John Bull

• 1. Introduction

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  John Bull is one of the most enduring national symbols England has ever produced, and yet he began life as a punchline. In 1712, a Scottish physician named John Arbuthnot published a pamphlet called Law is a Bottomless Pit, and inside it he introduced a character so vivid, so deliberately ridiculous, that he would outlive every target Arbuthnot ever intended him to mock. That character was John Bull. He was stout, matter-of-fact, a country dweller with common sense in his bones and small beer in his cup. He was never meant to be a hero. He was meant to be a joke.

  What drew readers to him, and kept them coming back for nearly two centuries, is harder to explain. Was it that he felt real? Was it that he felt like the man next door rather than a king on a throne? Or was it something more uncomfortable: that a figure born to ridicule the English ended up becoming the face England chose for itself? The answers take us from the courts of the War of the Spanish Succession all the way to the trenches of the First World War, and through the hands of cartoonists, Irish satirists, Egyptian nationalists, and W. H. Auden.

• 2. Arbuthnot's Invention

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  John Arbuthnot moved in rarefied circles. He counted Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope among his close friends. When he created John Bull in 1712, he was reaching for a very specific target. The War of the Spanish Succession was grinding on, and Arbuthnot blamed the Whigs, their foreign policy, and the financiers who were growing rich from the conflict.

  The vehicle he chose was allegory. In The History of John Bull, a four-part political narrative published the same year as Law is a Bottomless Pit, John Bull drags a lawsuit through the courts against a cast of thinly disguised stand-ins. Louis Baboon represents the House of Bourbon in France. Lord Strutt represents the king of Spain. John Bull himself stands for England, while his sister Peg stands for Scotland. The lawsuit was a proxy for the war, and the whole elaborate joke was pointed squarely at the Whig establishment.

  Arbuthnot's Bull was not a dignified symbol. He was a vehicle for attack. Yet something in the conception stuck. The character he built, full of common sense, loyal to friends, frustrated by authority, and possessed of no particular claim to power or heroism, resonated beyond the pamphlet wars of Queen Anne's reign. The sister Peg continued to appear in pictorial art long after the 18th century ended. Louis Baboon and Lord Strutt did not.

• 3. From Derision to Icon

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  William Hogarth and other British writers took the originally derided Bull and turned him into what they called a heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman. It was a transformation that took decades, and it ran parallel to a wider shift in how English liberty was being imagined.

  From the 1760s onward, Bull was drawn as an Anglo-Saxon country-dweller. His visual vocabulary grew more specific. A waistcoat. A simple frock coat, navy blue in earlier depictions. A low-crowned top hat that signaled middle-class identity rather than aristocratic rank. The shallow crown of the hat, sometimes called a John Bull topper, was a deliberate cue. He was not a lord. He was a yeoman.

  By around 1790, a trio of British satirical artists helped fix the image that would define him for generations. James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Isaac Cruikshank developed the cartoon version of Bull: stolid, stocky, conservative, and well-meaning, dressed as an English country squire. Their Bull was often placed in explicit contrast with the scrawny French revolutionary Jacobin, the sans-culottes figure that stood for everything Bull was not. An earlier national personification, Sir Roger de Coverley from a 1711 edition of The Spectator, had not achieved the same grip on the popular imagination.

  Washington Irving captured the literary version of Bull with precision in his chapter from The Sketch Book. Irving wrote that Bull was "a plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow, with much less of poetry about him than rich prose," a man who "excels in humour more than in wit; is jolly rather than gay" and who "will stand by a friend in a quarrel with life and purse, however soundly he may be cudgelled."

• 4. A Figure Abroad

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  The reach of John Bull extended well beyond Britain. The American cartoonist Thomas Nast helped carry the figure to new audiences, as did the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, whose play John Bull's Other Island placed the character in a distinctly colonial frame.

  The most pointed foreign critique came from Egypt. Yaqub Sanu, an Egyptian nationalist journalist, used his popular underground newspaper Abu-Naddara Zarqa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to publish cartoons that turned Bull into something very different from the jolly country squire of British satire. In Sanu's drawings, Bull was a coarse, drunken bully who stole the wealth of Egypt while pushing around ordinary Egyptians. Much of Sanu's humor centered on Bull's alcoholism and his inability to speak French properly. The Egyptian characters in these cartoons spoke proper French; Bull mangled it. The joke was not affectionate.

  The Irish Republican musician and playwright Dominic Behan also used Bull as a proxy for British authority, attacking the British government through the figure in his ballad The Patriot Game. These critical portraits did not displace the symbol so much as reveal how much meaning a single character could hold. The same image that English editorial pages used to represent English common sense was being pressed into service by colonized peoples to represent English arrogance.

• 5. Name, Costume, and Meaning

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  Bull's surname was no accident. Arbuthnot chose it in part for its echo of the alleged English fondness for beef, reflected in the French nickname for English people: les rosbifs, which translates as the Roast Beefs. The name also carried the animal's qualities. Bull was meant to read as virile, strong, and stubborn.

  The costume accrued meaning over time. During the Georgian period, Bull wore a red waistcoat and a royal blue tailcoat, paired with buff or white breeches. This combination deliberately echoed the blue and buff scheme associated with supporters of Whig politics. Arbuthnot had originally designed the character to mock the Whigs, and the colors were part of that mockery. By the 20th century, the waistcoat had been replaced by one bearing the Union Flag, and the coat had darkened. The Regency-era silhouette survived even as the political meaning shifted.

  He is often accompanied by a bulldog. Britannia or a lion sometimes stands in for him in editorial cartoons. The singer David Bowie wore a coat in the style of Bull, one data point in a long line of cultural references that stretched the character's life beyond its satirical origins. Margaret Fuller, writing in Summer on the Lakes in 1843, used the phrase as shorthand in Chapter 2, praising a traveler for having seen the American landscape "as man, simply, not as John Bull." By her time, the name had become an adjective.

• 6. Decline and Succession

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  John Bull's dominance as the face of England began to slip during the First World War. The function of representing the common man, which Bull had held for nearly two centuries, passed largely to Tommy Atkins, the generic name for the ordinary British soldier.

  The historian Alison Light argued that during the interwar years the nation moved away from what she described as formerly heroic public rhetorics of national destiny, turning instead toward an Englishness that was less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private. In this new mood, Bull was replaced by a new figure: Sidney Strube's suburban Little Man, a more anxious, smaller-scaled personification of the nation.

  Not everyone accepted the substitution without comment. W. H. Auden, in his 1937 poem Letter to Lord Byron, favorably contrasted Bull to the Little Man. Some read Strube's Little Man as a symbol of Britain's post-First World War decline. Bull had been a yeoman with common sense and a bulldog at his heel. The Little Man was a commuter. The contrast said something about what Britain believed it had lost. Bull himself kept appearing in posters and cartoons as late as the First World War, a long afterlife for a character born as a satirical weapon in a pamphlet war that had ended two centuries before.