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Summary

Journalist, playwright, novelist, and English improvvisatore, Theodore Hook tapped into readers’ interest in representations of fashionable life with his Sayings and Doings (1824–8). Hook’s stories – influenced by his political journalism and theatrical experience and sometimes adapted for the stage – engage fundamental questions about speech, action, and personal identity. They constitute a hybrid genre of sociological documentary and imaginative fiction by an observer who stands both inside and outside the world he depicts. While William Hazlitt popularized the term “silver–fork fiction” in his reviews of Hook, the tendency to assimilate Sayings and Doings to later, longer silver–fork novels has obscured what is innovative about Hook’s fictional debut and how it embodies the distinctive climate of the 1820s. Sayings and Doings is an experimental hybrid of fiction, social critique, and metafiction that combines techniques of representation from theatre, improvisational performance, and newspaper journalism.

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.

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Chapter 5 - Theodore Hook’s Sayings and Doings on the Page and the Stage

Summary

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

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Chapter 5 - Theodore Hook’s Sayings and Doings on the Page and the Stage

Summary

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