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John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot's Character

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2017

Leah Orr
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Abstract

How did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

Keywords

John Bullcolonial Americaeighteenth centurynewspaperssatirenational characterpoliticsAmerican RevolutionStamp ActJohn ArbuthnotJames Kirke PauldingJeremy Belknap
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 51 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2017 

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References

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3 This is the focus of Hunt, Defining John Bull and is also covered at length in Taylor, “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England, c. 1712–1929,” as well as Franklin, Alexandra, “John Bull in a Dream: Fear and Fantasy in the Visual Satires of 1803,” in Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815, ed. Philp, Mark (Aldershot, 2006), 125–40Google Scholar. On the visual Bull in the 1760s, see Morgan, Winifred, An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity (Newark, DE, 1988), 68 Google Scholar; Carretta, Vincent, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, GA, 1990), 301–7Google Scholar.

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45 General Evening Post, 22–24 January 1771, 4.

46 London Chronicle, 3–6 April 1766, 4.  It purports to be just a “specimen,” but no longer work survives.

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53 “John Moore, a Scotchman,” New-Jersey Gazette, 6 February 1782, 1.

54 Thomas's The Massachusetts Spy, Or, Worcester Gazette, 6 February 1783, 4.

55 Vermont Gazette, Or, Freemen's Depository, 28 August 1783, 3. Originally from the Gazette des Bijoux.

56 Reprinted in Dunlap's Pennsylvania Packet, 9 January 1775, 3. The source cited is the London Gazette.

57 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 21 February 1775, 4.

58 Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 2 August 1775, 4.

59 London Evening-Post, 6–8 January 1778, 4.

60 Reprinted in the radical Pennsylvania Journal, 16 August 1783, 2. The article is cited as “from London.”

61 Public Advertiser, 1 April 1773, 2; Craftsman, 7 May 1774, 1.

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