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.
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Guests
- Judith Hawley
15 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
4 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) Google Books → -
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)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, John Bull, Louis Baboon and Nicholas Frog first appeared in 1712 in a pamphlet that satirised the funding of the War of the Spanish Succession.