William Hepworth Dixon, 'Men of the Day No. 45'

Adriano Cecioni's chromolithograph presents Dixon as a squat, top-heavy figure whose enormous bearded head dwarfs his body — the classic Vanity Fair formula for puncturing self-importance. The caption, 'He discovered New America and Free Russia,' mocks Dixon's bestselling travel books New America (1867) and Free Russia (1870), implying his 'discoveries' were journalistic vanity rather than genuine revelation. Dixon was editor of The Athenaeum and a prolific popular writer whose breezy optimism about American Mormons and Russian peasant communes irritated serious critics. The caricature carries no overt ethnic targeting; its ridicule is purely reputational — the oversized cranium suggesting a man whose ego outpaces his scholarship. Cecioni, an Italian sculptor resident in London, contributed relatively few plates to the series.