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For other people and uses of this name, see John Bull (disambiguation).

World War I recruiting poster

John Bull is a national personification of the Kingdom of Great Britain created by Dr. John Arbuthnot in 1712, and popularized first by British print makers and then overseas by illustrators and writers such as American cartoonist Thomas Nast and Irish writer George Bernard Shaw, author of John Bull's Other Island. He is sometimes used to refer to the whole of the United Kingdom, but has not been widely accepted in Scotland or Wales as he is viewed there as English rather than British. Britannia, or a lion, is therefore used as an alternative in some editorial cartoons. Although embraced by Unionists, Bull is rejected by most nationalists in Northern Ireland as well.

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 pictorial 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 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).)

In a Suffragette cartoon of 1912, John Bull is portrayed looking out of the window of a house over whose door the sign says "Franchise Villa", while his wife knocks on the door, with the accompanying text: "John Bull: 'How long are you going on making that noise outside?' Mrs Bull: Till you let me in, John!" (see [1]).

John Bull's surname is also reminiscent of the alleged fondness of the English for beef, reflected in the French nickname for English people les rosbifs (the "Roast Beefs").

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

John Bull

• National personification
• John Bull's Other Island
• Sawney
• Uncle Sam
• Marianne
• Mother Svea

• Superimposed images of John Bull by cartoonists, from 1790 on.
• The British Library newspaper catalogue