John Bull

Late Georgian England was a period of great social and political change, yet whether this was for good or for ill was by no means clear to many Britons. In such an era of innovation and revolution, Britons faced the task of deciding which ideals, goals and attitudes most closely fitted their own conception of the nation for which they struggled and fought; the controversies of the era thus forced ordinary people to define an identity that they believed embodied the ideal of 'Britishness' to which they could adhere in this period of uncertainty. Defining John Bull demonstrates that caricature played a vital role in this redefinition of what it meant to be British. During the reign of George III, the public's increasing interest in political controversies meant that satirists turned their attention to the individuals and issues involved. Since this long reign was marked by political crises, both foreign and domestic, caricaturists responded with an outpouring of work that led the era to be called the 'golden age' of caricature. Thus, many and varied prints, produced in response to public demands and sensitive to public attitudes, provide more than simply a record of what interested Britons during the late Georgian era. In the face of domestic and foreign challenges that threatened to shake the very foundations of existing social and political structures, the public struggled to identify those ideals, qualities and characteristics that seemed to form the basis of British society and culture, and that were the bedrock upon which the British polity rested. During the course of this debate, the iconography used to depict it in graphic satire changed to reflect shifts in or the redefinition of existing ideals. Thus, caricature produced during the reign of George III came to visually express new concepts of Britishness.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The History of John Bull" by John Arbuthnot. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

How John Bramlett, the meanest, hardest-hitting man in professional football found the only peace that could calm his rage.

There is a strong but unreliable view that immigration is a marginal and recent phenomenon. In fact, immigrants and refugees have come to Britain throughout its recorded history. In this book, first published in 1988, Colin Holmes looks at this period in depth and asks: who were the newcomers and why were they coming? What were the distinctive features of their economic and social lives in Britain? How did British society respond to their presence? The resulting book is a major historical survey of immigration which synthesises and evaluates existing work and weaves in new material on a wide range of immigrant minorities.

Shaw’s story is rife with such ‘beyond opinions’, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, a Dubliner in London, and a socialist living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. In one sense, as a Protestant choosing to live in London, he is a John Bull, yet he remains Irish – an Irish Bull, something alluded to in his one play set in Eire, John Bull’s Other Island.

Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw remains one of the world's most important and popular writers. His plays are regularly performed around the world, from the boards of Broadway and the West End to regional, community, and college stages.The three plays selected here are widely considered to be three of the most important in the canon of modern British theatre:Man and Superman: a four-act comedy for serious people, staged in part at Royal court in 1905, it is one of the early works of Modernism to take an ancient myth and restage it in contemporary mode (and its influence extends across world literature, palpable in writings from Mann to Joyce). Its storyof how a sensitive woman compels a superman-figure to adjust to her needs and those of the real world provides an updated commentary on Nietzsche's still-fashionable notions of ubermensch; and its famous third act introduces a persistent Shavian theme, which goes back as far as earliest religiousliterature-that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell.John Bull's Other Island takes up that idea: to the visionary, hell may be the ultimate modern dream of efficiency and rational administration, as manifested in a colonial Ireland run by liberal exploiters. Commissioned by WB Yeats to mark the opening of Ireland's National Theatre, the Abbey, theplay was promptly refused by its Directors (who disliked its mechanical mockeries of mechanism but may have missed its visionary qualities). It was performed to huge acclaim in London in November 1904 and it made Shaw famous, the supreme example of the Playwright as Thinker and, ever afterwards,one of the most valued commentators on Anglo-Irish relations.Major Barbara: a three-act drama which in classic Shavian style unmasks the motivation of puritan idealists and dedicated industrialists, this work (like the previous two) pits a strong woman against a sardonic, practical man. Having exposed the mendacity of apostles of efficiency, Shaw seems thento submit to their doctrine, arguing that a pure private charity towards the destitute is no adequate substitute. Like the previous two works, this is a problem play, in the course of which the audience sympathy is aroused and then repelled in all directions. The suggestion that it may be acceptableto take money from tainted sources, such as arms manufacturers, caused much debate in 1905 - and even more after the carnage wrought by mechanized guns in World War One.