The Great 19th-Century Green-Spectacle Craze

Stephen R. Wilk

Stephen R. Wilk delves into an interesting early-1800s optical fixation—green glasses.

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In a scene in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the boy Moses Primrose, when his mother asks for the money from the sale of the family’s colt at a local fair, answers: “I have brought back no money … I have laid it all out in a bargain, and here it is … a gross of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases.”

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