John Laurence Toole, 'A Spelling Bee'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') caricatures the beloved comic actor J. L. Toole, a favourite of Victorian music halls and West End theatres, here labelled 'A Spelling Bee' — a reference to the craze for competitive spelling contests then sweeping fashionable London society. Ward exaggerates Toole's compact, rotund frame, his shock of reddish hair, and his oversized, mournful face, rendering him mid-gesture as though mid-performance: coat clutched open, hat tucked under one arm, eyes half-closed in comic pathos. The caricature is affectionate rather than hostile — Toole was a popular figure, a friend of Henry Irving — and the physical distortion follows Pellegrini's established Vanity Fair grammar of enlarging the head and shrinking the legs to produce a figure that is recognisable precisely because it is absurd.