'A Wet Quaker': Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, M.P.

Spy (Leslie Ward) renders the Welsh Liberal M.P. and Swansea industrialist Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn as a stooped elderly gentleman in frock coat and top hat, pince-nez dangling from his nose as he peers myopically at a document he holds inches from his face. The caption 'a wet Quaker' is political shorthand: Dillwyn was a Nonconformist who backed temperance causes yet stopped short of full prohibitionism — hence wet, in the parlance of the drink-reform debates then roiling Parliament. Ward's caricature exaggerates Dillwyn's aged posture and sharp-featured face without resorting to ethnic distortion. The lithograph printer's imprint, Vincent Brooks Day & Son, appears at lower left alongside Spy's characteristic signature.