ABSTRACT
The most memorable image from 1803 shows the King of England holding the First Consul of France on the palm of his hand. Given life by the incomparable pencil of James Gillray, this became the inspiration for a string of visual satires on the relative sizes of the defenders of England and their adversary. Compared to George III or to John Bull, Bonaparte was a fly, a worm, Gulliver to the giant Brobdingnagians, a fairy and ‘Little Boney’.1 An essayist in 1818 recalled complacently of this caricature, after Napoleon’s defeat, ‘John Bull laughed at his pigmy effigy strutting in the palm of our good old king’, and asserted that ‘this playful effort of the pencil … had a wondrous effect upon the opinions of the common people of England. … Gillray and old Charles Dibdin [the author of patriotic musical entertainments] may fairly be said to have served the good cause at home during the French Revolution, almost as much as our naval and military heroes abroad.’2 Significantly, the anonymous essayist identified the audience with the figure who himself occupied one of the largest roles in the satires of 1803, ‘John Bull’. This conflation of a fictional character with the people whose ‘good sense’3 had resisted the lures of French republicanism exemplifies the difficulty of extracting a historical measure of popular opinion from visual satires, themselves constructed in part to influence that opinion.4
