I spy with my little eye

Being immortalised as a Spy caricature in the pages of Vanity Fair was once a gentleman’s dream, observes Eleanor Doughty

- Eleanor Doughty

WHO are the men of today? Are they golfers, politicians, explorers? Newspaper editors, perhaps, or huntsmen? This is who they were in the late 19th century and many were immortalised—or rather, caricatured—and published on the pages of Society magazine Vanity Fair.

There have been at least five separate magazines called Vanity Fair, but this iteration, the second, was first published by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868, its aim to expose the vanities of human existence. Today, it’s best known for its caricatures with clever captions—in 1870, Lord Halifax’s read ‘he fell off his horse into a peerage’. The first, of Benjamin Disraeli, was published in 1869, drawn by Carlo Pellegrini, known as Ape. Gladstone was next, before various men (and a few women) of distinction followed. By the time the magazine closed in 1914, the list had expanded to criminals, actors and Americans. In 1873, the artist best associated with the caricatures, Sir Leslie Ward, drawing as Spy, began working for Bowles.

Potential subjects were initially reluctant to be portrayed in Vanity Fair. ‘At the beginning, when Ape was doing these sketches, people were a little upset,’ notes Roy T. Matthews, co-author with Peter Mellini of In Vanity Fair. Attitudes changed and soon it was ‘considered something of a coup’ to be in the magazine, notes Mr Matthews.

Some, such as Lewis Carroll, begged to be excused, however. ‘Nothing would be more unpleasant for me than to have my face known to strangers,’ he wrote in his diary. Anthony Trollope was unhappy with his 1873 depiction; later, James Pope-Hennessy wrote that, in his caricature, Trollope looked like ‘an affronted Santa Claus who has just lost his reindeer’.