Featured Victorian/Georgian-era Quizzing Glasses

The lens is easily replaced, should you ever want to. Take to a competent optician's shop and they'll do it. All it is, is a simple magnifying glass, after all.

So long as they can remove the old lens, and put in a new one - it can be done.

 

I have an 18k rare Georgian quizzing eye! It’s coming in on Tuesday! Excited to see it up close before I put it up for a new home. I always found the quizzing eyes fascinating and shocked more people don’t collect them, as they are functional as loupes or quick magnifying glasses.

 

Totally understand your excitation!
plus, it has a memento compartment!!! (Hair or fabric?)

 

I was just wondering about that, too!

 

At the start of this blog you post three photographs, the final one showing two 'glasses' of which the right hand has two lenses. It clearly shows two hines etc to enable it to be opened out. I have an identical one but cannot find out how to open it. Please can you make any suggestions as to how it opens as I am sure it must be very simple.

 

They're called "lorgnettes" (from the French "lorgner" or to "leer" or "stare at").

They're usually held shut by a little spring-loaded catch or toggle. Tweak it, and the catch releases, and the specs usually spring open. Then to close you fold up, and the catch pops back into place again to hold it shut.

Catch may be a bit stiff. Try a drop of oil.

 

Just for clarity for those who may be unfamiliar...
A quizzing glass has a single magnifying lens, usually on a short handle and generally worn on a chain.
A lorgnette has two lenses, like spectacles, on a single lateral handle.

"Ah, mother! How do you do? Where did you get that quiz of a hat? It makes you look like an old witch."
~John Thorpe in chapter 8 of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 or 1799, though unpublished until 1817

A "quiz" was an odd, eccentric, or peculiar thing or person.
A "quizzing glass" was used for the fashionable, but often impolite, prying observation of others considered odd, eccentric, or peculiar.
A "quizzer" was the person doing the "quizzing" of others.

A true antique quizzing glass is a bucket list item for me.

 

I've got three of them. One of them is my everyday magnifier which I wear on a chain. Has the original lens inside it from 1800-whatever and it's REALLY strong magnification. It's like 5 or 6x mag.