THE JOY OF SPECS

From Henry VIII to cinema sex symbols and cool intellectuals, this history of glasses illuminates their special kind of cool

It turns out those stereotypes about people who wear glasses being clever, clumsy and a bit standoffish have their basis in something solid. During the dark ages, when everyone was blundering around with uncorrected vision, the myopes were at a distinct disadvantage. Not being able to lead the boar hunt, or failing to bow to a nobleman from the other side of the great hall, marked you out as an oik. The safest place was in the library where you could spend your days scanning pages of monkish swirl or even having a go yourself. From then on, swottery and short-sightedness were soldered together in the cultural imagination.

As soon becomes apparent in Travis Elborough’s brilliantly enjoyable survey on eyewear, shortsighted people didn’t suddenly acquire glasses and start morphing into party people and hawkeyed hunters. Early glasses were nothing more than a couple of bottle-thick lenses haphazardly tacked together with leather string or, if you were feeling fancy, gold wire. No one had yet noticed how useful ears could be and so, instead of having side arms, lenses were more likely to be attached to a band around the head or stuck on a stick and held up as a lorgnette.

What’s more, glasses were ridiculously expensive: only cardinals and kings could afford the luxury of being able to see properly. So useful did Henry VIII find them that he had a pair bolted on to his visor in order to know exactly who was charging towards him as he entered the lists.

It would take craftsman such as John Dollond in 18th-century London and John Bausch and Henry Lomb in 19th-century America to produce eyewear that could be guaranteed to stick securely to the face, leaving hands free to get on with something else.

However, glasses quickly became associated with busy-fingered tradespeople, and therefore something to be avoided if you wanted to identify yourself as a member of the non-working classes.

Elborough spends less time on those with hypermetropia, or long-sightedness, perhaps because it’s mostly a matter of tipping the stigmas on their head. The long-sighted were the extroverts who could fix an enemy across the courtroom with an icy stare, but had problems when it came to absorbing the details of the paperwork.

Whether you needed glasses for long or short sight, though, there were always issues of perception. People worried about being seen in them because it sent a signal that they were lacking, deficient, spoiled. Hitler kept his out of sight, for fear that someone might spot that he didn’t embody his own superman ideal. Ronald Reagan was the first White House incumbent to wear contact lenses, having learned from his Hollywood cowboy days that to perform masculinity you needed to be able to scan the horizon convincingly, looking for trouble.

Reagan’s glasses-free presidency occurred despite the fact that specs had long been fighting back as the badge not just of the cool intellectual (think Arthur Miller) but the beddable hero. Michael Caine’s turn as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965) made glasses not just sexy but sexy-dangerous. So plausible was his performance that from then on the short-sighted actor was allowed to wear his own specs on set. Still, though, heroes were pulling off women’s glasses without permission and telling them that they were, in fact, beautiful. Talk about the male gaze. It was not until glamorous Gloria Steinem wore aviators in the 1970s to fight the good gender fight that Dorothy Parker’s acid-drop “men seldom make passes / at girls who wear glasses” started to seem beside the point.

Elborough’s previous excursions into popular cultural history, which include studies of Routemaster buses and vinyl LPs, have been marked by an infectious personal enthusiasm. And this time too Elborough brings his own experience to bear on his subject. There’s a particularly fascinating excursion into the spring-loaded glasses case which terrorised young spectacle wearers throughout the second half of the 20th century. Made with the ferocity of a man trap, these mass-produced cases seemed capable of taking off small fingers with a single snap and managed to imply to the vulnerable myope that their glasses were almost certainly too good for them.