If you want to make sure you don’t have a smear of grease across your nose after working on your car, or check to see that your meticulously-applied clown makeup is in good shape just before the Halloween party, you might use a pocket mirror. Sometimes the folding versions of these are called “compacts.” But they’re hardly ever called “sprunking glasses.” Not any more, anyway.
In the 1827 novel Rueben Ansley you can find the line “He offered his sprunking glass to the disordered baronet.” And much earlier, a 1685 book with the unexpected title The ladies dressing-room unlock’d … in burlesque. Together with the Fop-dictionary included the entry — I guess it was a definition or a caption or something: “The Pocket Sprunking Looking-Glass.”
“Sprunking” sort of sounds German, and it probably is. Back in Middle Low German there was a similar word “prunken” that meant to dress up or show off. There’s a similar word in Dutch, “pronken,” that means the same thing.
It was mostly used up until the late 1600s, after which it started to fade in usage except in the case of historical novels, which, is what Rueben Ansley is. It was written by Horace Smith, who is slightly famous, but not for that book. He wrote poetry as well as novels, and was in a sonnet-writing contest with Percy Shelley. You’ve probably heard of Shelley, but not Smith, so we can presume that Shelley won the competition. He also described Smith this way: “Is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew who had money enough to be generous with should be a stockbroker? He writes poetry and pastoral dramas and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous.”
Smith, along with his older brother James, entered a contest for writing something that would be recited when the Drury Lane Theatre reopened in 1812 (the old one had burned down). Their winning idea was to write parodies of rejected entries written in the styles of various famous poets such as Coleridge and Byron (the list didn’t include Shelley, who wasn’t famous at the time). The parodies were compiled into a book that became a huge bestseller. Lord Byron, for one, loved it and claimed he couldn’t believe he hadn’t actually written the rejected entry ascribed to him.
After that, Smith really did go on to prosper as a stockbroker, and managed Shelley’s finances for him. Writing-wise, Smith published a series of — you guessed it — historical novels in the late 1820s, which gave him the chance to use “sprunking glass” at least once. He didn’t use his initial success in writing parodies to continue in humor, but his brother did — Charles Mathews, a well-known comic actor of the time who performed his work, said James Smith was “the only man who can write clever nonsense.” But I bet he never got to use the term “sprunking glass.”
