High Society Humour

In the introduction to his book The Prime Ministers (1995), former Conservative Home Secretary Lord Baker of Dorking noted that ‘politicians need cartoonists, for to be caricatured is a sign that they have arrived’. The same is true of many other public figures, and in the middle of the nineteenth century a new British society magazine, Vanity Fair, began to publish weekly colour caricature portraits of ‘Men of the Day’, ‘Statesmen’ and so on, using the new process of high-quality chromolithography. It led the field for more than forty years and eventually published more than 2,300 portraits, a third of which were of politicians.

Vanity Fair was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles (1842-1922), the illegitimate son of the Conservative MP Thomas Milner Gibson, who was President of the Board of Trade in Palmerston’s last government (1859-65). Little is known of his mother Susan Bowles, but his adopted mother Susannah Gibson was a society hostess whose salons attracted many famous literary and political figures including Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and the Italian republican exile, Giuseppe Mazzini.