Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders Samuel Wilberforce — 'Soapy Sam,' Bishop of Oxford — as a puffed-up prelate in full episcopal dress: rochet, chimere, and billowing lawn sleeves that dwarf his compact body. Hands clasped in theatrical piety, he scowls outward with barely suppressed combativeness, making the caption 'Not a brawler' richly ironic. Wilberforce was famous for exactly that: his 1860 Oxford debate against T. H. Huxley over Darwinian evolution had made him a national figure of clerical bellicosity. The caricature exaggerates his heavy jowls and self-important posture, standard Pellegrini physiognomic heightening rather than ethnic caricature. Placed in Statesmen No. 25, the plate treats a churchman as a political actor — which, in the Irish Church disestablishment battles of 1869, Wilberforce emphatically was.