The Toy-shop, Newbery, spectacles

In the chapter 7 illustration, Lady Meanwell sits in a chair holding spectacles, with Horace and Bellinda standing before her, a pose nearly identical to the one John Newbery uses for the frontispiece to A Little Pretty Pocketbook. This is an example of an interlocutor gesture in which an object replaces the book in the familiar composition of mother/child reading. The chapter opens with Lady Meanwell briefly suggesting a visit to the bookstore because she needs spectacles. However, the story itself does not describe her showing spectacles to her children (since she has none). This suggests that the composition of the image is designed to evoke Newbery's signature frontispiece, rather than serve primarily as an embellishment of the text.