was also the deliberate counterpoint to fantastic or irrational recreation. On one hand, the competitive leisure industry pressured the informing philosophical illusionist to distinguish himself from the deluding conjuror. On the other hand, popular educators relied on the same battery of stunning newfangled devices to attract the consumer’s gaze.
Because wheat is so dear . . .
“. . . His person was tall and thin, his countenance expressive of ardour and impetuosity, as were all of his movements. Over his whole figure, and even his dress, an air of puritanism reminded the beholder of the secretaries under Cromwell, rather than a young man of quality in an age of refinement and elegance. He possessed stentorian lungs and a powerful voice always accompanied by violent gesticulation.” [from The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir N.W. Wraxall (1772-1784) v. iii.]
This picturesqueness of appearance is corroborated by another hand. Writing from Strawberry Hill, September 7, 1774, to Hon. H.S. Conway, Horace Walpole says: “Apropos, Lord Mahon, whom Lord Stanhope, his father will not suffer to wear powder because wheat is so dear, was presented t’ other day, in coal black hair, and a white feather: they said he had been tarred and feathered.”
From Charles Earl Stanhope and the Oxford University Press by Horace Hart (1966 reprint edition of 1896 original)
