#One eye spectacle skin
#One eye spectacle full

In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens lampooned a character unable to hold one, because he “had such flat orbits to his eyes and such limp little eyelids that it wouldn’t stick in when he put it up, but kept tumbling out against his waistcoat buttons.”īy the start of the 20th century, the monocle gag was already tired.

#One eye spectacle full

Cartoons of the period show caricatures of self-regarding young fops posing and preening with their monocles on full display. It was even useful for looking at things.īut by the middle of the century, monocles had already become a comic staple. They were explosively popular, and why not? In its brief heyday the monocle was an attractive little object, round or octagonal, rimmed with silver or gold or horn, fixed to one’s coat by a silken ribbon. Older aristocrats wore monocles younger and poorer men copied them. This period, the Regency era, was ground zero for British dandyism. It jumped to London around the turn of the 19th century, where it took hold among the aristocracy. By the end of the century, it was in use all over German-speaking countries. Notwithstanding, popularizing the monocle became his lasting legacy. Its advent is usually associated with Philipp von Stosch, an 18th-century German baron, who in his time was better known for writing the definitive work on carved gemstones and living an active, open life as a homosexual.

#One eye spectacle skin

It was fixed in the eye socket and held in place hands-free, wedged behind the loose skin around the eye thanks to the orbicularis oculi, the muscle that closes the eyelid.

Read: Galileo fought dirty with his fellow scientists Around the same time, a single lens on a little stick appeared, called a quizzing-glass. The sextant sailors used in the 18th century for celestial navigation had a telescopic attachment (which gave Popeye the Sailor his characteristic squint). By the early 17th, Galileo had his telescope. The first spectacles appeared in Europe in the late 13th century. The magnifying properties of glass have been in use for millennia, and wearable since at least the Middle Ages. This little glass disk designed as corrective eyewear wound up as a comic prop, a universal metonym for wealth and snobbery. Peanut is never seen without his, nor is Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker’s cartoon mascot. The Monopoly Man, Rich Uncle Pennybags, ought to have one but doesn’t.

The villainous Penguin fights the Batman wearing a monocle. Joseph Conrad had one, as did Yeats and Auden.

So did Woodrow Wilson and Otto von Bismarck. Read: The New York Times resurrects the monocle, a century after trashing it Aristocratic, yes, but cold and calculating, filled with menace. Or else, the monocle-wearer is a sinister European gentleman. It drops from his eye to mark astonishment at a breach of manners or an abrupt revelation. He peers through its single lens to project a critical gaze at a work of art or perhaps a raffish orphan given into his care. It’s a visual shorthand for a stock character: a wealthy gentleman with the air of a Gilded Age aristocrat ready for a black-tie gala or a night at the opera. In the present day, a monocle is almost always part of a costume. A monocle perches on the face, precariously unsupported, requiring effort and practice just to keep it in place. One eye is magnified and obscured, while the other looks naked. Why would anyone want this? I’ll admit to owning a tweed blazer (or seven), but when it comes to retro men’s fashion accessories, monocles are on another level of affectedness. It showed an earnest young man with a full beard, waxed mustache, period clothing, and the anachronistic piece of eyewear. The ad probably appeared because I had visited too many over-specialized menswear websites. Recently, a Facebook ad tried to sell me a monocle.