Alfred Emmott, 'The Deputy Speaker'

This Vanity Fair supplement plate presents Alfred Emmott, M.P. — Liberal politician and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons — in full-length three-quarter pose, rendered in the magazine's characteristic chromolithographic style. He wears a dark frock coat over a striped waistcoat and pinstriped trousers, one hand pocketed, conveying practiced parliamentary authority. The caption below reads simply 'The Deputy Speaker.' Unlike the sharper grotesquerie of earlier Ape caricatures, this unsigned plate is closer to dignified portraiture than comic distortion — a shift in Vanity Fair's tone by 1910, as the magazine's original satirical bite had softened considerably. Emmott, an Oldham cotton manufacturer turned parliamentarian, would be elevated to the peerage as 1st Baron Emmott in 1911, making this image a snapshot of his peak institutional prestige.