Vanity Fair, Vol. 6, No. 152

A steel line-engraving caricature of Daniel S. Dickinson, captioned "The 'Daniel come to Judgment.'" The figure stands in profile, rendered with sharp cross-hatching in the manner of mid-nineteenth-century newspaper engraving, showing an elongated face and gaunt frame draped in a long coat. Dickinson, a New York politician, is presented as a prophetic or judgmental figure—a visual pun on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. This cover exemplifies Vanity Fair's format as a New York weekly of political satire during the Civil War era, combining portraiture, literary allusion, and sharp graphic technique to comment on Union-side figures and events. The masthead credits Marshall's Household Engraving of Washington for the steel-plate work.