'Hull' — Charles Henry Wilson, M.P.

Pellegrini presents Charles Henry Wilson, the Hull shipping magnate and Liberal M.P., as a self-satisfied Victorian industrialist: hands thrust in trouser pockets, top hat slightly oversized, and a spectacular auburn moustache and mutton-chop beard rendered with affectionate exaggeration. The caption reads simply *Hull*, locating the man entirely in his commercial domain rather than Westminster. Wilson ran the Wilson Line, then the world's largest privately-owned shipping fleet, and the plate flatters his solidity — broad-chested, well-tailored in brown tweed and a buttoned waistcoat — while the shrunken feet and ballooning head signal caricature. No ethnic distortion appears; the comedy is one of civic pomposity, the self-made northern merchant deposited, slightly too large for his boots, into polite London society.