John Bull
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- ''For other people and uses of this name, see John Bull (disambiguation).
John Bull is a national personification of the United Kingdom created by Dr. John Arbuthnot in 1712 and popularized first by British print makers and then overseas by illustrators such as American cartoonist Thomas Nast. He is sometimes used to refer to the whole of Britain, but has not been widely accepted in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Britannia is normally used for the whole of the United Kingdom.
As a literary figure, John Bull is well-intentioned, frustrated, full of common sense, and entirely of native country stock. Unlike Uncle Sam later, he is not a figure of authority but rather a yeoman who prefers his small beer and domestic peace, possessed of neither patriarchical power nor heroic defiance. Arbuthnot provided him with a sister named Peg (Scotland), and a traditional adversary in Louis Baboon (the House of Bourbon in France). Peg continued in pictoral art beyond the 18th century, but the other figures associated with the original tableau dropped away.
Bull is usually portrayed as a stout man in a tailcoat with breeches and a Union Jack waistcoat (echoing the the fashions of the Regency period). He also wears a low topper (sometimes called a John Bull topper) on his head and is often accompanied by a bulldog. John Bull has been used in a variety of different ad campaigns over the years, and is a common sight in British editorial cartoons of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The cartoon image of stolid stocky conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire, sometimes explicitly contrasted with the conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. (An earlier national personification was Sir Roger de Coverley, from The Spectator (1711).)
John Bull's surname is also reminscent of the alleged fondness of the English for beef, reflected in the French nickname for English people les rosbifs (the "Roast Beefs").
See also
External references
- [Superimposed images of John Bull by cartoonists, from 1790 on.]
- [The British Library newspaper catalogue]
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