Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') — 'The Poet Laureate' (Men of the Day, No. 28)

Signed 'Ape' in the lower right, this chromolithograph presents Alfred, Lord Tennyson in sharp profile: stooped, heavy-coated, a tall silk hat dominating his silhouette, a pocket-watch dangling from one hand. The caption reads simply 'The Poet Laureate.' Pellegrini exaggerates Tennyson's famously prominent nose and dishevelled reddish beard into near-grotesque territory — the standard instrument of Vanity Fair's affectionate mockery of eminence. The politics are social rather than partisan: by 1871 Tennyson held the Laureateship for two decades and was a national institution, so the joke is bardolatry itself — reducing the nation's official bard to a rumpled, myopic, watch-fiddling eccentric. No ethnic caricature is present; the distortion is purely physiognomic.