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.