I spy with my little eye

WHO are the men of today? Are they golfers, politicians, explorers? Newspaper editors, perhaps, or huntsmen? This is who they were in the late 19th century and many were immortalised—or rather, caricatured—and published on the pages of Society magazine Vanity Fair.

There have been at least five separate magazines called , but this iteration, the second, was first published by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868, its aim to expose the vanities of human existence. Today, it’s best known for its caricatures with clever captions—in 1870, Lord Halifax’s read ‘he fell off his horse into a peerage’. The first, of Benjamin Disraeli,