Spy with an eye for Victorian Britain
As Prince Charles reveals his love of Vanity Fair cartoons, fellow collector Eleanor Doughty tells their story
You’ll have seen them in country houses, pubs and officers’ messes: Vanity Fair caricatures. Commonly known as Spy cartoons – after the nom de crayon of the magazine’s most famous artist, Leslie Ward – they have a habit of turning up in smart people’s downstairs loos, too.
Now the Prince of Wales has revealed he too likes to visit Vanity Fair. As he opened London’s new Nightingale Hospital by video link from Birkhall, where he was self-isolating, a pair of Spy cartoons could be spotted, obscured by a lamp. One of them was the 1898 depiction of David Longfield Beatty, a captain in the 4th Hussars, described by the magazine as ‘born to sport’.
There have been several magazines called Vanity Fair; this one was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868, for ‘those in the know’. As Roy T Matthews and Peter Mellini describe in their book, In Vanity Fair, the magazine ‘reviewed the newest opening in the West End and the latest novel in the club’s library’.
Its caricatures – Bowles’s brainchild, which sent the magazine’s circulation soaring – remain its most popular feature today. Bowles quickly began recruiting artists. In 1869, he got Carlo Pellegrini (‘Ape’). In 1873, he hired Leslie Ward (‘Spy’).
The first caricature, published on 30th January 1869, was by Ape – of the newly deposed Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Dizzy was accompanied by the caption ‘He educated the Tories’.
A week later, it was the new premier – and Disraeli’s deadly rival – Gladstone, who was lampooned (‘Were he a worse man’). And so it went on for the next 45 years. On 14th January 1914, Joseph Chamberlain was the last caricature to appear. Later that year, the magazine was absorbed by Hearth & Home, Bowles having sold it in 1899.
With over 2,300 caricatures, the subjects cover the broad range of society. Some greatest hits appear more than once. Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, was in twice; as was his uncle (thus the expression, ‘Bob’s your uncle’) Lord Salisbury.
My own ever-expanding collection contains newspaper editors, explorers and European royalty. They vary in price. I bought the Earl of Onslow on ebay for £1.99. Oscar Wilde can cost £600.
The catalogue is a who’s who of aristocrats – generals, landowners, huntsmen and royals. Queen Victoria was drawn, seated in a carriage, in 1897. Edward VII appeared four times. Alexander II of Russia was drawn in 1869, and George V in 1911.
Writers were also subjects. A tophatted Lord Tennyson was drawn by Ape in 1873, with the caption ‘The poet laureate’. Oscar Wilde appeared in 1884, and Thomas Hardy, sporting a bowler hat, followed in 1892. Anthony Trollope also made the list. His 1873 caricature resembled, as R C Terry put it, ‘a wildmaned, pot-bellied, Victorian squire in baggy pants’, and upset its subject. Later, James Pope-hennessy wrote that Trollope looked like ‘an affronted Santa Claus who has just lost his reindeer’.
Surprise, surprise – Winston Churchill was a regular. He was drawn at the age of 25 by Spy in 1900, before he was elected MP for Oldham, and again by ‘Nibs’ in 1911, as Home Secretary. His father, Randolph Churchill, Chancellor the Exchequer, made the magazine three times.
The majority of cartoons were done in the subject’s lifetime. But when Captain Robert Falcon Scott set off for Antarctica on the Terra Nova expedition in 1910, he hadn’t been drawn for Vanity Fair. In February 1913, almost a year after his death, the magazine printed his almostghostly caricature, drawn by Wallace Hester, with Scott wrapped in a fur-lined trench coat. The caption was simple: ‘The South Pole’.
For some collectors, the key to the cartoons is in the funny, short captions below each picture – there are longer write-ups on the neighbouring page. The 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke (1905) is called ‘A MFH with a sense of humour’. W G Grace (1877) is simply ‘Cricket’. The great Giuseppe Garibaldi – ‘This splendid child of revolution,’ said the write-up – was just ‘Revolution’. Lord Halifax, son of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes the prize: ‘He fell off his horse into the peerage’.
The cartoons are an unparalleled way of imbibing this period of history. Of the seven Prime Ministers between 1869 and 1914, all appeared in Vanity Fair – as well as the Labour Party founder, Keir Hardie, in 1906, and future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law in 1912. Alfred Harmsworth, founder of the Daily Mail, appeared in 1895. And between 1871 and 1900, nine different members of the Rothschild family were in the magazine.
These funny little drawings are a joy to collect, particularly in these grim times. The next cartoon for the Prince of Wales’s collection should be one of his ancestor, another Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Vanity Fair calls him ‘the pacificator of Europe’. Here’s hoping peace – and freedom from disease – return to Europe very soon.
Trollope is ‘a wildmaned, pot-bellied, Victorian squire in baggy pants’