When was the last time you saw Canada represented as Johnny Canuck, a hearty and somewhat simple logger in a plaid shirt? Or Britain as Britannia, a comely but warlike young lady with a helmet and shield? The art of national personification is a dying one, as national stereotypes seem so much more fraught these days.
One thinks of this on seeing a full-page cartoon in the December edition of Vanity Fair that shows a crippled Uncle Sam begging for change as various other nations pass him by. (He holds a sign saying "Lost my country, please give what you can.") The other countries are easily identifiable: There's Marianne with her tricolour Phrygian cap, fat John Bull with his top hat, a portly burgher in green lederhosen and Tyrolean cap, and a big bear in a winter coat.
Ethnic stereotypes have long been acceptable among Europeans. Indeed, Britons have always been proud of the girth of John Bull, just as the French don't seem to mind the ridiculousness of the tiny Gallic rooster as he is so often portrayed, a scrappy little guy without the might to back up his crowing. But the Vanity Fair cartoonist, Edward Sorel, has been careful in drawing the character of China.
She is in drab Maoist garb with a red star on her cap, but does not have exaggeratedly Asian features, as a caricature of 50 years ago would have had. We've come a long way from the buck-teethed, bespectacled Japanese and the enormous-lipped African of Second World War-era cartooning.
Coincidentally, a fascinating archive of American Civil War political cartoons has recently been posted online, with historical background for each one. The cartoons are all from Punch, and they were all done by the great illustrator John Tenniel, whom you may know as the creator of the most famous images of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The treasure of drawings were put online by a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, with help from his students and colleagues; their commentaries are also lucid and well researched. The cartoons are fantastic not just because of the brilliance of Tenniel's style, or because of the strange British Imperial view of the war that they present - as an embarrassing conflict among hicks - but also as a defining moment in the history of such national caricatures.
One can see the development of the best-known image of Uncle Sam in these drawings. At the outset of the war, the United States is represented by a character called Brother Jonathan, a spindly and impoverished-looking country fellow (in contrast with the rotund and sanguine John Bull, the personification of stability and prosperity). Brother Jonathan had been an image of the American patriot since the revolutionary war - indeed he was a kind of updated Yankee Doodle. Uncle Sam, a similar-looking guy with a beard, had come on the scene around the time of the War of 1812, but in 1860 Tenniel was still using Jonathan for the United States, often portraying him as a petulant child. As the years of the Civil War go on, Tenniel begins to graft Abraham Lincoln's features onto Jonathan, conflating America's president with its people. By the end of the conflict, Lincoln has grown his distinctive beard, and so Jonathan begins to look more like the Uncle Sam of the famous poster.
Tenniel managed this morphing of real political players with allegorical figures in his representation of British interests as well: Britannia, usually portrayed as a young woman who resembles the Roman goddess Minerva, becomes a stouter and older matron in some cartoons - looking a whole lot, in fact, like Queen Victoria. The British lion is portrayed as a bourgeois with bowler hat.
The American slaves are predictably racist stereotypes - speaking in incomprehensible dialect and almost always comical. This would have been a common perception at the time, even in a nation - and at a magazine - that opposed slavery. It is significant, I think, that they do not have any animal to represent them, as the nations of Europe have. Racist portrayals are far more cutting when the image is of an actual person, rather than of an animal. Animals are inherently sympathetic. For example, the French have never minded being seen as roosters, but the image of Marianne has in recent years created great controversy (must she be conventionally beautiful? Must she be white?).
I suspect that this is why Canadian cartoonists no longer have a use for Johnny Canuck - that image of a rural Anglo-Saxon colonist has little resonance in this complicated country. But the beaver is still used every day - even in this newspaper, where the mischievous animal shows up regularly in the clever editorial cartoons of Brian Gable. What Canadian resents being personified by an animal that's small, shy, hard-working, practical, and apparently impervious to cold?