Edward Pleydell-Bouverie, 'Statesmen No. 119'

Plate No. 195 in the Vanity Fair Statesmen series caricatures Edward Pleydell-Bouverie, Liberal MP and former President of the Poor Law Board, beneath the dry caption 'He did not decline the Speakership.' The joke cuts at a man remembered chiefly for an ambition he failed to convert: when the Commons Speakership fell vacant in 1872, Bouverie was considered but passed over. 'Lyall' renders him as a squat, ruddy-faced figure in a comically oversized white top hat, black frock coat, and tan trousers — the hat dwarfing the man, a visual shorthand for inflated self-regard. The ruddy colouring and bulbous features follow the era's broad comic convention for depicting bluff English political types rather than targeting ethnic origin. The composition's humor is essentially deflating: here is a statesman whose chief distinction was not refusing an honor he never quite received.