university of london thesis

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‘THE BODY POLITIC AND THE
FAMILY QUARREL: THE WAR OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE.
METAPHOR AND VISUAL
IMAGERY IN BRITAIN’
THOMAS LATHAM
CANDIDATE FOR THE DEGREE OF
PHD IN THE HISTORY OF ART AT
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
AUTUMN 2005
UMI Number: U592976
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Abstract:
Name of Candidate: Latham, Thomas Edward Mere
Title of Thesis: ‘The Body Politic and the Family Quarrel: The
War of American Independence, Metaphor and
Visual Imagery in Britain’
Text:
The thesis examines images produced in Great Britain between c. 1765 and 1789,
and relates them to general concerns about the relationship between Britain and the
thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of North America that declared their
independence in 1776. Anglo-American conflict in this period was frequently
conceptualized through metaphors that imagined events as an attack on the body
politic or a quarrel within the wider British family. The thesis is concerned with the
connections between these metaphors through artists’ embodiments of Great Britain
and her colonies, principally as Britannia and an American Indian, and the ways in
which they were contextualized by contemporary social, political and cultural
experience. The various gender and generational permutations of the conflict
metaphorized as a family quarrel relate the colonial relationship to wider
contemporary concerns about the relationships between parents and children.
Similarly the figurative division of the transatlantic community was imagined as the
literal dismemberment of the British body politic, and contextualized through
medical discourse and practice.
As a civil war the conflict was often conceptualised as a quarrel between male
members of the family or a culinary attack on the colonial body politic. The entry of
the European powers to the conflict seems to have brought about a trend away from
the conceptualization of the war as a family quarrel. The entry of Spain to the war in
1779 destabilized this metaphor’s narrative and gradually caused it to be replaced
with other figures revealing a switch in perception from civil war to a more
traditional view relating to the balance of power within Europe. Furthermore, the
thesis suggests that the Franco-American treaties of 1778 and resultant military
alliance were significant steps in the process whereby Anglo-American colonists
came to be regarded as foreigners rather than fellow Britons.
Table Of Contents
Acknowledgements 5
1. Introduction 9
2. The Body Politic 37
3. The Family Quarrel - Britannia and her Daughter 70
4. The Prodigal Son - Declarations of Independence 107
5. The Balance of Power 139
6. The Dismemberment of Britannia 171
7. Britannia’s Blood 197
8. Sibling Rivalries 221
9. Conclusion 245
Bibliography 270
List of Illustrations 3 99
Illustrations 421
Acknowledgements:
First of all I owe a great deal to my supervisors Professors David Bindman and
Stephen Conway, who guided this project from the beginning and helped me to turn
a couple of sentences into an entire thesis. They showed interest in my research,
encouraged me to take risks, pulled me back from taking the wrong risks, suggested
possible lines of research and prevented me from making some rather obvious
mistakes (any remaining mistakes are my own).
The staff of the History and History of Art Departments at University College
London in general deserve some thanks for putting up with my loitering in their
corridors for more than four years (especially Dr Claire Wilkinson, Dr Tom Gretton,
Professor Helen Weston, and Diana Dethloff). Prior to that, the same would be true
of the History of Art departments at the University of Leicester (Carol Charles,
Professor Phillip Lindley, Nicholas Watson, Professor Alison Yarrington, Dr
Thomas Frangenberg and Dr Geoff Quilley) and Aarhus Universitet, Denmark (Lars
Kiel Bertelsen and Maria Fabricius Hansen).
The other postgraduate students at UCL have been a constant source of support and
challenging ideas, in particular I owe much to those whose areas of interest overlap
chronologically with my own: Dr Richard Clay, Dr Richard Taws, Sue Walker, Zoe
Kahr, Mercedes Ceron-Pefia and Emily Richardson. I would especially like to thank
Emily for looking after things whenever I was in America conducting my research,
and for being such a good listener. Material and ideas from chapter five were
previously published in the journal OBJECT, and I would like to thank the editors for
their many helpful suggestions, as well as the external validator Gill Perry.
6
I would like to thank Dr Emma Barker for her comments at my upgrade seminar, as
well as those in attendance who were both encouraging and challenging. Similarly, I
would like to thank Professors Diana Donald and William Vaughan for agreeing to
be my final examiners.
A variety of conferences and institutions allowed me the opportunity to test out some
of the ideas and material in this thesis before finally committing everything to the
printer, and I thank them and the audiences who made such helpful comments.
The Arts and Humanities Research Board awarded me funds in order to pursue both
my master and doctoral studies for which I am extremely grateful. A number of
institutions in the United States of America also kindly awarded me with fellowships
to enable me to travel and use their collections. I spent a very enjoyable month in
2003 at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, and I would like to
thank Maggie Powell, Susan Walker, Marielle Mudgett-Olson, Cindy Roman,
Lenore Rouse, Anna Malicka and Jim Cassidy, as well as the other fellows in
residence in August 2003 Karen Junod and Dr Luisa Cale. As well as being a
valuable resource in its own right, the Paul Mellon Centre in London provided me
with a fellowship that enabled me to spend three months based at the Yale Center for
British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Many people provided help, advice and
suggestions during my stay there, including Julia Alexander, Julia Hyde, Susan
Brady, Lori Misura, Phil Basner, Diana Donald, Marcia Pointon and Jason Schron.
The John D. Rockefeller Jr., Library (part of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
gave me a fellowship enabling me to use their collection for a month in 2005, and
thanks are due to Inge Flester, Margaret Pritchard, Laura Barry, Gail Greve and Jim
Horn. Thanks to a Batten Fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson
Studies at Monticello, Virginia, I was able to spend March 2005 based at the
Jefferson Library. I would like to thank everyone there, but especially Andrew O’
Shaughnessy, Sanders Goodrich, Anna Berkes and Eleanor Sparagna. I also owe
thanks to Paul Babbitt at the University of Virginia, who helped me through an
increasingly complicated US visa application process. The Maryland Historical
Society awarded me a Lord Baltimore Fellowship to visit their collection in
Baltimore, Maryland, in April 2005 and to use their H. Furlong Library Baldwin
library. I would like to thank all the staff there who offered assistance and
suggestions, especially Bea Hardy.
People at many other libraries, archives and museums gave me invaluable help and
advice, and I owe thanks to the staff of the following: the British Museum, especially
Aileen Dawson; the British Library; the Institute of Historical Research; the National
Gallery, London; the Tate Britain gallery; the National Portrait Gallery; the Guildhall
Library and Art Gallery; the National Archives at Kew; Lambeth Palace Library; the
Wellcome Library; the National Maritime Museum; the Paul Mellon Centre, London
and in particular Kasha Jenkinson; the Royal College of Physicians; the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.; the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University,
where I would like to thank the staff of its Map and Franklin Collections in
particular; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven; the Harvey
Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library in New Haven, with special thanks to
Susan Wheeler; the Mudd Library, New Haven; the Library Company of
Philadelphia and Charlene Peacock; the curator of Fort Ticonderoga, New York,