In Our Time - John Bull

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

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. WithJudith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonMiles Taylor Professor of British History and Society at Humboldt, University of BerlinAndMark Knights Professor of History at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. 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. John Arbuthnot was the author,

part of the circle of Swift and Pope and his John Bull was the English voter, beleaguered by taxes that went into financiers' pockets, baboon was the French, and Frog was the Dutch. And for the next two centuries, Arbuthnot's John Bull was a gift for cartoonists and satirists, particularly when they wanted to ridicule British government for taking advantage of the people's patriotism. With me to discuss John Bull are Miles Taylor,

Professor of British History and Society at Humboldt University of Berlin, Mark Knights, Professor of History at the University of Warwick, and Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway University of London. Judith Hawley, let's start with John Arbuthnot. Who was he and how did he create John Ball? Well, John Arbuthnot was born in 1667 in North East Scotland, in a town actually called Arbuthnot. And he came from quite a prominent family in the neighbourhood.

His father was a minister there and gave him a very good education. He was trained up in the classic. and also mathematics and natural philosophy. His family became fairly well to do. His brothers were merchants trading in the East, but they were slightly tricky figures in a way. One of his brothers became a Jacobite, and his father also didn't support William and Mary

when they came in with the glorious revolution. Can I come in and revel that from a moment before we go any further, the Jacobite and William and Mary? When his father was a minister, So he had to swear the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs who came in in 1688, William and Mary. But he was a supporter of the Stuart regime. And one of John's brothers also became a Jacobite supporting James II and his successors. And so there was a sense of political opposition in the family.

And Arbuthnot himself doesn't seem to have been a Jacobite, but he was always associated with an anti-wig position. And that's quite important throughout his career. Other important elements of his career are his real affinity for mathematics. He studied mathematics and taught mathematics, and he wrote a number of books on the sort of practical importance of mathematics, including one on the Rules of Chance, which was actually partly very helpful for playing cards and dice.

And he's a keen cards player, which actually stood him in good stead throughout his life because he became a courtier. He became a doctor by chance to Queen Anne. He happened to be at Epson Races when her son fell ill. And he became doctor to the son and then later to Queen Anne when she ascended the throne. And he spent a lot of time in St. James Palace

tending to the Queen and when she didn't need him, playing cards with the courtiers. And it's through that connection that he met two men who are very important for John Bull and they are Robert Harley, who was a leading Tory figure, and Jonathan Swift, the Irish minister and satirist. And both Swift and Arbuthnot were writing for Harley in favour of the Tory courses. And one of the main causes that they had at the time was that the Tories wanted to stop a war that had been raging in Europe over who was going to send to the throne of Spain.

How did Harbethnott's character compare to that of the better known satirists, such as Swift and Pope? Well, I mentioned at the time he spent hanging around in court, and that might mean that he's a rather sort of scheming politician, and certainly he was very canny, but he was an extremely genial man. Pope described him in a poem he wrote in 1735 as a friend to my life, social, cheerful, and serene. and Jonathan Swift said that if there are 12 such in the world as our butthnot, he would burn his gulliver's travels, that he was such a good companion and a good-hearted man,

even though he had this political and satirical aspect to his life. Miles Taylor, can we come, can we go back to the Tories and the Whigs? What did they represent? And how was it that they were so fractious? The words Tories and Whigs were not the party labels that they become later on, say, in the 19th century. I mean, they are both terms of abuse used by either side. But they do reflect political groupings that emerge in the years after the glorious revolution of 1688 to 89.

And the wigs are particularly associated with the victory, in other words, the restoration of a Protestant monarchy in the shape of William and Mary and defeat of James II, the Catholic King. and the Tories are associated really with the opposition to the political establishment. The Whigs tend to control the main levers of political and financial power after the constitutional settlement. The Tories tend to represent the interests of the nation outside of the cities, outside of the Westminster bubble, and are particularly associated with the crown. and obviously in the case of Abathnot and Swift and Harley,

that's a physical association as well as a political allegiance. At the time that Wiggs were credited with actually almost creating a new British state, is that right? Yes, I think we should not underestimate the scope and range and effects of the Revolution of 1688 to 9. It's often said that England doesn't have a constitution. Well, it's quite a lot of a constitution in the legislation passed. in 1688 to 9, which secures not just the basic rules about the accession to the monarchy, who can be king or queen, but also the powers of parliament, which are reasserted, and also, for example, other things such as the creation of the national debt

and the formalization of the Bank of England. So if you like, the fiscal state, as historians call it, the fiscal and constitutional state where everybody knows the rules of the game, to this day in many ways has its origins in the legislation that comes in the 1690s and early 18th century

and the Whigs really are the constitutional architects of so much of that. What was the audience for satire in the early 18th century before let's call it mass media but mass media was creeping in wasn't it? But the main question is what was the audience?

The term that scholars used for this early 18th century period the reign of Queen Anne to describe this kind of media is propaganda. The word doesn't emerge until the early 20th century, but I think it is an appropriate way to understand much of the pamphleteering that's going on. And the audience is really each other's political party and friends. So, for example, LeBathnot's John Bull pamphlets, which come out in a series of five separate parts,

goes into six editions, in 1712 alone. And that will be shared out amongst the political classes of Westminster, but also there's an edition published in Edinburgh, so it'll be circulated. And it's really, if you like, a cue card, a kind of manifesto or a form of editorial that politicians and would-be politicians and different partisans can look to for a view or a way of expressing a view on the politics of the day. It's a real frenzy, these pamphlet wars that go on. But we shouldn't underestimate the extent that they have hugely partisan origins. They really are the political propaganda of the early 18th century.

Was one of the reasons that they took off and flared up because by naming people like John Bull and baboon and frog, these weren't real people, but they're engaged like real people, from Esop's Fables sort of thing, like real people in opinionated disagreements all the time. Was that to escape libel? Yes, I mean the libel laws are fierce and furious throughout the 18th and early 19th century. By the end of the 18th century during the wars against revolutionary France,

it's treasonable even to imagine the king's death, let alone write about it or visualize it. So visual satire after 1760 and print satire before 1760, often using the disguise of anthropomorphic identities or fake names or made-up names, as in the case of John Bull, is the way to get round the libel laws, which after all don't just affect the author. But first and foremost, they affect the printer and the publisher. So whole businesses are brought down at the strike of the libel law. Mark Nights, enter John Bull. What was Arbethnott's pamphlet or pamphlets about in 1712? So as Judith was suggesting, these are topical pamphlets relating to the War of Spanish Succession,

which raged really on the continent and further afield as well, between 1702 and 1714. And this was a war which centred around the succession to the Spanish throne, because the king of Spain, Carlos, died childless, and under... Spanish law, the crown passed through the female line, and he had two grandsons, one from the French royal family and the other from the imperial Austrian family. So there were rival claimants to the Spanish throne, and in his will, Carlos left his Spanish estate and dominions to the French line, which filled the English with absolute horror because it represented the union of two of its very long-standing enemies,

France and Spain. So the pamphlets are a critique of this war. Its alliances, Britain made alliances with Austria and others. Its expense, it was massively costly. The national debt at this period rose, to about £40 million pounds, which probably doesn't seem that high in current terms, but to contemporaries was an eye-watering sort of sum.

And to its critics, also the sort of futility of it. And so the pamphlets reduce what had become by the period around 1712 to be a prolonged period of negotiations. It reduced these to an allegory of a lawsuit between John Bull on the one hand and Lewis Baboon, who represents France. And the first pamphlet was called Law is a bottomless pit. Going to law never really ends.

And so John Bull enters into this lawsuit. But the pamphlets are so much more than that because, as you were suggesting earlier, the characters are really rounded out. So John Bull, as the personification of the English, is described as ruddy and plump. He's got a pair of ruddy cheeks. He's an honest plain-dealing fellow. He's choleric.

He loses his temper quite quickly, but also recovers it reasonably quickly. He's bold. He's apt to quarrel with his best friends. And Abathnot says, if you flatter him, you can lead him like a child. And the other perhaps terrific thing about these pamphlets is that they're a family saga as well. So in the first pamphlet, we meet John Bull's wife who symbolises the Whig government. And they have a massive falling out. And his new wife, who's very shrewd and very sensible and very calculating, is the new Tory government.

What was Arbeth not hoping to achieve here? Did you want to change something or just impress his friend? and have a bit of fun? Probably a bit of both. I mean, certainly impressing his friends and having fun was always on the agenda, but I think there is a very serious purpose here as well, and that's really to bring the war to an end.

How was he going to do that? He thought Satire was strong enough to do that, did he? He did, and his colleague, Jonathan Swift, wrote a pamphlet pretty much at the same time as Abathnot, called the Conduct of the Allies. which is a very sort of straight analysis, very hard-hitting analysis of the mismanagement of the war, the way in which the wigs were profiteering from it. And Swift was really gratified to hear that pamphlet on everybody's lips.

It was a massive bestseller. We heard from Miles earlier on how Abuthanaut's own pamphlets were greedily bought up. And so the arguments that they were putting forward were really repeat. and rehearsed inside Parliament as well and swift comments on this. So, yes, this is an era in which print discourse can actually really have a significant impact. And one of the things that they both really wanted to do was to turn the agenda around so that instead of criticising the French, their thrust was really about criticising the Dutch. who were the ostensible allies of the English.

And these writers were really arguing that the allies had led Britain astray. Judith Hawley, in later years the figure of John Bull became a jingoistic figure. But he's not that, for Arbuthnot. How does John Bull start out? Well, Mark, in his masterful summary of this complex pamphlet and the complex background, has picked out some of the key characteristics that John Bull is endowed with. He's an honest plain-dealing fellow, but caloric.

That means he's hot-tempered. He's also got a very unconstant temper. So what I would notice there is that John Bull isn't in any way an idealised characterization of the spirit of Britain. He's not a sort of sense of sort of a symbol for the glory of a British national character. He's actually really, I think, a satire on public opinion.

So the idea that he can be easily swayed, you can flatter him and he'll change his mind. Or as Marcus told us, he's almost sort of seduced and betrayed by his first wife and the lawyer who exploit him. But if you tell him the right sort of things, if you tell him the truth as swifted in the conduct of the Allies, and you explained to him that Robert Harley has nothing but his interests at heart, he will roll over and do what he's meant to do. There are a couple of other aspects I'd want to pick out at the start here because they're important for the way John Bull is depicted in visual satires after about 1760.

But also it's clear that John Bull is not a fixed figure. I think we might have an image of a chap with a Union Jack waistcoat and a low top hat and high riding boots. That's not at all what John Bull is like. like in our Bothnott's pamphlet. For one thing, he's a tradesman, a clothier. So he's a member of the middling sword. The middle class is making his money by trade.

He's an urban figure. He has a country estate that he gets by his trade. But later on, we get an association between John Bull and first country bumpkins and then gentlemen. But at the moment, he's a tradesman, and that seems quite important. And I think this sense that because of trade, he's involved with the new Whig economic system, but he's not really wedded to it. He's got his heart elsewhere.

That point about the tradesman, I think, is a really important one because a really essential part of the negotiations was about the commercial arrangements. How British trade would interact with French trade and indeed with Dutch trade was absolutely central to these discussions. and so it's really significant that John Bull is a clothea and a tradesman in that sense. Miles, he appears as a written character at first rather than in a cartoon, but why are the bulls and baboons and frogs here? That kind of allegory where animals are substituted for humans and animals' characteristics are imputed to humans is a classic form of rhetoric and satire that goes way.

back and we've already mentioned Esop's fables. And so I think calling John Bulla Bull does pick up on earlier tropes of Englishness, which allude to the bovine nature of the English, their slowness, they're easily duped. And of course, the presumption that the English love roast beef, and that can be found in Shakespeare. It's also there in earlier medieval literature. So you can see these tropes of Englishness which are not essentially personified in a figure until you get John Ball. And I think that is what is unique about Obathnot's John Ball. There are other personifications of Englishmen, I mean, Defoe and Swift at this time, but none of them managed to quite create this composite figure, which not only brings together the animalistic,

the anthropomorphic elements of national character, which are such a familiar way of writing about national difference across the 18th century, none of them quite bring them together into this composite figure who has so many resonant political meanings, as Mark and Judith have described. But could we say when John Bull became a figure in the, not so much literary, but in the conversational landscape? And if so, what sort of figure? So in terms of political conversation and rhetoric, it's pretty ubiquitous by the late 18th century, partly because of the immense amount of visualisations of John Ball, starting slowly in the 1760s at the beginning of the reign of George III,

but then particularly during the 1790s and the wars against revolutionary France, where you get the binary of English versus French and all the kind of characteristics that are associated with that. And yes, John Bull becomes a shorthand way of saying this is what the English men and women, because there's a Mrs. Bull, as we've heard, and later a Joan and a Jane Bull. This is what ordinary people think. And so the references to John Bull or bullish type of opinion. Mark, Julius told us how Arbuthnot was milder than the others,

but he could be cutting when he wanted. What was his attack on lying? Yes, so he wrote another pamphlet in 1712, the same year that the John Bulls series were published. And it was, again, another satire, and it was a satire on what he called a treatise of the art of political lying. And essentially it's a mock prospectus for a book that he thought he might publish about how political lying worked.

And the reason why he wanted to produce this was the sort of concatenation of three different factors. One, the freedom of the press, as we've heard, the print media was becoming really ubiquitous. Secondly, very, very frequent elections as a result of that constitutional settlement that Miles was talking about earlier on, there are elections on average every two and a half years in this period. And thirdly, the emergence of partisan politics, the whigs and Tories that Miles was explaining earlier on. And the parties therefore used the press. in order to manipulate the electorate to vote for them. And for Abagnot, this was really about political lying

and political truth seemed to have gone out of the window. And so he's poking fun, really, at the cultural impact of this new culture where truth seemed to be destabilised by these bitter partisan. and conflicts and disputes over the war, but also over a whole range of other things as well. What effect did that have? That pamphlet is really part of a much longer series of interventions by Abuthnot and others

expressing real anxiety about the state of political culture. They saw political lying everywhere. Now, of course, there was a silver lining to this, Swift, as we've heard, was involved in this political pamphleteering. So is Daniel Defoe. And I suppose the plus side of political lying is also imaginative literature. Swift and Defoe were also able to craft imaginative responses to this context. They cut their teeth in this vituperative world of political lies and counter lies.

but they also were able to create imaginative literature, which we still read today. Judith, how did John Bull evolve? He moved across two centuries, really. How did he evolve at the start? First of all, vis-a-be France, we've said to Bittitt. That would say a bit more.

And then in the American War of Independence, as that loomed. Yes, John Bull, as I said, in our bathnot's first depiction of him, was quite a variable character easily led. And it meant, I think, that he was, was easy for satirists to create different versions of him depending on and adapt him to the political time. So whatever political debate was, or political crisis was in train, you could bring out John Bull and use him to say something about it. For example, in the 1760s and 70s

during the American War of Independence, he was sometimes depicted as a kind of a country Bumpkin, a Yokel, who might not be very clever, but knew that the very start when a lot of people were sympathetic to the American calls for independence, knew that the American colonists were being taxed far too heavily because he knew how to bear the burden of tax too. So very often he's part of a debate about the cost of prosecuting a war as he is in the John Bull pamphlets. Sometimes he's complained that he's having to bear the burden. of his Scottish sister Peg. When the French came in on the side of the American colonists,

depictions of John Bull flipped rather. So in visual cartoons, he's now encouraged, you know, Hobarth not said he could be flattered to do things, encouraged to take up his cudgel against the French and to act as a stout defender of his land. When we move into the 1790s and the French Revolution, Again, there are these competing depictions of him and shifting it really week by week in response to the news as it comes in.

The great visual satirist James Gilray is producing a satire at least one a week for Hannah Humphers in the 1790s. And he said that the pace of his evolution really hots up. And he sometimes, again, he starts off being a yokel complaining about how much he's having to pay or there's a wonderful Gilray cartoon in which Charles James Fox and the wigs are trying to seduce him over to the French cries for liberty. But he says, no, I might be stupid, but I know that Farmer George, George de Third is the one for me and I'm going to stay loyal. And then there's a whole series of depictions, again prompted by Gilrays of French liberty and English slavery.

that the French are skinny Frenchmen eating roots and garlic and all sorts of other disgusting stuff instead of wonderful English roast beef. So in the Gilray cartoon when he's contrasting the French and the British, the Frenchman is starving but claiming that he's free, whereas the Englishman is eating a hearty diet but grumbling about oppression. So it's a kind of precursor of McMillan's you've never had it so good. So I think that's right about the 1790s. They are a critical moment. But there is a sort of atmosphere of dissonance. There are versions of John Ball which see him as a kind of Frankenstein of democracy. He looks like he could be about to put on the red cap of liberty. He could be about to become a Jacobina or song, Coulot. So he is disfigured. He is emaciated. He's coarse. He's plebeian. That's when you get a lot of the kind of body, the body humor, the farts and the sexualized imagery. of John Bull, which I think suggests that the governing classes in the 1790s in Britain

weren't absolutely sure which way John Bull was going to turn. After 1803, I think it becomes clearer that his loyalty is assured. But in the background of William Pitt's terror and all the legal repression of radicalism in dissent in the 1790s, John Ball stands out as a rather ambivalent figure who could go either. the way. Miles, can I ask, was he, did he think of him, was he thought of, or did he think of himself as if he was, if there's a self there? Did he think of themselves as English or British, or did satirists not distinguish? I think for much of the 18th century, he is essentially English. It's no, it's no coincidence that Abuthnot, as a, as a Scott, is writing in the context

of the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland. And we've already heard about the references to Sister Pegg. So Sister Pegg is Scotland And later on there are more derogatory references To Ireland So he is resolutely English But not in a way that is anti-Scott Or always anti-Irish It really depends on the particular flavour

The particular context Mark, what changed when satire became more about pictures Than words? Yes, I mean that's right That it does become more about pictures Though it's also worth remembering that the pictorial tradition developed alongside the literary one. And actually, there was an awful lot of text in many of these graphic satires.

But as they become more graphic, they became more personalised. So this was an era, the 18th and into the 19th century, an era when politicians became recognizable to an audience. and caricature, which was an Italian form of exaggeration and sometimes grotesque exaggeration of particular features, lent itself very well to this growing recognition that people had of politicians and of the elite more generally. So the royal family came in for a great deal of criticism and satire.

There is a huge amount of graphic satire against the Prince Regent, for example, much of which is extremely lewd and suggestive. And Miles mentioned John Bull and Farts. There's a very famous print in 1798 by Richard Newton called Treason, with three exclamation marks after it, showing John Bull farting in the face of George the third, for which he was not prosecuted. It's worth noting. So this graphic satire could be quite earthy.

It could be really quite puncturing of people's pride and really skewer politicians and members of the elite, partly because, as Miles was suggesting earlier, it's much more difficult to prosecute for an image than it was to prosecute for text. By the 1720s, both irony and allegory had essentially been outlawed for satirical purpose in text. So it was almost natural that the graphic satirists

would really have their day from the 1760s through to the 1830s when almost 20,000 individual prints were produced. Julius Hawley. How did John Bull develop in the pages of Punch in the 19th century? Yes, there's quite a strange development in the 19th century that we've been talking about how John Bull is used in very different ways and that the sort of iconography of him isn't fixed, that he's often depicted in very grotesque ways.

He's sometimes a country bumpkin, sometimes a gentleman. But when Punch is set up as a comic, like a sort of lighter satirical magazine in the mid-19th century. Two artists, the most important for whom I suppose is John Toneal, who also illustrated the Alice books very famously. They fixed the image of John Bull, as I think I've alluded to before, as a rather rotund, cheery-faced gentleman,

very respectable-looking, pale breeches, a waistcoat, maybe blue and blue. buff or with the Union Jack waistcoat and the low top hat. I'm getting a shake of the head from Miles here that the Union Jack comes later early 20th century.

But no, I think you do find it in the 19th century and opposite Uncle Sam. So Teneal depicts him, he fixes the visual representation of John Bull as a country gentleman with quite long legs heartily striding about the

countryside and also quite boldly standing up to people. And this is one of the things I think that partly evolved out of the responses to say the debauchery of the Prince Regent, that John Bull earned the right to fart in the face of the monarchy and maybe

in the pages of punch he's not quite so rude. But he's able to speak his mind in a much more confident way. And he has a dog. And he has his bulldog. It's a bit mastiff to begin with and then later it becomes a bulldog.

Very essential. Miles, when he first appeared, John Bull was a contemporary figure, wasn't straightforward, had many flaws and so. At what point did he become arguably a nostalgic one? So I'm not sure that nostalgia is the right word. I would echo what Judith is saying, that there's a much more settled image by the 1840s and the 1850s, and he's associated with agricultural Britain.

Remember that property, landed wealth, particularly the squirearchy, is still seen as the orthodoxy, authentic richness of the British economy rather than trade and industry, which is more fly-by-night and might not last. So he's associated with old rural values, and to that extent, I guess, he can be associated with nostalgia. But it's also a kind of complacency that Britain has come beyond 1832, the Reform Act of that year. It survived the 1848 revolutions that hit hard across much of the rest of Europe and Ireland. and it is a peaceable kingdom and he embodies that piece, if you like,

and one very measurable sign of that piece is that his tummy gets bigger and bigger. He is a rotund figure and his en bon point, his ruddy, his rude health, if you like, reflects the rude health of the British economy, the workshop of the world,

the beginning of Pax Britannica and all of that kind of thing. Mark Knight's, looking at the way satirists used John Bull, what was the power of laughter or really cool perhaps that they provoked? I suppose I'm saying in a complicated way. How was it received? Laughter was even theorised in this period.

We've already heard from Judith about the different ways of representing the French and the English. And part of that relies on incongruity between the French idea of themselves and the reality of their emaciated. form in the 1790s. And so laughter was something which actually people spent quite a bit of time theorising. Francis Hutchison wrote an analysis of laughter. Hobbes in the 17th century suggested that one of the ways in which laughter work was that we felt superior to other people when we laugh at them. And I think that's also inherent in the John Bull vein.

But satire and laughter is also intended often to reform. Part of the purpose of the ridicule is to correct people's behaviour. Now, that's a very laudable intention. Whether it always translates into practice is another matter. How far the satire translated into real action, I think is debatable. But laughter was certainly very political. In 1817, one of the satirists, William Hone, who used John Bull as a sort of central character in some of his material, was prosecuted for blasphemy. And in his trial, he asks, is laugh treason? Surely not. And then provoked laughter in the court. And he said he almost had a duty to laugh at ministers as long as they were a laughing stock.

And he said the government needed to be laughed out of court. So laughter, although it seems innocuous, can be really hard-hitting and political. And politicians and princes even were really affected by this. We know that Charles James Fox in the 1780s and in the 90s was really offended by some of the satires of him. And the Prince Regents certainly was. I mean, he collected many of these in order to stop them being sold on the streets. So we also know that print shops displayed these graphic satires in their windows in the late 18th and into the 19th centuries. So it wasn't just the elite who could afford these rather expensive single sheets of satire,

but also a wider public who could see them pasted up to laugh at. Judith, how did, if he did, how did John Ball become a dominant imperialistic figure, imperialist figure? I think you're right to say, Melvin, if he did, because in some ways he continued as a very complex figure used by all sides of the political debate to represent a whole variety of opinions. But if we want to draw something of a straighter line through history, we can point to a number of sort of key points. One is that Punch was a conservative magazine and it was widely read and distributed in the empire. So it was appealing to an imperial market. So that possibly affected the tone surrounding the depiction of John Bull.

And then there were a particular moment such as the Boer War where John Bull was mobilised as a kind of patriotic figure by supporters of the war. He could be used to complain against the war too in the burden of taxation, as in the original depiction of John Bull. In 1906, there's an MP sort of weird independent MP called Horatio Bottomley, who started a John Bull newspaper. And he's a kind of populist who was pro-business and in favour of small government. And John Bull becomes tied up in all sorts of debates about free trade and the protection of British produce. He's used on a recruiting poster early on in the World War I

before mobilisation is introduced. After World War I, the figure of the man on the street and Tommy Atkins come in to replace the idea of John Bull in a way. And this might be a point at which John Bull becomes more of a nostalgic figure used in marketing. I mentioned possibly erroneously that he appears with a Union Jack Woll. waistcoat in the 19th century, but he certainly does in the early decades of the 20th century in advertising campaigns indicating the sort of the strength and reliability in the domestic origin of various products. So he stands for British produce and British trade in the early 20th century. Miles, it seems that John Ball's influence faded away, drained away. Is that

true? And if so, did anybody replace him? Yes, I think Judith has mentioned the idea of the man or the woman in the street or the man or the woman on the Clapham omnibus. I think you get occurrence of that particular phrase around the early 1900s around the time of the First World War. And so all the other shorthands that we now have for Vox populace, for ordinary people's opinions, these are what supplant the idea of John Ball. And I guess he disappears as that personification of public opinion around the time when you get full adult suffrage and women get the vote. It no longer makes any sense to embody the nation in such a gendered way or in such a way that denotes class and the

squirearchy of the countryside. Having said that, also tax becomes a less contentious issue. I mean, everybody pays a lot of tax after 1918 and the British fiscal state never really changes after that to this day. Whereas in the 19th century, taxes are generally low, and when they are raised, John Bull comes onto the stage to complain about them. We're coming to the end now. Mark Nights, could you give us, what does the portrayal of John Bull reveal about British culture? Well, the fact that we're still talking about him, I suggest, means that we're still

interested in John Bull as a lens through which we can see ourselves and represent our I think he's a testament to the importance of political satire as a genre and it's continuing survival and vitality. I think he's also a signifier of how we perhaps laugh at ourselves. The English have a good sense of humour. We'd like gently laughing at ourselves and indeed other nations. Perhaps some less pleasant characteristics are also enduring. angry at high taxes, hostility to foreigners, a feeling of being put upon and so on. But I suppose really that Abathnot would be really surprised that we were having this conversation.

He wasn't a man who really cared for his reputation and nurtured it in the way that perhaps some of his contemporaries did. He was writing a topical pamphlet that was going to disappear, I think. So he would be very pleasantly surprised that John Bull has an enduring. life. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, Mark Knights, Judith Hawley and Miles Taylor, and our studio engineer, Jucky Marjoram. We take our on your break now, and we'll be back on the 15th of September. Please join us then. In the meantime, on BBC Sounds, you can listen again to some of the 957 programmes we've made so far. Thanks for listening and have a good summer. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material.

from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we missed out that would have been valuable to have kept in or had in? By the late 19th century, John Bull is being picked up by commentators overseas. And that's where you get the nasty, more racist imperial characteristics being imputed to him, that he's a colonialist. He wants to grab land. He's a capitalist. There's a pamphlet by Max O'Rell produced in 1883. Max O'Rell is a pseudonym for a French writer. there's various American attacks which critique John Bull as the nasty end of British imperialism.

And of course, he's no friend to the emergent labour or socialist movement in Britain in the late 18th century. And again, it's his land-owning wealth, which is being lampooned in those sorts of caricatures. So I think there is a – there are twists that are made that leave him as not always. is this kind of safe figure. Just as in the 1790s, he's kind of stereotyped as a Frankenstein of democracy. By the 1890s, some of his critics, stereotype him as a Frankenstein of capitalism. When we call, they called the Dutch Nicholas Frog, where I'm sad to say, a lot of people think that should be the French. So why did Frog go to the Dutch, Judith?

So Nicholas Frog is called Frog, though, as we might think of the Froggy Frenchman, But I think it's because of the bogginess, the wetness of the low countries. It might also be to do with the slipperiness that Arbuthnot attributed to the Dutch, that Nicholas Frog is a slippery, slimy character who can't be, you can't grab him very well. But I think it's predominantly because of the boggy nature of the country. Also, you can't be baboon for Bourbon. Yes, yeah. So a baboon had already been taken.

Nicholas Frog's first name is also significant. So Nick was often the way in which Britons referred to Nicholas Machiavelli, the crafty politician who wrote treatises on the art of manipulating people. So the fact that he's called Nick Frog, I think, is also significant. And a pun on old Nick the devil. Indeed. I think it's really interesting that some of the images that we might have in our minds of John Bull, of the man striding along with his low top hat and possibly his dog

depict him against a sort of plain background. He's an independent figure. But as Miles has said, he's very much part of a figure of international relations. In the original allegory, it's about this interrelation between the Dutch, the French, the Spanish and so on. And that sense of the British being part of the world,

but also set against it is very powerful, I think, in the sense of who John Bull was to other people. George III himself said that he felt he was a bit of a John Bull and that he had a hatred of all things foreign. Rather ironic coming from a German king. So if I can add two things really. One I think is that is obviously with John Bull a strong focus on English identity as male.

But there is an alternative, of course, in Britannia, which was a much more female representation of Britain. And it's interesting perhaps to run John Bull alongside Britannia because certainly in the American wars in the 1760s, 1770s, the tensions with America and so on. Britannia was often represented as a woman, a dismembered woman, and the pamphlets that Judith was talking about, about that appropriated John Bull, in a sense,

were also about the extended family that was being broken by the tensions between the British domestic and the American colonists. So Britannia as female, I think, is a really interesting image. But the other thing I wanted to come back to was in relation to the changing media world into which John Ball launched his pamphlet. because this was a period when the coffee house

had become a sort of really ubiquitous form, forum really, for political discussion. First introduced into England in the 1650s, coffee had rapidly taken off, and coffee houses were to be found in most provincial towns by the end of the 17th century. And in those coffee houses, and alongside the taverns and the inns and so on,

there was a great deal of political discussions. So these pamphlets and the graphic satires that we've been talking about were circulating in new spaces, or spaces which were being in perhaps used in new ways. And there were political clubs that were springing up in these new fora, which really absorbed this material. So you didn't actually need to buy the pamphlets. You didn't actually need to buy the satirical.

graphic satire, but you could discuss it with your colleagues in the coffee house clubs that were proliferating. How long were the satirists given free reign? It's a good question because Miles mentioned libel laws early on. So we know that in 1695 the licensing act lapsed and so the government wasn't enforcing direct censorship of literature after that except for the 1737 theatrical licensing act and the theatre was censored. But pamphlets could be sort of burnt by the hangman. There could be a price put on the head of the author and the publisher and the bookseller. And people were prosecuted.

William Hone was hounded. Swift had a price put on his head. Della Riviera Manly was tried for libel. When you said Swift had a price put on his head, does that mean he was hunted down? And if anybody caught him, they'd get the money. A £300 pound reward for the person who wrote the conduct of the Allies, which was the sort of the more serious version of the debate about the ending of the war of Spanish succession. Yeah, £300, he was delighted that he was worth so much. It's probably worth adding there as well that it was even more dangerous to be a publisher of some of this material.

It was one thing to be an author because an author could escape. The government usually knew who was behind the publication of something. So publishers like John Alman in the 1760s and the 1770s were real targets for the government's repression. And indeed, many of the graphic satirists were prosecuted through their publishers. And that was another way of trying to contain this culture. Just coming back to Britannia, I think it's such an interesting discussion of why Britannia and why John Bull. Britannia, of course, refers to Britain as a naval power. I mean, it's essentially a story about the sea.

And if you see most of the depictions of Britannia, there's some ship or sea rolling into view very soon after you see the image of the woman. So I think, yes, it is a gendered distinction between John Ball and Britannia, but it's also about a different vision of what Britain is. And John Bull is very much connected to Britain being an island or set of islands, being a landed economy, whereas Britannia is essentially about sea power. Rule Britannia rules the waves and all that kind of thing.

And the gender thing works out, interestingly, as the times changed. So in the 1780s, when women such as the Duchess of Devonshire were playing a very important role in campaigning in the elections, there were satires on the Duchess of Devonshire. And I think the figure of Britannia was used in a way to suggest that that femininity was being tarnished by what these women were doing, these women who didn't have the vote. And there are times when Britannia is depicted as a victim.

In some ways, there she is with her shield and her spear and this sort of martial figure. But in a way, against the French, it seems as if the cudgel bearing John Bull is a better opponent to Little Bonaparte. But the images are both circulating and sometimes put in the same print, in the same satire,

and sometimes replacing each other. And they also go, I suppose, to that discussion that we were having early with Mars about the Englishness or the Britishness. Perhaps John Bull is more useful for those who want to stress the sort of English identity within Britishness and perhaps Britannia is a more inclusive figure. What did people in America and people in France, if at all, think about John Bull? Good question.

I don't know much about that, but I know that in a, in America he's used a lot against Uncle Sam. And he's used in cartoons well into the 20th century. As Uncle Sam, either shaking hands with or making overtures to John Bull or vice versa, sometimes refusing to deal with each other. You get these even into the Cold War, the two figures are used as a way of sort of thinking about what is the state of our special relationship at any given time. But the French side is interesting because I think a rather vicious version of John Ball emerges in the 1880s, 1890s.

It's partly in print, but it's also in French caricature, which of course builds on the great grotesque cartoons of people like Doméié. And so this is caricature of not a kind or friendly type, the way in which John Ball is being represented as Britain's colonial aspirations and land grabbing. greed. And so if you compared the French images of the 1880s and the 1890s with the British images, you would really see two very different versions of the same figure. I just want to make one very minor little correction to Miles' earlier statement that propaganda was a 20th century term. Of course, it's rooted in the Catholic Church's ministry for propaganda, which was essentially a censorship body of the 16th century. which prescribed Protestant texts from circulating in Catholic countries.

So the concept of, indeed, the language of propaganda was available to contemporaries at the time that Darbathnot was writing. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Travel Through Time with the Your Dead to Me podcast. Discover what made Frederick the Great of Prussia so great. I never knew that was a thing. Uncover the secrets woven into the buyer tapestry. A kebab and a fight, nothing's changed.

And hear how a pharaoh didn't want to be queen. Orking. She's just all about being divine rather than being constrained by gender norms. With special guests from Stephen Fry to Lou Sanders. Johnny Good, isn't it? Radio 4's You're Dead to Me with Greg Jenner. That's me.

Listen on BBC Sounds.