The World's First Cartoon Character

'John Bull' and Joys of Beefy Georgian Satire

James Gillray’s conception of John Bull in 1798.

The caricaturist James Gillray recognized a fundamental truth about the average Brit, which is that he will always find something to complain about. In 1798, Gillray published an engraving that showed the English everyman, ‘John Bull’, belly-aching because he is being forced to eat countless captured ships from Napoleon’s fleet, served to him as ‘fricassées’ by Horatio Nelson and his victorious admirals. In the background, the Whig grandees Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan - early supporters of the French Revolution - flee the scene with hands raised, fearing they’ll be served for lunch next.

Gillray’s boorish, ungrateful, and frankly grotesque John Bull - or ‘Old Grumble Gizzard’- is a very different character from the figure he would become in the ‘respectable’ Victorian age. This was when he morphed from a purely English exemplar into a kind of British counterpart of America’s Uncle Sam. In what F. D. Klingender described as the ‘dull decorum’ of Punch magazine, and in insipid satires elsewhere, the John Bull of 19^th-century cartoonists like John Leech was a stalwart, avuncular figure who embodied the ‘values’ of a global empire. But Gillray’s generation, I think, knew rather better…