John Bull (mayor)

John Bull is a national personification of England, especially in political cartoons and similar graphic works. He is usually depicted as a stout, middle-aged, country-dwelling, jolly and matter-of-fact man. He originated in satirical works of the early-18th century and would come to stand for English liberty in opposition to revolutionaries. He was popular through the 18th and 19th centuries until the time of the First World War, when he generally stopped being seen as representative of the "common man".

Origin

John Bull originated as a satirical character created by John Arbuthnot, a friend of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Bull first appeared in 1712 in Arbuthnot's pamphlet ''Law is a Bottomless Pit''."AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion," Metropolitan Museum of Art (2006), exhibition brochure, p. 2. The same year Arbuthnot published a four-part political narrative ''The History of John Bull''. In this satirical treatment of the War of the Spanish Succession, John Bull brings a lawsuit against various figures intended to represent the kings of France (Louis Baboon) and Spain (Lord Strutt), as well as institutions both foreign and domestic. The allegory was intended primarily as attack against the Whigs, their foreign policy and their financiers who were profiting from the war. In Arbuthnot's work John Bull personifies England while his sister Peg symbolises his native Scotland.

William Hogarth and other British writers made Bull, originally derided, "a heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman." Later, the figure of Bull was disseminated overseas by illustrators and writers such as the American cartoonist Thomas Nast and the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, author of ''John Bull's Other Island''.

Starting in the 1760s Bull was portrayed as an Anglo-Saxon country-dweller. He was almost always depicted in a buff-coloured waistcoat and a simple frock coat (in the past navy blue, but more recently with the Union Jack colours). Britannia, or a lion, is sometimes used as an alternative in some editorial cartoons.

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 patriarchal 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 pictorial art beyond the 18th century, but the other figures associated with the original tableau dropped away. John Bull himself continued to frequently appear as a national symbol in posters and cartoons as late as the First World War.

Depiction

Bull is usually depicted as a stout man in a tailcoat with light-coloured breeches and a top hat which, by its shallow crown, indicates its middle-class identity. During the Georgian period his waistcoat is red and/or his tailcoat is royal blue which, together with his buff or white breeches, can thus refer to a greater or lesser extent to the "blue and buff" scheme; this was used by supporters of Whig politics, which was part of what John Arbuthnot wished to deride when he created and designed the character. By the twentieth century, however, his waistcoat nearly always depicts a Union Flag, and his coat is generally dark blue. (Otherwise, however, his clothing still echoes the fashions of the Regency period.) He wears a low topper (sometimes called a John Bull topper) and is often accompanied by a bulldog. Bull has been used in a variety of different advertising campaigns over the years, and is a common sight in British editorial cartoons of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The singer David Bowie wore a coat in the style of Bull.

Washington Irving described him in his chapter entitled "John Bull" from ''The Sketch Book:''

The cartoon image of stolid, stocky, conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire, sometimes explicitly contrasted with the conventionalised scrawny, French revolutionary ''sans-culottes'' Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by the British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank. (An earlier national personification was Sir Roger de Coverley, from a 1711 edition of ''The Spectator.'')

A more negative portrayal of John Bull occurred in the cartoons drawn by the Egyptian nationalist journalist Yaqub Sanu in his popular underground newspaper ''Abu-Naddara Zarqa'' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Fahamy, Ziad "Francophone Egyptian Nationalists, Anti-British Discourse, and European Public Opinion, 1885-1910: The Case of Mustafa Kamil and Ya'qub Sannu'" pp. 170-183 from ''Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East'', Volume 28, Number 1, 2008 pp. 173-175. Sanu's cartoons depicted John Bull as a coarse, ignorant drunken bully who pushed around ordinary Egyptians while stealing all the wealth of Egypt. Much of Sanu's humor revolved around John Bull's alcoholism, his crass rudeness, his ignorance about practically everything except alcohol, and his inability to properly speak French (the language of the Egyptian elite), which he hilariously mangled unlike the Egyptian characters who spoke proper French.  

Likewise, the musician, playwright and Irish Republican Dominic Behan criticized the British government via the proxy of John Bull in his popular ballad, The Patriot Game:

This Ireland of mine has for long been half free,

Six counties are under John Bull's tyranny.

And still de Valera is greatly to blame

For shirking his part in the patriot game.

Increasingly through the early twentieth century, John Bull became seen as not particularly representative of "the common man," and during the First World War this function was largely taken over by the figure of Tommy Atkins

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