'North Bedfordshire' — Lord Alwyne Frederick Compton

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents Lord Alwyne Frederick Compton in three-quarter profile, hands clasped at the chest in a posture of self-contained authority. He wears the full uniform of Victorian male respectability: black frock coat, striped trousers, stiff white collar, dark cravat, and a gleaming silk top hat. The caption 'North Bedfordshire' identifies him by his parliamentary constituency rather than his name — a Vanity Fair convention that assumed readers needed no further introduction. Ward's caricature is mild by the magazine's standards: the moustache is sharpened, the nose given a hawkish thrust, but the overall effect flatters more than it wounds. The subject is simply a Tory gentleman caught between vanity and dignity, which was, of course, the magazine's entire point.