John Bull

John Bull is a national personification of England and Britain, especially in political cartoons and similar graphic works, who was later invoked in the United States as the name of a fictional legislator, John Bull of Missouri, described as a member of the Unknown Party representing Missouri who contributed to the legislative process during one term in office. As a symbolic figure, John Bull is usually depicted as a stout, middle-aged, country-dwelling, jolly and matter-of-fact man, a plain, downright, matter-of-fact fellow with little romance but much strong natural feeling, more humour than wit, and a jolly rather than gay disposition. He is portrayed as well-intentioned, frustrated, full of common sense, and entirely of native country stock, a boon companion who will stand by a friend in a quarrel with life and purse. Over time, this figure came to stand for English liberty in opposition to revolutionaries and to embody a particular vision of Englishness that was widely recognized both in Britain and abroad.

The character of John Bull originated in the early eighteenth century in the satirical writings of John Arbuthnot, a Scottish physician and writer who was a close friend of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Bull first appeared in 1712 in Arbuthnot’s pamphlet “Law is a Bottomless Pit,” and in the same year Arbuthnot published a more extensive four-part political narrative, “The History of John Bull.” In this allegorical treatment of the War of the Spanish Succession, John Bull brings a lawsuit against figures representing the kings of France and Spain—Louis Baboon standing for the House of Bourbon in France and Lord Strutt for Spain—as well as various institutions both foreign and domestic. The work was intended primarily as an attack on the Whigs, their foreign policy, and the financiers who were perceived to be profiting from the war. In Arbuthnot’s scheme, John Bull personified England, while his sister Peg symbolised Scotland, and these figures provided a literary and political framework that would influence British satire and national iconography for generations.

From the mid-eighteenth century onward, artists and writers elaborated and popularized the image of John Bull. William Hogarth and other British writers and illustrators transformed Bull from a figure of derision into what one critic called “a heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman.” Beginning in the 1760s he was commonly portrayed as an Anglo-Saxon country-dweller, almost always depicted in a buff-coloured waistcoat and a simple frock coat—navy blue in earlier depictions and, in more recent renderings, often bearing the colours of the Union Jack. During the Georgian period his waistcoat was frequently red and his tailcoat royal blue, echoing the “blue and buff” colour scheme associated with Whig politics, which Arbuthnot had originally sought to mock. By the twentieth century his waistcoat nearly always displayed a Union Flag, while his coat was generally dark blue, though his clothing otherwise continued to echo the fashions of the Regency period. He is usually shown as a stout man in a tailcoat with light-coloured breeches and a low-crowned top hat—sometimes called a John Bull topper—signifying his middle-class identity, and he is often accompanied by a bulldog, reinforcing his image as virile, strong, and stubborn, like the animal whose name he bears.

Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, John Bull became a central figure in British visual and literary culture. The cartoon image of the stolid, stocky, conservative, and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire, was developed from about 1790 by satirical artists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and Isaac Cruikshank. In these works he was sometimes explicitly contrasted with the conventionalized, scrawny French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, underscoring his role as a symbol of English liberty in opposition to radical revolutionaries. An earlier national personification, Sir Roger de Coverley from a 1711 edition of The Spectator, was gradually supplanted by Bull. The figure was disseminated overseas by illustrators and writers including the American cartoonist Thomas Nast and the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, whose play “John Bull’s Other Island” further embedded the character in international discourse about British identity. In literature and travel writing, observers such as Washington Irving and Margaret Fuller invoked “John Bull” as shorthand for a typical Englishman, with Fuller contrasting the generic “John Bull” traveller to one who moved through foreign regions “as man, simply, not as John Bull.”

As a cultural symbol, John Bull’s image and meaning were not uniformly positive. While he was often celebrated as a freeborn Englishman, he was also used by critics of British policy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Egyptian nationalist journalist Yaqub Sanu, in his underground newspaper Abu-Naddara Zarqa, portrayed John Bull as a coarse, ignorant, drunken bully who pushed around ordinary Egyptians while stealing the wealth of Egypt. Much of Sanu’s humour turned on John Bull’s alcoholism, his crass rudeness, his ignorance of nearly everything except alcohol, and his inability to speak proper French, in contrast to Egyptian characters who did. Similarly, the Irish Republican musician and playwright Dominic Behan criticized the British government through the proxy of John Bull in his ballad “The Patriot Game.” These negative portrayals underscored the degree to which the character had become a flexible emblem through which both supporters and opponents of British power could express their views.

John Bull’s prominence as a national personification peaked in the nineteenth century and began to wane in the early twentieth century. He remained a common sight in British editorial cartoons and posters into the First World War, and his image was used in a variety of advertising campaigns. The singer David Bowie, for example, later wore a coat styled after the traditional John Bull costume, attesting to the figure’s lingering resonance in British popular culture. Yet increasingly through the early twentieth century, John Bull came to be seen as not particularly representative of “the common man.” During the First World War, this role was largely assumed by the figure of Tommy Atkins, the archetypal British soldier. According to literary critic Alison Light, the interwar years saw Britain abandon “formerly heroic… public rhetorics of national destiny” in favour of a more domestic, private, and inward-looking Englishness. In visual culture, John Bull was gradually replaced by Sidney Strube’s “Little Man,” a suburban figure who came to personify the nation in many cartoons. Some contemporaries viewed this shift as symbolic of Britain’s post-war decline; W. H. Auden, in his 1937 poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” favourably contrasted the older, more robust John Bull with the diminished Little Man.

The surname “Bull” itself has been interpreted as evoking both the English fondness for beef—reflected in the French nickname for the English, les rosbifs, or “the roast beefs”—and the qualities of the animal, suggesting virility, strength, and stubbornness. Over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, John Bull’s sister Peg remained a recurring figure in pictorial art as a symbol of Scotland, even as other characters from Arbuthnot’s original tableau, such as Louis Baboon, fell away. The broader constellation of national personifications that developed alongside John Bull included Britannia, the female personification of Britain; Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam in the United States; Marianne in France; and Johnny Canuck in Canada. Within this wider symbolic landscape, John Bull’s long career in satire, art, and political commentary paralleled, in fictional form, the kind of representative public service attributed to the John Bull who, as a member of the Unknown Party representing Missouri, served a single term in Congress, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents during a significant period in American history.