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The Gross of Green Spectacles
George Cruikshank
1832
steel-engraving
9.2 cm high x 8 cm wide, vignetted
Second illustration by George Cruikshank for Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), facing p. 48.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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As [Mrs. Primrose] spoke, Moses came slowly on foot, and sweating under the deal box, which he had strapt round his shoulders like a pedlar. — "Welcome, welcome, Moses; well, my boy, what have you brought us from the fair?" — "I have brought you myself," cried Moses, with a sly look, and resting the box on the dresser. — "Ay, Moses," cried my wife, "that we know, but where is the horse?" "I have sold him," cried Moses, "for three pounds five shillings and two-pence." — "Well done, my good boy," returned she, "I knew you would touch them off. Between ourselves, three pounds five shillings and two-pence is no bad day's work. Come, let us have it then." — "I have brought back no money," cried Moses again. "I have laid it all out in a bargain, and here it is," pulling out a bundle from his breast: "here they are; a gross of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen cases." — "A gross of green spectacles!" repeated my wife in a faint voice. "And you have parted with the Colt, and brought us back nothing but a gross of green paltry spectacles!" — "Dear mother," cried the boy, "why won't you listen to reason? I had them a dead bargain, or I should not have bought them. The silver rims alone will sell for double money." — "A fig for the silver rims," cried my wife, in a passion: 'I dare swear they won't sell for above half the money at the rate of broken silver, five shillings an ounce." [Chapter XII, "Fortune seems resolved to humble the family of Wakefield — mortifications are often more painful than real calamities," pp. 48-49]
Goldsmith has developed the scenario of the green spectacles directly from the traditional fairy-tale "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," with the Primrose family's colt replacing the cow belonging to Jack's mother. The grandfather clock (an obvious sign of affluence) shows that it is 7:50 P. M. on the day of the fair. Mrs. Primrose, centre, is shocked, and the younger children do not know what to make of their brother Moses' so-called bargain. Dr. Primrose in his clerical coat tries to let the boy down easily when he reveals that the rims are merely copper, and that the spectacles are worth just a fraction of what he paid the sharper for them.
Although the Vicar and his wife have six children (George, Olivia, Sophia, Moses, and the two younger boys, Dick and Bill), Cruikshank has chosen to use just the three adults (the Vicar, left; his wife, Deborah, centre; and eighteen-year-old Olivia), the adolescent Moses (fashionably dressed for the fair), blithely holding up the package, and the two youngest the boys, one in the linen smock-frock of a country labourer. The eldest son, George, a university student, is not present in the text. Moses wears a stylish, cocked hat and a cloth coat of "thunder-and-lightning" pattern, breeches, and stockings. In other words, he is dressed as a miniature adult. Self-confidently, he leans back on the kitchen-settle (the deal-box still on his back) as his agitated mother raises her hands in alarm as she learns that Moses has not brought back the money. Cruikshank fills out the parlour scene with evidence of the family's middle-class prosperity: drapes, a clock, the dresser, and the pewter serving platters. Undoubtedly with its fairy-tale origins and character comedy it attracted Cruikshank's attention, even though it has little to do with the elopement plot involving Olivia.
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Last modified 5 January 2018