J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Turner’s transcript of the song reads as follows:

These verses are a variation of a song ‘Here’s a health to right Honest John Bull’ first published in the early 1790s. An early edition was credited to the pseudonymous Earl of Howard and a longer version, attributed to an anonymous ‘well-wisher to King and Country’,1 appeared with other ‘Select Modern Poetry’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, February 1805 (p.158); it was to be sung to the tune ‘Why Moses, why Aaron’ and with a chorus, ‘Here’s health to right honest John Bull’ after each verse. This might in turn be associated with the 1803 play John Bull by George Colman the younger, or with lines sometimes attributed to the poet William Cowper but not acknowledged by him.

The version published in 1805 had thirteen verses as opposed to the seven written out here by Turner. This is not the first time that Turner had given the song his consideration. An earlier transcription of eleven verses, headed ‘John Bull Content’, in the 1808 Derbyshire sketchbook (Tate D07145–D07147; Turner Bequest CVI 11–12) may not be in Turner’s own handwriting but at least demonstrates his interest. Of the two versions in his sketchbooks, the present one goes further in changing the usual meaning of the song.

It is not evident in what circumstances Turner wrote it, although it certainly seems intended for repetition. The present writer has suggested that the artist might have regaled his friends at Farnley Hall with it at the end of his 1816 tour of Yorkshire and the North of England documented in the rest of this sketchbook, having perhaps heard it sung in an inn somewhere along his route. That may be so, but the alternative lines and elisions in the transcript suggest a creative involvement with the sense and phrasing. The departures from the original are numerous and considerably alter the sense and general tenor. The original is an unashamedly anti-reformist Tory paean to the established order, the rights and privileges of property, and instruction to the honest Englishman to happily accept his lot, place and duty. Turner’s version adapts the original form of words, sometimes quite radically, and in places appears to twist the politics into something more levelling in its sympathies.

Certainly stanzas in the original that breezily celebrate the necessity (for example) of there being fine Lords and Ladies and the munificent rule of the King and judiciary, or warn against the chaos that would ensue in the absence of the ruling classes, the wretchedness that would accompany egalitarianism, or the incipient relation of roguery with radicalism, are all dropped. It is perhaps unfortunate that Turner’s handwriting is not easier to decipher, or his literary skills greater. Nevertheless, it would appear as if the Tory sympathies of the original were being countered to a degree that might have appealed to the Whig gentry who gathered around Walter Fawkes2 at Farnley.