John Jaffray, 'The Birmingham Daily Post'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') places John Jaffray, longtime proprietor of the Birmingham Daily Post, in a plain chair, legs crossed, holding his paper open across his lap with both hands. He wears a well-cut black frock coat and striped trousers; a white beard and bald crown are rendered with affectionate exaggeration typical of Ward's gentler mode. The figure's large nose and fleshy jowls are amplified but not cruelly so — this is the comfortable caricature of a provincial press grandee rather than a political enemy. The caption simply names his paper, making the portrait a tribute to regional journalism's growing respectability in Victorian public life, at a moment when Birmingham's civic pride, stoked by Joseph Chamberlain's machine, was reshaping British Liberalism.