John Bull

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origin of this personification of the English everyman and his development as both British and Britain in the following centuries. He first appeared along with Lewis Baboon (French) and Nicholas Frog (Dutch) in 1712 in a pamphlet that satirised the funding of the War of the Spanish Succession. The author was John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scottish doctor and satirist who was part of the circle of Swift and Pope, and his John Bull was the English voter, overwhelmed by taxes that went not so much into the war itself but into the pockets of its financiers. For the next two centuries, Arbuthnot’s John Bull was a gift for cartoonists and satirists, especially when they wanted to ridicule British governments for taking advantage of the people’s patriotism.

The image above is by William Charles, a Scottish engraver who emigrated to the United States, and dates from 1814 during the Anglo-American War of 1812.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Judith Hawley 13 episodes
  Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
• Miles Taylor No other episodes
  Professor of British History and Society at Humboldt, University of Berlin
• Mark Knights 3 episodes
  Professor of History at the University of Warwick

Reading list

• The History of John Bull
  John Arbuthnot (eds Robert A. Erickson and Alan A. Bower) (Oxford University Press, 1976) Google Books →
• Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot
  Conal Condren (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) Google Books →
• Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England
  Tamara L. Hunt (Routledge, 2003) Google Books →
• Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture
  Mark Knights (Oxford University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain, 1500-1820
  Mark Knights and Adam Morton (eds.) (Boydell & Brewer, 2017)
• Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850
  Paul Langford (Oxford University Press, 2000) Google Books →
• The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair
  Peter Mandler (Yale University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation
  Ben Rogers (Chatto and Windus, 2003) Google Books →
• John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c.1712-1929
  Miles Taylor
• Georgian John Bull
  Adrian Teal

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Programme ID: m0018nsd

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018nsd

Auto-category: 941 (British history)