thumb|220px|upright|[[World War I recruitment poster]]
John Bull is a national personification of England and Britain, especially in political cartoons and similar graphic works. He is usually depicted as a stout, middle-aged, country-dwelling, jolly and matter-of-fact man. He originated in satirical works of the early-18th century and would come to stand for English liberty in opposition to revolutionaries. He was popular through the 18th and 19th centuries until the time of the First World War, when he generally stopped being seen as representative of the "common man".
Origin
thumb|An earlier John Bull in which he is depicted as an [[Anthropomorphism|anthropomorphic bull]]
John Bull originated as a satirical character created by John Arbuthnot, a friend of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Bull first appeared in 1712 in Arbuthnot's pamphlet Law is a Bottomless Pit. The same year Arbuthnot published a four-part political narrative The History of John Bull. In this satirical treatment of the War of the Spanish Succession, John Bull brings a lawsuit against various figures intended to represent the kings of France (Louis Baboon) and Spain (Lord Strutt), as well as institutions both foreign and domestic. The allegory was intended primarily as attack against the Whigs, their foreign policy and their financiers who were profiting from the war. In Arbuthnot's work John Bull personifies England while his sister Peg symbolises his native Scotland.
William Hogarth and other British writers made Bull, originally derided, "a heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman." in France). Peg continued in pictorial art beyond the 18th century, but the other figures associated with the original tableau dropped away. John Bull himself continued to frequently appear as a national symbol in posters and cartoons as late as the First World War.
Depiction
Bull is usually depicted as a stout man in a tailcoat with light-coloured breeches and a top hat which, by its shallow crown, indicates its middle-class identity. During the Georgian period his waistcoat is red and/or his tailcoat is royal blue which, together with his buff or white breeches, can thus refer to a greater or lesser extent to the "blue and buff" scheme; Sanu's cartoons depicted John Bull as a coarse, ignorant drunken bully who pushed around ordinary Egyptians while stealing all the wealth of Egypt.
Likewise, the musician, playwright and Irish Republican Dominic Behan criticised the British government via the proxy of John Bull in his popular ballad, The Patriot Game:
Increasingly through the early twentieth century, John Bull became seen as not particularly representative of "the common man," and during the First World War this function was largely taken over by the figure of Tommy Atkins. According to Alison Light, during the interwar years the nation abandoned "formerly heroic... public rhetorics of national destiny" in favour of "an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private". Consequently, John Bull was replaced by Sidney Strube's suburban Little Man as the personification of the nation. Some saw John Bull's replacement by the Little Man as symbolic of Britain's post-First World War decline; W. H. Auden's 1937 poem "Letter to Lord Byron" favourably contrasted John Bull to the Little Man. Auden wrote:
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, which translates as "the 'Roast Beefs.'" It is also reminiscent of the animal, and for that reason Bull is portrayed as "virile, strong, and stubborn," like a bull.