'Hull' — Charles Henry Wilson, M.P.

Pellegrini presents Charles Henry Wilson, the Hull shipping magnate and Liberal M.P., as a self-satisfied Victorian industrialist: hands thrust in trouser pockets, top hat slightly oversized, and a spectacular auburn moustache and mutton-chop beard rendered with affectionate exaggeration. The caption reads simply Hull, locating the man entirely in his commercial domain rather than Westminster. Wilson ran the Wilson Line, then the world's largest privately-owned shipping fleet, and the plate flatters his solidity — broad-chested, well-tailored in brown tweed and a buttoned waistcoat — while the shrunken feet and ballooning head signal caricature. No ethnic distortion appears; the comedy is one of civic pomposity, the self-made northern merchant deposited, slightly too large for his boots, into polite London society.